I found Porterhouse in the back of a health-food joint in a rehabbed neighbourhood with a sordid past. The trendy lettuce-and-sprouts place where we met was once a drug den. Close your eyes, forget about the yuppies tearing into salads and inhaling soy shakes, and you can almost hear the hiss of butane and smell the scent of crack, like bittersweet peppermint gasoline, drifting through the room. I hesitated before confronting him, a million little options swirling through my brain.Sit.

Stay.

Leave.

No.

Porterhouse was knocking back smoothies with a bevy of beauties in a corner booth. He shooed them away when he saw me approach.

Porterhouse plays a brief, dramatic role in "My Friend Leonard," the popular sequel to James Frey's memoir, "A Million Little Pieces." Frey has lately taken some heat from reports that he'd made up portions of both books. Oprah Winfrey endorsed "A Million Little Pieces" as "gut-wrenching," "raw" and "real." Well, as Meat Loaf used to croon so convincingly, two out of three ain't bad.

The trouble began when a Web site called The Smoking Gun went looking for evidence of Frey's exploits. Their snoops had tried and failed to track down some of the people mentioned in Frey's writings, including Porterhouse.

I am here to assert that I found him. But like Frey, I have no notes or documents to prove I did. Also like Frey, I assure you that what I write here is true to my conversation with Porterhouse and my recollection of his recollections. Think of it as — how did Frey put it? — "a subjective retelling of events".

Frey wrote that Porterhouse beat him bloody during Frey's first jailhouse lunch. From that unlikely beginning an odd friendship allegedly formed and revolved around a passionate interest in books.

"Yeah, I clobbered him, but he had it coming," Porterhouse told me. "I'm an animal activist," he explained, "and a militant vegetarian. Something about the way he chewed his meat just made me lose it. It's tense in jail, man."

"Tell me more," I said.

"Frey ate the meat exactly as he described eating it in his first book: 'I eat slowly. I start with the steak, cut it into pieces, cut those pieces into smaller pieces. I eat the pieces one at a time. ... I hold each bite and I let it dissolve. I let the flavour of the rare red meat sink into my tongue, I let the juices fill my mouth."'

Porterhouse glared, reliving the moment. "One crazy carnivore, that kid."

I asked him how he could remember whole passages of prose so easily. "The same way Frey remembered whole snatches of dialogue from his stint in rehab," he said with a snort.

"So you don't approve of Frey's 'embellishments'?"

"They don't bother me," he replied. "Ours is a culture of deception. The Pilgrims deceived the Indians and it just went from there. Politicians lie on a daily basis. Corporations doctor their books to boost profits. And writers? What else can you expect? I always think of Janet Malcolm's definition of a journalist: 'He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.' Readers get victimised all the time."

I told Porterhouse he seemed awfully well-read for a guy who barely knew the alphabet a short time ago. In "My Friend Leonard," Porterhouse is described as an illiterate double-murderer.

"Please," he said with a chuckle. "I have a master's in comparative literature from Northwestern. I was humouring the kid by letting him read to me. I wanted him to feel good about himself. And I've never killed anybody either."

Porterhouse added that while he wasn't entirely pleased with Frey's storytelling, he found all the uproar slightly hypocritical. "We're subjecting writers to a double standard. So Frey wasn't really a hard-core criminal and drug dealer and he pretended that he was. You could say that about any gangsta rapper. Except for Fitty, of course. Fitty's the man."

"Why haven't you come forward?"

"For the same reason that I won't give you my last name. I don't want to cross Frey. He claims to have powerful friends. Mobsters, federal judges. Oprah. Phone calls can be made on his behalf."

He paused, then flashed me a beatific smile. "Ya know," he said, "no one's going to believe that you talked to me."

I asked him how I could convince people that I had.

"Just tell them that you stand by the essential truths of your story. That seems to work these days."Jabari Asim's e-mail address is asimj(at symbol)washpost.com.

(c) 2006, The Washington Post Writers Group