THE HUNDRED-AND-THIRTY-NINTH PAGE

There is nothing phonier than a Southern accent made by one who has never lived in the South. Fired is not pronounced farred and one would not say they were going to farr you. The elaborate drawling mispronunciations which ran through his rant like slobber down a coondog’s muzzle would have been amusing had they not announced my annihilation. On one hand, he was trying to disguise the notion that it was actually he, and on the other, he wanted me to be goddamned certain that he was paying me back for my every dirty little trick, culminating in his being farred. At the same time, he didn’t want to acknowledge the receipt of my every little misdeed.

But had I really done anything terribly bad? Certainly, at one time I had contemplated doing bodily harm to any number of my oppressors and if some of my experiments had backfired and offed My Editor, it would have been, simply, an accident, but nobody had died. So, a few people got sick, some people got some nastiness in the mail. It would have been forgotten by the next day. My Editor got a few gifts, which he was free to throw outAs for his being fired and divorced: he clearly was not cut out for the job and probably didn’t enjoy it. And it was very clear that his wife did not enjoy him as much as she did the editor-in-chief.