

### EVELYN DELIVERS THE PAPERBOY

As slung by

Bob, the Cat-caregiver

Copyright 2017 Robert W. Gill

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Dedication

To R.W. "Double" Gill, for his crushing humility, and to E.F Selliger for his charming absence of any.

Epigraph

Anyone can be unsentimental; brutal charm is a gift.

\- Evelyn Chimes, speaking of the stories of Dorothy Parker

In deference to my ghost collaborator who sadly (and humorously at times) drank himself into and out of a series of homes for inebriates while I was writing _Evelyn Delivers the Paperboy_ – my second novel – please donate a dollar or whatever you can spare to Alabama Children's Hospital Foundation, 1600 Seventh Avenue South, Birmingham, AL 35233. He had a niece and I have a daughter who were treated there, so this is not entirely a cynical marketing ploy aimed at getting you to dig deep and come up with the money I'm charging for reading my first novel _Evelyn Explains Everything_ , available on Smashwords for 99 cents and worth every penny. Thank you.

### Table of Contents

Prologue

Round 1

Round 2

Round 3

Round 4

Round 5

Round 6

Round 7

Round 8

Round 9

Round 10

Round 11

Round 12

Round 13

Round 14

Round 15

Round 16

Round 17

Round 18

Epilogue

Bob the Cat-caregiver's Final Notes

### Prologue

Every third week in February my boss gives the keynote address to a select group of the world's richest entrepreneurs who meet for a complimentary dinner in the banquet hall of her plush hotel on the outskirts of Disney World near Orlando.

"Bye, sweetie!" she kissed the blind cat Little Bitchergirl Five on the lips. "Bye, Frednik!" she tickled her little brother Freddy behind the ears. "Bye, Bibbitty Bobbity!" she tousled my hair. "Remember," she instructed me, "three-eighths of a Norvasc tablet for Bitcher's blood pressure, crushed up in the Honshu tuna the kitchen will be sending up shortly. And Clozaril for Freddy as needed.

"If Sonny arrives before I'm done delivering this boilerplate," she added, "fix him a drink – gin over ice – or is it cheap vodka neat these days? – call down for whatever he's swearing by this week if we don't have it on hand, and tell him I'll be back as soon as I can get away. After his stint in rehab, the poor thing will probably want more than one..."

She calls the billionaires at the free lunch she's hosting her disciples. They number 60. "Because," as she archly explains, "I'm five times more charismatic than Jesus."

Billed as a networking opportunity for owners, not players or coaches, her hotel is booked solid for six weeks in advance of the gala event with hundreds of small-fry hoping to wangle a moment of face-time with one of the big fish on the day of the dinner when the doors are closed to all but registered guests.

I'm neither a small-fry nor a big fish. I'm Bob the cat-caregiver. I look after Bitchergirl the ill-tempered blue-eyed Himalayan who is blind and has a mean-looking face like that cat Butch in the "Tom and Jerry" cartoons. She has a disposition to match. I also care for Freddy, who is prone to dissociative episodes in which he imagines he's a cat.

Her bodyguard Booger makes up the fourth member of Evelyn's entourage. It's his job to be taken for granite. He was doing that now, giving me his stoniest stare as Evelyn made a pleased inspection of herself in the mirror. When she finished, they entered her private elevator together, Booger first, a hand in his jacket pocket, presumably clutching a pistol. With his free hand he pushed the middle button marked Lobby. Roof and Garage were the other two buttons on the panel.

Even before the doors finished closing, Freddy had started grooming himself. His sister, hoping to put him at ease, stuck out her tongue, crossed her eyes, waggled her head and waved goodbye with both hands.

Ten minutes later, the elevator pinged and out shuffled her old friend Sonny. Pudgy, unassuming Sonny. Even before he was convicted of attempting to murder Evelyn's husband, Sonny looked like he was always apologizing. Also not a dinner guest, he'd just completed six weeks of court-ordered rehab – a deplorably light punishment some considered it, for such a serious crime.

Accompanying the unlikely felon was Dr. Tex, the famous television shrink at whose "state-of-the-art addiction-treatment facility" Sonny had been sentenced to take the cure.

As instructed, I fixed the boozehound a drink, and one for myself, and, ignoring the flouncing and gasping of Dr. Tex, we sat and imbibed and talked of this and that.

Sonny remembered me slightly – or pretended to. 'When you first arrived that night,' I reminded him, 'I'm the one who showed you the newest addition to Evelyn's rescued feline population: a little black kitten she named Bruce Wayne. "Well, he does have a bat face," you said, and Evelyn drew herself up and came to the defense of her unprepossessing waif. "And you have a fat face!" she bristled. "Bat Baby and Fat Face," she quipped. "Chimesville's newest crime-fighting duo!"'

Sonny smiled at the memory. Either that or at the refresher I put in his hand.

By the third round, as we relaxed into our conversation, heedless of the increasingly shrill castigation coming from Dr. Tex, I noticed that the questions I asked and the responses they elicited from Sonny all revolved around Evelyn's deposition. On the night of the shooting, at the moment the shot rang out, I was busy with cat duties. But a few days later, after things had calmed down a bit, Evelyn called on me to do double-duty as her videographer and record her chatty statement to Judge "Sy."

Having seen the deposition, Sonny was happy to comment on it.

What follows is a verbatim transcript of what Evelyn said, together with Sonny's comments appended at the end of each "Round" under the heading of "Sonny's Comments."

Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. And to preserve my above-ground status.

### Round 1

That's my cue? "We're rolling?" Not very bobbish of you, Bob-o. I'd like the full Hollywood treatment: a countdown followed by the clap of a scene-board snapping shut like the jaws of a crocodile. Where's that old Bob-bob-bobbin'-a-long spirit? At least holler "Lights! Camera! Action!"

...Sigh [spoken], I guess that will have to do.

Hiya, Sy! Have you met my pussycat Cleo? Short for Cleopatra. Note the heavy eye-liner. It's like the applicator got away from her. She makes the same bold statement on the other side. Procryptic is what they call these markings. She's one tough little tigress. A minute ago, she had that roll of paper towels in a death grip and was tearing its throat out.

...And off she scampers. Camera-shy. It's just as well. Center stage and the show all to myself – just how I like it!

Mercy, how 'bout this weather, sweetie? Mid-80s in January! Yesterday a girl might catch her death of cold. Today, melanoma!

Well, enough with the preliminary pleasantries, hon. To business. They tell me Winny's Aunt Mel is pressuring you to throw the book at poor Sonny so I thought I'd fill you in on what I know, which happens to be quite a lot since we've been friends since we were yea high. In fact Sonny was my boyfriend before Winny was my boyfriend – by one full day to be exact. Which is not to suggest they were bitter rivals for my affections; I had far too many simultaneous boyfriends for that. Still, we're all rivals, as Darwin was good enough to never let us forget, and once you've heard the full litany of unholy hell I put poor Sonny through, you'll know the right thing to do, dear, when handing down his sentence. Try to look on these remembrances as a plea for clemency on the grounds of what a little dickens I used to be.

