Ronald Reagan was the first man I consciously remember being elected President of the United States. For reasons I never knew or thought to question, my parents fervently supported John Anderson during the campaign. I was naturally mortified that the man my family hated the most won the election so soundly, while the correct candidate received no electoral votes (or points as I called them back then).

Before my teenage angst years, Ronald Reagan was the face of the nation. He told me of an evil empire full of communists called Soviet Union. It was such a bad place we had to skip the 1980 Summer Olympics because Russians might kidnap or brainwash our athletes. He talked about Star Wars becoming a reality (much later, I realized he wasn't talking about Jedi). He traded guns for drugs, or drugs for guns, or drugs and guns for something else. It was never quite clear if he knew what he was doing, but he still accomplished everything he wanted. He was the first president to serve out a full two terms since Eisenhower. He told the Russians to tear down the Berlin Wall, and they did. He slept well. And he did it all after he was 69 years old.

Little did I know that this former president had imaginary characters weaving in and out the many moments of his life.

Upon reading the excerpts of the new Reagan biography by Edmund Morris entitled "Dutch," I got a queasy feeling in my literary gut. Who is this "I" who keeps asking rhetorical questions in the text and seems to do nothing but follow Reagan through his life? Is he a stalker? It's not Hinkley, is it? That would be really creepy.

As many people know, Morris incorporated fictional characters into the biography to give the pages more life. This is not something I recommend for any aspiring biographers. Only a person with a three million dollar advance and writer's block should even try.

For one thing, having imaginary characters gives the book a feel of tabloid trash. Even if everything Reagan does in the book is factual, it's being told to us by characters who are as real as Timothy Orson, the first action hero I wrote about in third grade. And what would have happened if I incorporated a fictional dealer narrator into my junior report on Samuel Taylor Coleridge?

"I came by to see Sam today, and for the first time, he wasn't pleased to see me. With frenzied eyes, he shouted and pounded his fists on the wall, babbling something about Ghengis Khan and Xanadu and how I ruined his flow. I didn't see what the big deal was. It was quite clear that I should come over whenever I scored a new supply, and this new batch of opium was not the type of stuff you wanted to pass around at a party. This was the good stuff. The kind only addicts could truly appreciate. He whimpered with edgy hands until the pipe was in his mouth, and then he whimpered no more. His eyes dimmed, dancing in aberrant waking dreams.

"He didn't talk about the poem after that. In fact, we didn't talk about anything. Words constrained too much. We blended with oblivion in the way only opium could accomplish. He wasn't a poet anymore, and I wasn't a dealer. We were junkies, and the rest of life would just have to wait until we were ready to come back."

Needless to say, I would have failed English if I had done that.

Morris put in fictional characters in Dutch, for the same reason people want to read biographies--they wish they were there with the person. But no matter how factual the information is, when you incorporate an imaginary character, it ceases to have the feel of authenticity.

I'm sorry that Morris couldn't even get into Reagan's head, and I'm sorry that his words came out so flatly. But if Reagan was so boring, maybe that's the way it should be told. The section told in the third person were acceptable enough (although sometimes dry), and Morris' magical voyeuristic characters didn't make his life sound better. In fact, it's now more disturbing.

Chris Jungle, like Mark Twain, is not a real person, but he still tends to just talk about himself.