Larry "Ratso" Sloman

Larry "Ratso" Sloman (born July 9, 1950) is a New York–based author. Career Sloman was born into a middle-class Jewish family from Queens. His nickname Ratso came from Joan Baez who said Sloman looked like Dustin Hoffman's character Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy. He wrote for Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, and Creem in the 1970s. He wrote a column "Ratso's Pallazo" in Heavy Metal in 1985. He collaborated with Howard Stern on the radio personality's two best-selling books, Private Parts and Miss America. He also appears in all of Kinky Friedman's mystery novels as the Dr. Watson to Kinky's Sherlock. Sloman wrote an account of Bob Dylan's 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour, On the Road with Bob Dylan. He also penned Reefer Madness, a history of marijuana use in the United States, Thin Ice: A Season in Hell with the New York Rangers, a 1982 on- and off-ice account of the National Hockey League team's 1979–80 season and Steal This Dream, an oral biography of Abbie Hoffman.