Ah, here's Lawanda with that pitcher of bloody marys I'll be needing to fortify me through the coming ordeal.

Thank you, angel. And you included a celery stick to swizzle with. How sweet. Fetch, Cleo! I'll just use my finger, doll. ...Ummm, that hit the spot.

By the way, Sy-borg, you'll have to pardon the formality of this taped deppo. My idea was to accost you in the pool house next Saturday and make a much more personal appeal, but Sonny's lawyers insisted I do it this way, in the event a plea-bargain can't be reached and the case goes to trial, the trouble and expense of which I'm sure we'd all like to avoid.

Testing: one, two...Ahem. Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, learned counsel for the prosecution; dream-team for the defense; The Right Honorable Simony I. Grant:

The accused and I met in the fifth grade. We were _all_ in fifth grade together, come to think of it. Me, Sonny, Winny; my brother Freddy too. I'd been held back a year for disciplinary reasons, so I was a year older than the boys.

I used to call Sonny "Paperboy." Among other nicknames, but mostly "Paperboy." "Average Boy" would have served just as well. Because he was far and away the least exceptional of my boyfriends. Neither terribly bright nor terribly stupid; neither gloriously handsome nor grimacingly ugly; neither powerfully robust nor pitifully puny; neither...well, you get the picture. Sonny was just average.

Read no denigration into that assessment. I'm just telling you that the man you currently have under lock and key for shooting my husband in the head would have led a normal, unthinking, middle-class existence, suffering all the usual horrors and humiliations that middle-class people everywhere suffer, and seeking solace from the misery of his subservience in all the usual ways that middle-class people typically do – to include sports, religion, music, art, literature, tranquilizers, in-between-meal snacks, and lots and lots of television – were it not for my meddling.

To put it another way, whenever I find myself thinking of nothing special for any length of time, the image that takes shape in my mind – a little fuzzy at first, but slowly coming into focus the longer I sit and vegetate – is the sweet wholesome freckled face of my old pal Sonny, a face that might have served as the prototype for those young boys Norman Rockwell forged a successful career out of painting.

Technically speaking, you might argue that being _exactly_ average put the Paperboy in a unique category. I mean if he'd been slightly better-looking or slightly worse-looking, or slightly brighter or stupider, or slightly more or less talented in some way, he'd have grown up with grudges to settle or ambitions to fulfill; some combination of angst and resentment which might have led to a more troubled relationship with society. But Sonny was born with none of that to contend with. Instead, he had me, poor thing.

October 1959 marks the proximate date of his lost innocence. His rude eviction from Eden, as it were. That's when my family moved to Winter Park and Sonny and I became friends and neighbors.

The morning after our arrival, he threw us a paper, the big Sunday edition.

'Hey, Paperboy!' I hollered out my window. 'Quit littering our drive!'

'It's a sample,' he explained.

'Sign us up!' I commanded.

'I need a parent's signature,' he said, trying to keep his voice down because of the hour.

'So ring the doorbell, dumbbell! They're up!' I lied.

Rubbing sleep from his eyes, mad Dad answered the door in his pjs and grumpily told the Paperboy to come back later.

He did and was walking back to his bicycle after signing up his new customer when I yanked him into the garage to transact some business of my own.

First, I ascertained his paper income, which varied depending on the time of year and who took advantage of the special subscription rates, who was on vacation, who went north in the summer months, etc. etc.

Uh-huh, Uh-huh, Uh-huh, I said, getting it all down.

Finally, with all the pertinent financial information in hand, I proceeded to make the following proposition: 'Paperboy,' I said, 'twenty percent of your monthly earnings averages four dollars and sixty cents. In exchange for which you get one minute of looking at me buck naked, full frontal, backside or profile, your choice...'

Sonny turned beet red, tee-heed, and dug the toe of his sneaker into the concrete.

'For an extra five percent, or an additional buck-fifteen,' I added, performing all these calculations swiftly and unerringly in my head, 'I'll make it a less static viewing experience by throwing in ten jumping jacks.'

The Paperboy continued to hang fire. I could tell he was interested – what ten-year-old boy wouldn't be interested in seeing a pretty eleven-year-old girl naked? – but his eyes had a furtive look, like he was worried he was being set up and my dad might come bounding out from behind a big Mayflower Mover's box to scream at him if he took me up on my offer.

'Make up your mind!' I said, crossing my arms and taping my foot like a scold. 'I don't have all day!'

When he remained tongue-tied, I finally took pity on him and gave him the breech view. It's what most of my boyfriends chose in those days. Understandably, as full-frontal revealed little in the way of curves at that age.

Lush as these puppies are today, sweetie, there was a time they were only bud-sized and waiting on them to blossom took a toll on my nerves, believe me.

I immodestly explained as much to Sonny, squeezing what there was of them.

Thank goodness Fortune blessed me with a world-class fanny to exploit, and, judging from Sonny's goggling eyes, he was more than happy to watch me exploit it.

He'd see all sides of me soon enough as I turned his paper route into a steady source of revenue. To keep him coming back, I varied the fare, eventually presenting all my boyfriends with a four-page menu, featuring some fancy calligraphy and an Aubrey Beardsley tracing on the cover page, listing the many options:

They could touch my plump bottom, massage my plump bottom, kiss my plump bottom, watch me extrude from my plump bottom, or see me shake and shimmy my plump bottom via one or more of a set of five exercises I called the Canadian Experience, named for the military PT program my loony father employed to torture my brother Freddy in those days.

All poses, both static and animated, were numbered and followed by a posted non-negotiable rate with an asterisk beside each item, indicating at the bottom of the page that prices were subject to change without notice at my discretion.

Lurid photos – my face prudently masked – were also available.

I baffled Sonny – not at that first transaction, but not too long after that – with the information that just before moving to Florida, I'd reached womanhood and had begun boffing the brains out of some of the older boys in the neighborhood who were in danger of going blind due to masturbating a dozen times a day. 'But, on the assumption you're not an early developer,' I said, 'we'll get to that later.'

Sonny gave me a blank look.

'Just remember,' I added, baffling him still more, 'that when you reach that stage, rough sex is the only kind of sex that doesn't completely nauseate me.'

Of course the truth is my focus was not on sex. I mean I could take care of my own needs in that department. And frequently do. And did. And my boyfriends were allowed to watch. For a price. It was on the menu.

Neither was it about the thrill of reducing boys to drooling cretins at the sight of my bare hindquarters. Not that I didn't enjoy a good laugh as much as the next girl. Even today I find the raptures men go into at the sight of me unclothed so preposterous that I can't help scoffing. But making boys drool was not my main focus either. The Languorous Odalisque may have been one of my more popular static poses, but I was not some simple bimbo luxuriating in the power of my beauty.

My focus was upward mobility.

