Tony Danza's Nightfire

On September 25, 2025 , I came home from class to find that I had received a mysterious package in the mail.  It was a lumpy, overstuffed manila envelope with no return address, my own address scrawled across the front in crayon.  My curiosity got the better of me and I opened it.  I was shocked by what I found inside.  Stuffed in the envelope, amongst a mass of carefully clipped-out Frank & Ernest cartoons and shredded paper, was a manuscript for a novel.  The author?  None other than Tony Danza.  I have gathered that he intended to send it to Random House Publishers, but misunderstood “Random House” to mean that he could just mail it to a random house and it would make it through the appropriate channels to publication.  As fate would have it, the random address Mr. Danza sent it to was my apartment.  So without further ado, Tony Danza’s Nightfire:

Initially unsure how to proceed, I ended up calling Mr. Danza, as he had left contact information in his cover letter.  After some confusion about how the telephone worked, he was able to talk to me.  I began by attempting to explain that most novels are longer than seven pages, but he was clearly not paying attention, evidently engaged instead in a cup and ball game.  I then heard Mr. Danza shout something about “Captain Pick Hard” (I believe a rerun of Star Trek: The Next Generation was beginning on SpikeTV) before dashing off, leaving the phone off the hook such that I could hear him making sound effects in the background.  After a long twenty minutes, I hung up.