Since the time I was eight, I'd been using every means at my disposal to rise above the crushing humiliations of my hated upper-middle-class origins. Since the third grade, I was all about rectifying the terrible oversight God or Fate or Whatever had committed by giving me parents who were not of the rich and powerful class of oligarchs who control society. And once I saw that boys were willing to pay me to shed my clothes – mysterious as the thing was to me in the beginning – I had no qualms about shedding them, after getting my money up front.

However, my sources of income were not limited to the carnal.

For instance, I was not above running off with Sonny's glasses and making him pay a dollar to get them back. A dollar here a dollar there; it adds up.

A scarier gambit involved a jar crawling with newly hatched black widows. Trust me, you won't find a more aggressive spider than a black widow. Tarantulas are tenderhearts by comparison. Show me the entomologist who flaunts his lack of squeamishness by letting black widows amble up and down up his bare arms and I'll show you an entomologist who milks their venom beforehand. I brought the jar to Sonny's bedroom and threatened to loose the hundreds of little black dots in it if he didn't pay me three dollars to keep the lid on. He didn't hesitate to cough up. My other boyfriends too.

A somewhat more elaborate scheme involved stealing a can of green spray paint that Sonny was using to weatherproof some gourds he was making into birdhouses as a Cub Scout project. I made off with the can and used it to spray the words "PROUD SLAVE!" on my family's front door. Then I composed a note addressed to the police and showed it to Sonny, naming him as the malefactor, and threatening to turn over of the can of spray paint with his fingerprints on it if he didn't fork over five dollars or some possession of equivalent value. That's how I came to acquire his transistor radio.

I preferred cash of course, but in my struggle to rise above the degradations of my sub-owner social status, I was willing to accept readily convertible property as payment. With the result that I was soon inundated under a mountain of material assets.

Fortunately, in keeping with my overall good luck in the world of business, our day-maid's younger son Poughkeepsie happened to own a pawnshop in Eatonville, and his assistance proved invaluable to my upwardly mobile climb. But for Poo, I'd have had to hold a garage sale every day of the week to keep my inventory of bartered goods from reaching to my bedroom ceiling.

Which triggers another memory of my mistreatment of poor Sonny: A few days after Christmas, I remember wheeling the Paperboy's brand-new 3-speed bicycle into PooPoo's hock-shop. It marked a watershed moment for me in my partnership with Poo. That's when he started taking me a little more seriously and cheating me a little less on the jewelry which my boyfriends were stealing from their mothers, which PooPoo insisted was all paste at first. But the audacity required to steal something as big as a bicycle impressed him.

Not to short the importance of relatively minor characters in the story of Sonny and Winny and me, we'll get back to Poughkeepsie a little later...

Having explained that sex wasn't _my_ priority, I'm not going to sit here looking the way I do and pretend it wasn't the big draw for most of my boyfriends. Squat thrusts – item number nine on the menu, if memory serves – were Sonny's favorite. They got the lower hemispheres jutting and jouncing to the max in those pre-twerking days, and kept him in my thrall for the duration of his prepubescent years. I set the motion-surcharge at a sensible five percent, raising it to only ten after I began filling out in that other remunerative area, the upper half of the old T&A, thus furthering my business opportunities, thanks to Nature's generous if dilatory bounty. Remind me to show you some of my early home-movies from that era, Sy. In the meantime, here's a slightly superannuated version:

Ready-o! Exercise!

Down!-Out!-In!-Up! Squat!-Thrust!-Recover!-Two!

### Sonny's Comments

About his stolen bike, Sonny said Evelyn's mention of it in her deposition was the first he'd heard of her part in its disappearance.

He was hurt but she reminded him his wasn't the only new bike that Poughkeepsie took delivery of. Every year there was a rash of bicycle thefts in their neighborhood in the post-Christmas season. "Most of them more expensive than yours, sweetie," she pointed out, "with a lot more gears."

On a more congenial note, Sonny remembered the time Evelyn taught him how to hit a baseball.

One of the under-gardeners on the Chimes estate had been a professional third baseman for the Orioles, and when Winny's dad asked him to teach his son the finer points of batting, Winny insisted Sonny learn as well. 'Winsome picked it up like a natural,' Sonny recalled. 'But when it came my turn, I couldn't hit a thing, and after about eight thousand swings and misses, the ex-ballplayer was verging on exasperation – probably a bit beyond it. That's when Evelyn came to my rescue.

"'JESUS!' she hollered. "ONLY A CONGENTIAL _BIRDBRAIN_ WOULD KEEP PARROTING 'WATCH THE BALL, WATCH THE BALL, WATCH THE BALL' AND LEAVE IT AT THAT!"

'She had no interest in sports beyond the money that could be made sponsoring "fake fights" (as she called all athletic competitions), but having watched from the comfort of her family's screened-in pool for the better part of an hour and laughing all the while at my failure, she finally took pity and sashayed over in her skimpy swimsuit and made a deal for two dollars plus a double-payment clause if the outcome proved successful before explaining to me, "Look, Spazz, the _reason_ you watch the stupid ball is so you can see whether the stupid thing goes over or under your stupid bat so you can correct your stupid swing at the next stupid pitch, Stupid!"

'I followed her advice and was amazed at her powers of analysis when, three swings later, I connected.

'Unfortunately, I didn't have the four dollars I was contractually committed to so she took my marble collection, which filled half a shoebox, plus my Hardy Boys mysteries series as a penalty.

'Which was okay with me since I'd pretty much outgrown the marbles and had the Hardy Boys by heart by then and had moved on to Sherlock Holmes.

'I later learned she turned right around and sold both the books and the marbles to her brother Freddy – only to get everything back the next time _he_ peeped her bottom.'

On the subject of Evelyn's world-class fanny, Sonny said, 'To see it was to believe her boast that by the time she moved the Florida, three years after she started selling peeks at it for a dime and permitting kisses to be planted on it for two bits, she had three grand invested in Treasury notes, plus a thousand in preferred stock in a major European tire manufacturer, "on the strength of these spectacular glutes alone," as she put it.

### Round 2

A little touched in the wind, but not bad for an old broad, eh, Sy?

Another drink, Bobby Socks. And make it a stiffy.

There was a time I could have kept that up all day. Or at least until Sonny's money ran out and he was bereft of all liquid assets. Poor lamb never really stood a chance. Few hetero males or Sapphic females did, back in my prime. Alas, the body has lost a little tone since then.

...Speaking of bawdy tone, I wouldn't dream of trying to influence you with anything in the way of an ad hominem appeal, dear, but going through my closet this morning I couldn't find a thing to wear so, in light of today's unseasonably warm weather, I decided not to wear a thing. I didn't think you'd mind, as often as you drop by unannounced in the summer months when chances are pretty fair that I'll be here by the pool working on my sans-tan-line. A girl enjoys those little attentions, by the way. Particularly a girl of my years.

So where were we? Pan up, NaBob. Let's not overdo a good thing.

...Ah, yes, the Unexceptional Son-o. Born of decent everyday middle-class slavefolk who were just as unexceptional as he was. His dad was a chubby loan officer in the second largest of Winny's dad's eight banks in the greater Orlando area. He sang baritone in the church choir and was proud of his voice in a golly-gee-gosh-darn sort of way, making those and other humble noises of appreciation whenever anyone complimented his singing. But if his musical talent was above par, his I.Q. was exactly 100, his looks were a 5 at best, and his athleticism was subnormal; so, on the whole, Sonny Senior amounted to exactly the unexceptional block of wood from which you'd expect an unexceptional chip like Sonny Junior to fly.

If anything his mom was even more unexceptional. Average height, average build, average mind and average aspirations. She enjoyed the little things in life, a little gossip, a little nip of sherry, a little prosaic wit, and the little matriarchal shows of affection she exchanged with her average little boy.

For twenty years she labored as a combination nurse and paid companion to Winny's mother, a chronically ailing handful, older than her husband by eight years. Ministering to her steady complaints of headache and heart palpitations – diagnosed as pity-attracting devices by her doctors – kept Sonny's mother busy day and night, until the reputed hypochondriac got the last laugh by suddenly dropping dead of heart failure when Winny was just fifteen.

Whereupon the merry widower immediately wed his secretary – a buxom former Cypress Gardens water-skier with whom he was already sleeping – and together they gave Winny a half-sister named after his dad's own sister just before wife number two died in a car crash for which the intoxicated driver of the other car would have served time in jail for vehicular homicide if her blood-alcohol hadn't been over the limit as well, leaving Winny with a twice-bereaved dad and an aunt and a half-sister both named Melody.

One final note on the unexceptional Sonny, if I may, before moving on to the exceptionally rich WinWin: The house he grew up in with his unexceptional parents and his two no less unexceptional older sisters, JoJo and ZoZo, stood at the farthest reaches of Winny's family's lakeside compound, beside a babbling brook that overflowed its banks and flooded the front yard whenever it rained too many days in a row. Wildlife-sightings were not uncommon in that remote location, and when Sonny was twelve he found an abandoned baby possum in extremis making the most forlorn chirping noises in the woods outside his window. Moved to save it, he put the toothy orphan in a cardboard box with a blanket and fed it milk from an eye-dropper. And when it died a few days later, he cried buckets. Remember that when handing down the Paperboy's sentence, Sy. The whole thing puts me in mind of what's-her-face, that duck-doctoring kid in Ibsen's _The Wild Duck_.

By contrast, Winny was always fairly aloof to the suffering of animals. My rescued cats are a distraction to him at best and a downright nuisance much of the time. He rarely pets them; knows the names of only one or two; and objects to the odor.

It's the way he was raised. The only child to a distant father and a querulous mother and their bulging moneybags, he was the least cosseted of three pets. His mother had a smelly toy poodle she adored named Tinkerbelle, with an e at the end, and his father's best friend was a slobbering chocolate Lab named Georgia.

They all lived together in the biggest of five ivy-covered mansions on Lake Maitland situated between Rollins College to the west and the Winter Park Racquet Club to the east – that's Racquet with a "qu." One of the lesser mansions was leased to the Racquet Club and converted to a clubhouse; two of the others were leased to the college; the president and his family occupied one and the other was home to various visiting professors and writers-in-residence. The fourth mansion was Winny Senior's "office," which his wife kept putting on the market after learning that it was also her husband's favorite trysting spot. She could sell the property because the whole place was hers to begin with. But her husband had his own money and he kept buying the house back, until my parents bought it and declined his offer. However, they promised him first crack at it if they decided to sell, and casting a moony look at Mother's face and a moonier look down her cleavage, the old philanderer seemed okay with that.

To complete the housing report, a number of caretakers' cottages – I called them slave-quarters – dotted the Chimes family demesne. Sonny's family rented the roomiest one. And the whole estate was accessed down a humming brick-paved road that split two tall white obelisks, making both Sonny and Winny my next-door neighbors, loosely speaking, although I was hardly the girl next door.

Rest easy, Sy, if this is starting to sound like the set-up to a tedious morality play featuring the grinding poverty of a pitiable underclass. It isn't. Sonny and his family did not go hungry. And to all appearances they were perfectly content in their servitude. In fact Sonny's dad would have made Stephens, the butler in Ishiguro's _The Remains of the Days_ , look like a recruiting poster for revolution. If Sonny minimally challenged convention every so often, that was entirely due to my influence. There were no serious defectors in his family, no traitors to the status quo, no defiers of an unfair social arrangement. No Evelyns.

As for Winny, he was so far removed from the concerns of ordinary people that he was virtually brain-dead on topics like money and class. "Meager" was the word he used – and still uses – to describe the materialism of insensitive boors like me who pay too much attention to non-spiritual matters. But it was common knowledge among us boors that his family held title to half the high-end real estate in Orlando and most of the orange groves in Citrus County, plus a sizable portion of just about every lucrative asset you could name throughout the South. For landed gentry, the Chimeses were very savvy investors, not one of those trite shabby-gentile families that you read about who tragically lost everything to unscrupulous men of commerce after the Civil War. They were smart enough to put financial wizards on their payroll to look after their business interests, which were varied and far-flung.

We met on a Monday – my first day at Winter Park Elementary. And it was love at first sight. For me anyway. I fell head over heels in love with the power of the richboy's money the second I laid eyes on the homage the other kids paid to him. 'Hot damn!' I said, 'I want what that little fuck's got!'

Seeing how even the adults tripped over themselves to curry his favor, I asked, 'Am I less deserving to be the object of such fawning?'

The answer to that question was, 'Hell, no!'

The only thing Winny had worth worshipping that I didn't have was money! Money was all I needed.

To be completely honest, Sy, there were a couple of sullen, maladjusted kids in our class – the victims of broken homes with abusive alcoholic parents – who resented Winny and refrained from worshipping the power of his family's millions. Only they showed a spark of dignity. The rest of us did handsprings in our glassy-eyed efforts to please Bonny Prince WinWin.

Personally, I was nothing short of moonstruck.

I mean I'd read about rich people. In fact, I used to fall asleep at night with visions of the sweet lives they led dancing in my head. The relatively untrammeled life our owners enjoyed – and which I meant to enjoy after I'd amassed a similar fortune – made me dizzy with longing. Assuming you've been listening and paying the proper attention you'll have gathered by now that I already knew the value of money before meeting Winny and I was doing more than just dreaming about it. I had plans for acquiring gobs of the stuff and had been single-mindedly engaged in its pursuit for some time.

But it's one thing to be working toward fulfilling an abstract dream and another to suddenly find yourself in the presence of the fully realized apotheosis of that dream. Being face-to-face with Winny, an actual flesh-and-blood owner of Plantation Earth, suddenly ramped up my monetary ambition to the visceral level.

Not to belabor the point, hon, but conjuring up what it would be like to be steeped in the adulation of the multitudes and free from the daily horrors and humiliations that poor workaday executives like my father suffered, and then _poof_ to all at once be rubbing elbows with a real live rich person who suffered _none_ of the crushing upper-middle-class shame and rage that I was desperate to escape...I won't mince words, sweetie, it filled me with such a rush of emotion that I spontaneously orgasmed right there at my desk.

I'm serious. Seeing the power Winny's money exerted over our fifth-grade class had to be the foremost hallelujah moment of my life. There's no other way to put it. I grew giddy...then I began to spasm right there in front of everyone. My teacher thought I was having an epileptic fit.

I took to following my idol everywhere. I mean everywhere. I was worse than Mary's lamb. Watching the deference paid to destiny's darling kept me constantly gasping at how inexpressibly sweet my life was going to be after I got rich. From that little extra dab of grace in the inflection and countenance of Mrs. Bale, our teacher, to the obsequious groveling of Mr. Cobb, the hardware store owner, who literally leaped the counter, leaving lesser customers hanging in mid-checkout, in order to serve the town owner's heir-apparent the moment he entered his store...I couldn't get enough. I drank it in like some parched desert flower vibrating to the rumble of distant thunder and the promise of a drenching rain.

The untroubled aplomb with which the little gumdrop absorbed the endless fuss made over him only amplified my expectations of the wonderful life I saw coming my way. No second-hand substitute in books or movies could ever replicate it. Watching the dumpling serenely soak up all that endless adoration conferred on him by his father's money...well, I tell you what, if it didn't teach me something I didn't already know, it certainly confirmed in a big way something I'd already figured out. I still get goosebumps recalling those early days I spent side-by-side with the happy imbecile, the embodiment of all I wanted to be. Look...

Thank goodness the power of money isn't the only charm Fate bestows on a few lucky individuals. Winny turned out to be no less susceptible to the allure of my fabulous fanny than most other ten-year-old boys. For a week, we both played to our strong points, each quietly circling the other – the class richboy and the class badgirl – sizing up our mutual attraction, looking to get the edge.

That's how I remember it. Possessed of an artistic temperament, Winny looked on my behind as a sacred object with little connection to the rest of me, his love for it a purely spiritual experience. And, looking back, I guess the adoration I had for his money was pretty much the same.

I was the first to break. Caving under the strain, I blurted out my desire to be his friend. I couldn't keep quiet any longer. I made a frank and open declaration of how much I valued Winny as a harbinger of the bright future in store for me. I'd been holding back my feelings for a week, but once the floodgates opened, I called him my guiding star, a beacon illuminating my path to salvation, my hope incarnate, my deliverance from my detested sub-owner social status.

And how did my future life-mate respond to that heartfelt burst of unguarded emotion?

He cocked his head to one side and said, 'Huh?'

It was the first of many such Huhs?, but I remember the pain of that first one like it was yesterday. Because I'd been hoping for so much more.

We were behind the backboard at The Racquet Club. I won't bore you with a lot of inconsequential details, like the fact that the aging tennis showboat Gardner Malloy was touring the country taking on all comers in the tradition of old-time prizefighters, and at that moment was in the process of having trouble with my father (already our club champion) on Court One, or that my brother Freddy was one of the ball boys or that I was temperamentally unsuited for tennis or any other sport, considering triumphing over people in a dumb game to be pointless in this own-or-be-owned world. I had no time for such foolishness, all my energy and attention being focused on not being among the owned.

To which end I had my pants down behind the backboard, listening to the polite oohs and ahs and the smattering of applause between points as the spectators tried to gin up some enthusiasm over a fake fight while I battled for real.

Crouched behind me was Sonny, osculating one of my naked nether hemispheres for a dollar a minute while Winny, crouched next to him, concentrated on the other.

Like I said, I'd been hesitant to open up to the richboy, but once I got started, I was gushing away like a schoolgirl in no time. I told him how much I coveted his position of privilege and all it portended for me in the way of a sweet revenge on the terrible humiliations of my upper-middle-class origins. Also the reduced suffering, no more feeling like a chump, but mostly the heady feeling of being worshipped by so many of former enemies, the proud slaves I hated like poison, now my eager subjects, all things beautiful coming to me that I saw a blissful foreglimpse of whenever I looked at him. I remember telling him how I'd have to take care to smother the vicarious thrill I took in imagining myself in his shoes already, in order not to jeopardize actually realizing his enviable position one day, which I knew was going take hard work, discipline, and ruthless determination, not mere imagination.

I nattered on in that effusive way for a solid five minutes, until I had to pause to catch my breath.

Which is when Winny removed his lips from my right buttock long enough to look up, cock his perfectly empty head to one side, and say, 'Huh?'

It was not the reaction I'd envisioned. Far from it. I was frankly expecting him to come bouncing up off his knees and warmly shake my hand and hug me and welcome me into his coterie of the rich and worldly wise.

How naïve was I?

I was able to maintain my composure only by reminding myself that our owners have to be careful about giving the game away to their subjects. And directly to his left was Sonny, possibly the devoutest of the richboy's toadies, applying his lips to my proximate buttock. Using the Paperboy's presence to explain away the rebuff, I slipped Winny a conspiratorial wink over one shoulder and mouthed the words, 'We'll talk later.'

And later, when Winny had both my haunches to himself, I made a show of looking to the four points of the compass to indicate prudence before assuring him that it was okay for us to speak frankly now because we were alone and I meant to be as rich as he was in the very near future.

'You can't begin to imagine,' I told the living paragon of my hopes and dreams, speaking in a fervent whisper of outrage, 'how much I hate God for not giving me rich parents like yours! And how much I despise the groveling clods I'm surrounded by for submitting to the humiliations of their sub-owner status!'

I totally bared my soul to my new rich friend and confidant like I'd never bared it before. And with no Sonny around, I saw no obstacle to his jumping up and putting me in that fraternal embrace I was expecting the first time and recognizing me for a twin soul.

But it didn't happen.

Instead, the simpleton pulled his lips from my fanny again, gave me exactly the same cockeyed look as before and said, 'Huh?'

I don't mind telling you, Sy, that that second Huh? did more than just wound me. It scared me.

It scared me because I'd already accepted the impossibility of ever finding a kindred spirit among the kids of my own low social station, all of whom seemed content with their subservience. Young as I was, I knew I was forever destined to be an outsider among such broken spirits. At the same time I'd come to count on the certainty that rich people would understand me. It was a preconceived idea that I'd clung to as a source of comfort all through my lonely childhood. It played a part in why I fell so hard for Winny to begin with: 'Here,' I thought, 'is the bosom pal I've been searching for my whole life, the soulmate who will acknowledge me as one of his own.'

And seeing that source of comfort crumble, I quailed.

Yet, by a monumental effort of will, I swallowed hard and managed to overcome the sting of Huh? number two. I kept reminding myself it was only a matter of convincing the richboy that he could trust me. Mum must necessarily be the wary watchword among the master class in the presence of such low-borns as me.

So I soldiered on, urging my future husband to accept that intimacy between us was okay because I was devoted to being his social and financial equal.

It was Huh? number three that brought out the beast in me. There would be no recovery from Huh? number three. With Huh? number three, I quit denying my pride and told the light of my life that he was a jerk, a putz, and a priceless ass, and I would not only be _joining_ him in that pantheon of plutocrats who rule Plantation Earth, but I would one day surpass him _by a country fucking mile!_

'Huh?' Winny said a fourth time.

It – Huh? number four – confirmed the suspicion already planted in my mind that the little snot meant to view me as his social inferior for all time and there was nothing I could do or say that would ever change his mind, short of creating a financial portfolio heavy enough to render him unconscious when I bashed him over the head with it.

Livid, I minced no words telling him so. 'You're going to regret dismissing me in this high-handed fashion, asshole! I'm going to see to it!'

My threat elicited another 'Huh?' and I screamed, 'YOU SHIT!!!'

Though I was too caught up in my rancor at the time to remember it, Freddy tells me that one of Winny's Huhs? – possibly that one – induced me to snap the radio antenna off our father's Lincoln and use it to lash the richboy about the face and neck multiple times.

It made no difference. The Huhs? just kept on coming.

No matter how often I assured Winny it was okay to drop his defenses and be friends, he kept right on high-hatting me (as I misperceived things at the time), twisting his head to one side like a cockatoo and reaffirming the imbalance of power between us by drawling, 'Huh?'

By week two of our volatile acquaintance I was calling my future one-and-only an uppity harebrain, a willful moron, a dishonest maggot and a smelly puddle of puke, and I demanded that he quit playing dumb with me.

'Huh?' Winny responded

Eventually, after I'd exhausted all the juiciest profanity in my lexicon, which was quite extensive for one of my tender years, I would realize that my assessment of Winny's motives was wrong and his stupidity was not an act at all; he was in fact as dumb as a brick. But you know how sensitive kids can be. At the time I just wanted to kill the dunce.

At one point it occurred to me: Maybe he thinks I'm mocking him? Maybe he suspects that my desire for the wonderful humiliation-free life he leads is a left-handed putdown of how lucky he is? I set out to disabuse him of any such notion by assuring him that the only social injustice I was out to redress was _my_ suffering. I had no wider social-justice aims than that.

'Listen, dummy,' I pleaded with him in this confessional vein, 'I _sincerely_ want what you have. I'm emulous; not envious! I don't resent your money! I resent circumstances for not giving me parents as rich as yours, but I don't resent you! I want to _be_ you!'

And again, he quizzically cocked his head and said, 'Huh?'

'QUIT FUCKING WITH ME, SHITFORBRAINS!' I bellowed.

His repeated snubs to my sweet overtures had taxed my generosity to the limit. By Thanksgiving I was fit to be tied. 'WHAT THE HELL'S YOUR PROBLEM, MAC?' I screamed. 'CUT THE DUMB ACT! YOU'RE NOT THAT STUPID!'

By Christmas, I was beside myself with indignation. 'I TOLD YOU I'M NOT ASKING YOU TO FEEL GUILTY OVER MY SHITTY SOCIAL STATUS, GODDAMN IT! I'M SIMPLY ASKING YOU TO APPRECIATE THE HORRIBLE HUMILIATION THAT MOTIVATIVES ME TO RISE ABOVE IT AND BECOME AS RICH AS YOU ARE SO I DON'T HAVE TO SUFFER IT ANYMORE! CAN'T YOU GET THAT THROUGH YOUR THICK SKULL!'

He just gaped at me like always, as if I were speaking in Swahili, before saying – what else? – 'Huh?'

'FUCK! PISS! CUNT! COCK! _CRAP_!' I exploded, giving increasing emphasis to each expletive, as if "crap" were the worst of them. 'Can't you say anything besides HUH?'

That's when – pity him and his hopeless stupidity which he couldn't help and can't be blamed for, but I hadn't figured that out yet – Winny swaddled me with his fondest paternal gaze and began to googoo, 'It's not about the money or the social status –'

At which point my fury, which had peaked a dozen times over the past weeks, peaked again like never before. ' _SHADAP!_ ' I shrieked, a crimson rage disfiguring my movie-star good-looks. ' _WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU'RE TALKING TO? I'M NOT SOME ZIPPETTY-DO-DA SLAVE ON YOUR FUCKING PLANTATION! SELL THAT HAPPY SLAVE-SHIT TO YOUR SUBJECTS, RICHBOY! DON'T YOU DARE TRY TO FEED IT TO ME, BUB! EVER! YOU GOT THAT! I KNOW THE SCORE, SAME AS YOU, YOU SELF-ENAMORED MUTTONHEAD!_ '

We were outside his house, as the scene comes back to me, and his family's holiday decorations were spread out over the front lawn. Winny ran for cover when I delivered that shrill screed and hid behind the crèche set up in a gazebo decked out to look like the interior of a barn. Peeping around one of the life-sized plaster Magi, he said, 'Huh?'

'That's right, Huh-boy!' I stamped a foot in his direction. 'If you're too stuck-up to say anything meaningful, go back to saying "Huh?"'

Keeping a low profile, he scurried from the gazebo to his house. While I was looking around for a rock to throw at him, he ducked inside and slammed the door. Before the door banged shut, the weasel got in a final word. That word was – you guessed it – 'Huh?'

### Sonny's Comments

About the baby possum Evelyn touched on in her deposition, Sonny confirmed that the story was basically true. 'But she was just having some fun comparing me to the tragic figure of Hedvig. I mean I shot her husband, not myself. And I was hardly a teenager at the time.'

On the subject of Evelyn's frustration with Winsome, Sonny said, 'In the beginning he got to enjoy her carnal delights at no charge, including free private showings of her home-movies which the rest of us saw in a Saturday-matinee setting at two dollars a pop.

'But after she lost patience with him, he had to pay, and she kept raising the rates until they got so high that she lost his business for a time.'

'Movies like "The Shamisen?"' I asked, naming a short film that would figure prominently later in her deposition.

Sonny said, 'She made a lot of them. The first one I remember was called "The Ruddy Rill Valley." In it, wearing only a pair of cowboy boots, Evelyn was lying in bed, acting like she wasn't long for this world, while her brother Freddy, in only a red cowboy hat and a long face, sat beside her and listened to her plaintive swansong.

To the tune of "Red River Valley" Evelyn warbled, doloroso:

" _Come and sit by my side, if you love me,_

Do not hasten to bid me adieu.

Just remember the Ruddy Rill Valley

_And the cowgirl who loved you so true._ "

'Then she spasmed violently and flopped over on one side; before spasming again and flopping over on the other side. With each flop, her arms and legs twisted into grotesque contortions which, in conjunction with a series of frightful facial grimaces, evoked a portrait of harrowing agony and mute panic.

'She told me later that she modeled her performance partly on her brother Frank's final sigh of release, but more on the thrashing death throes of a sick parakeet she watched die.

'With a third flop she came down on her stomach and with a dramatic exhalation – her last gasp – she gave up the ghost entirely. At which time, her brother loosed a piercing howl and buried his face in her bottom and began sobbing with simulated grief.

### Round 3

And who was the poor schmuck who got it in the neck when Winny failed to reciprocate all those desperate supplicating pleas I made for his friendship?

If you guessed poor Sonny, you guessed right. The Paperboy would suffer the brunt of my slave-wrath. The fickle finger of fate, to coin a phrase, singled out none other.

...Hold on a sec, Plumb Bob. It's my Chinese broker, Hung Wang. Real name: Chip. Has a face like a Peke.

'Talk to me, hon, but don't say anything. ...Uh-huh. Uh-huh. ...Reliable? ...Hmm, sell half of B at 140. Buy twenty percent of A at the end of the day, HK time, _if_ the price falls another three points which I think it will. ...Hold off on C for now. We'll discuss it later on a more secure line.'

And we're back.

So, let's see, summing up, I made my appearance in Winter Park around Halloween; immediately bewitched Sonny the Paperboy, and by Christmastime, I was already mulling over the idea of kidnapping Winny, who I was calling 'Huh-boy.'

But I think we were talking about the horrible thing I did to Sonny. And feel free to credit Winny with a chunk of the blame here because even though his treatment of me turned out to be the result of an authentic stupidity, not a feigned one, it still left me feeling lonelier than I'd ever felt before in my whole life.

It was a cruel letdown that was all the crueler for the glow of hope I initially felt at the certainty that I'd finally found someone who understood me, a boon companion who saw the world as I did and would ease the burden of isolation which had been weighing on me all through my childhood. To have the promise of that relief yanked out from under me left me foundering like I'd never foundered before.

Huh-boy's repeated 'Huhs?' led to fits of rage in which I pinched my brother black and blue and threatened murder not just on Winny but all of mankind. I wasted countless hours shrieking myself hoarse with promises to burn the Chimes Family Compound to the ground and all of Winter Park as well, not to mention bashing hundreds of dollars worth of bartered inventory against my bedroom walls. That last was the worst part.

However, the human spirit has amazing recuperative powers, and thanks to my resilient nature, coming down to me from my Spanish-Irish parentage, going all the way back to royalty on my mother's side, whose family came to this country from Espana during the time of the Inquisition and, not wishing to miss out on the fun, viewed the native Americans as heathens and heretics and slaughtered them accordingly; together with an equally vicious strain of Irish vengefulness that I got from Dad, I was able, after working myself into a state of mental and physical exhaustion, to pick myself up and dust myself off and find the strength of character needed to look around for some poor mug to share my unsparing view of the world with, even if it meant forcing it on him – even if it meant enlightening a member of my own sub-owner class with the last thing on earth any member of our class ever wants to be exposed to: namely, the terrible truth about the unfair social arrangement he submits to – and I proceeded to do just that.

It was something I'd never done before. At least not to a child. Other than my dead brother Frank, I mean. I told my stupid father the terrible truth all the time, and frankly hoped it would kill him. But after what happened to Frank, I never wanted to burden another child with it.

Till desperation drove me to it. I now meant to create a sympathetic, like-minded companion, come what may. And who should happen to wander into my bedroom at that fortuitous moment but the poor Paperboy.

I turned a more-than-usually predatory eye on him and said to myself, 'Who am I to argue?'

Thus it came to pass that dressed in only a Santa hat I proceeded to permanently and unalterably destroy Sonny's happiness for all time by telling him something so unsettling that it would fill his future with an inextricable sense of shame and misery, a little something I like to call the straight skinny.

'Paperboy,' I said as soon as my body parts stopped jiggling, 'in a world filled with sorrow and horror, for you to suddenly go off on a merry-making jag every 25th of December, giving in to feelings of hysterical joy, is not only irrational and dishonest, it's figgy fuckin' goofy!'

Abusing Christmas seemed like a natural lead-in to my unvarnished vision of humanity, given Sonny's excitement over that festive season of the year when fantastic concepts like universal love and peace and goodwill toward men are celebrated. He was like a child during that slave-holiday, the way he went about setting up his family's Christmas tree in the front window a month before the big day; stringing colored lights around the porch columns; putting out the plastic Santa in his plastic sleigh behind the plastic reindeer in the front yard. It reminded me all too painfully of my dead brother Frank who used to do the same thing before Dad began mauling him in the holy name of socialization. While I personally enjoyed the gift-getting at Christmas, Frank liked the gift- _giving_ as much or even more. Sonny was the same.

I'd already made one abortive attempt, looking back, to put Sonny in touch with reality by using a can of antiperspirant like a blowtorch to melt the face off his plastic Santa. He simply tossed Santa but left his sleigh and reindeer out there with the gooey explanation that the merry old elf was inside unsacking presents and having milk and cookies.

Sonny was also an inveterate caroler who had the first verse to all the popular carols by heart. "Good King Wenceslas" was his favorite. He knew _all_ the verses to that one, and sang them straight through hoping to down out my scoffing analysis of the sozzled tyrant, who was doubtless full of liquid compassion on the Feast of Stephen or he would have called out the guards that night at the sight of one of his subjects out there on the lawn gathering his paltry winter fuel in the way of fallen twigs for his pitiful Xmas fire before going to bed cold and hungry because to have a nice big fire would mean chopping down one of his majesty's trees for which crime he would have been garroted on the adjacent tree.

'I can just see Old Wency,' I shouted over the strains of verse two, 'getting up the morning after the feast, feeling crapulous and flea-bitten and hating himself for fraternizing with his inferiors and vowing to find ways of punishing them so they'd take care to remember their place the next Christmas and not take advantage of their owner's goodness when he was in his cups!'

But nothing could dampen Sonny's holiday spirit. If my selection of him for a soul-mate had not been entirely random, I felt I couldn't have picked a more deserving recipient of the terrible facts I was about to furnish, given his views on Christmas. I mean Sonny's love of Christmas was so over-the-top that he once told me he wished that he had a house straddling the International Date Line so he could enjoy two full days of the holiday by moving from the west wing one day to the east wing the next. The cupcake actually said that.

And so, as I was saying, dressed in only a Santa's hat – after jumping naked on a pogo stick for 60 seconds by the clock, in return for which Sonny dropped 20 percent of his December paper earnings, including holiday tips, into what I called my Up-From-Subservience Kettle – I straightened my hat and proceeded to enlighten the chump.

'Paperboy,' I said, 'there are two types of people inhabiting Plantation Earth.'

I paused a moment to make sure I had his attention because of the glazed look that always came into his eyes any time I bared my my backside in those days.

'Owners,' I named the categories, 'and the Owned. Otherwise known, respectively, as people with thick investment portfolios and the poor slobs who work for them.

'Now in other places,' I held forth, striking a number of kittenish _Playboy_ poses on my bed in return for a signed IOU in the kettle because he was already severely overextended by then, 'the powerful oligarchs might be high-ranking military strongmen or top political big shots – be they Nazis or Communists, and in a few countries royal families still rule as they ruled in olden days. Theocrats control some of the more primitive nations today, and there are of course many combinations and permutations of these basic varieties of the owner-class. But here in the U.S. our masters are capitalists – also known as the major shareholders in big companies.

'Alas,' I continued, pulling on a bulky green sweater with a red-nosed Rudolph on the front which was long enough to cover my distracting orbs, 'your family and mine belong to the servant class. Your slave-family is a nice normal everyday galumphing variety of the horribly humiliated middle-class, not terribly eager to serve but not much bothered by it either, ever-ready to find relief in the typical forms of slave-comfort, one of them being Christmas. Whereas my family is of the executive or "driver" class. Which means that my parents are not only slaves, but ambitious slaves, the very foulest kind of slaves in existence, who serve their masters more zealously than other slaves in a perverse attempt to ease the shame they feel over serving them in the first place.'

Despise me for it, Sy, but I was just that blunt, putting these facts before Sonny without mercy. Today I understand just how brutal it was to force-feed that sour apple of knowledge to a boy who was still so mentally and emotionally intimidated by slave-life as to half-believe in the existence of Santa Claus at the age of ten. I see now that no matter how much pain I was in on account of Winny's rejection of me or how desperate I was to ease my terrible loneliness by creating someone in my own image to join me on that arduous uphill struggle to ownership status, those excuses hardly mitigate torturing someone as sweet as Sonny with the unspeakable truth. Taking away his paper-route money really should have been enough. I should have been satisfied with inflicting that much punishment on the gullible Paperboy and left him alone.

However, not being in such a great place myself at the time, I gave my friend-to-be no quarter. In fact, I was convinced that I was doing him a huge favor by delivering a salutary, much-needed dose of reality. And acting in that magnanimous spirit, I went on to offer the whole length and breadth of my Oz-like wisdom to the innocent sugar-cookie.

'But we must not lose heart, Paperboy,' I said, switching over to the first person plural and cranking up the charm. 'We must look for and find the strength and courage to pick up the crappy hand God has dealt us and fling the cards back in His ugly face. And the one and only way to do that is to get rich! You need but follow my lead, Paperboy, and you as well as me – both of us – will be _rich_!' I raised a beatified face to my reflection in one of the many mirrors in my bedroom, adding, 'You have my solemn word on that. We will _own_ these feasting fawning beasts of burden we call our parents and teachers and coaches and preachers and administrators and politicians! And once we own these cheerleaders for slave-life, once these pathetic lying pieces of slave-shit are under our control, we won't hate them anymore! Not even the worst of them! Not even the most ambitious worms who make up the upper-middle-class! Not even my father! Because they're the ones who will serve us best! The executive class will kiss our feet with the same devotion they kiss Winny's father's feet today! And in consequence we'll feel towards them the same way Huh-boy feels towards them! We'll _love_ their stinking asses! We won't be able to help ourselves _! Those disgusting shit-eaters will see to it_!'

There it was, Sy. All my hopes and dreams in a coconut shell; my clear-eyed take on humanity; my belief-system; all laid out in a nice tidy sermon. I gave it to the Paperboy straight and paused to let him take it in while I studied his face for a reaction.

The pause stretched out for some time because there wasn't any reaction. Sonny just sat there mute and immobile, possibly playing possum in the hope I wouldn't eat him.

The lack of feedback annoyed me and made no secret of it. I'd been anticipating something along the lines of a radiant smile of epiphany, a sudden massive show of gratitude, and, ideally, a gushing appeal to join me in my heroic effort to achieve ownership-status, and I told him so.

Still nothing.

Even after I went to the trouble of spelling everything out in more detail, his expression held not a sign of anything close to the response I was looking for.

That's when I lit into him full-force, denouncing him with every ounce of my seething contempt for his cowardly acquiescence to the status quo and listing every disreputable symptom of the ignoble slave-mentality that so thoroughly possessed him.

I said he'd been bred from birth to accommodate an oppressive society and indoctrinated to fear the primary source of his spiritual suffering and to embrace it to ease his shame over not opposing it and either swallow his rage and shame and loathe himself or else find safe targets to unload on. I told him how only money could buy freedom from such a life of terrible ignominy and degradation, and how we both felt the same crippling shame over our subordinate social status; only _I_ bravely acknowledged it and chose to do something about it, whereas _others_ – and here I gave the Paperboy a meaning look – blithely went about compounding their cowardice day after day, first by denying it and then by being complicit in it by growing up to break their children as they were broken by their slave-parents before them.

I could see by the time I'd finished listing his defects that I'd given him plenty to think about, because his brow was drawn and he looked pensive.

There was another longish pause as I waited on him to formulate a response.

Finally he spoke.

He began by thanking me in a tremulous voice for enumerating his many shortcomings, before adding in a more tremulous voice that when I first began enumerating them, a qualm had entered his mind, and 20 minutes later when I finished enumerating them, that qualm was still there.

'Spit it out, toe-dancer,' I said.

'Well,' he apologized, 'doesn't getting rich just, you know, kind of perpetuate the problem?'

' _Not for me, Paperboy_!' I whooped triumphantly, raising both hands over my head as if to stop the clock after bulldogging him in those six short syllables, declaring to the judges and the wider audience that I had roped, rolled, and trussed the bawling calf in record time.

But the thing is, I hadn't. Because no matter how many times I would deliver that same get-rich-and-suffer-less speech over the next 50 years, the Paperboy kept on countering it with his perpetuating-the-problem reservation. And no matter how many times I weighed in with that same triumphant whoop: ' _Not for me, Paperboy_!' he steadfastly hung back from being wised up.

Truth be told, Sy, that repeated back-and-forth grew to be our signature exchange, and it remains our signature exchange to this day. Sonny was too honest to disagree with the awful facts of life as I laid them bare. But he couldn't get on board with my way of dealing with them. Appearances to the contrary, Sonny, in his watery-kneed poopsy-woopsy kind of way, can be one stubborn little bastard at times.

### Sonny's Comments

Asked about Evelyn's intellect, Sonny said, 'In matters of the human spirit, she's always claimed to outshine Einstein's understanding of the physical universe by light years.'

Asked if she favored him over her other boyfriends, Sonny shook his head. 'Proximity and my paper money may have ranked me among the favored few, but she pretty much looked on all of us as the dirt beneath her feet, or the worshippers thereof. In fact she often referred to us in those terms. "O-ground-that-I-walk-on-or-worshipper-thereof, peel me a grape..." That sort of thing.'

As for choosing him for the distinction of being molded into a kindred spirit, Sonny agreed it with her that was not premeditated. 'She simply pinned the tail on the nearest donkey.'

Asked if he was forced to do a paper route, Sonny said, 'I didn't have to throw papers to help support my family, if that's what you mean. But when I was seven my dad insisted I take a paper route because he was deathly afraid of spoiling me. My cousin Rodney was the example he cited when touting the character-building benefits of having a job. It was supposed to keep me from becoming as irresponsible as Rodney. I remember finding it a little humiliating at first, but in time I got used to it. And as I got older, I came to believe, as Evelyn says at some point, that delivering papers was the answer to all my prayers.'

### Round 4

Gradually, by degrees, bit by bit, not all at once but a little at a time, _grudgingly_ , if you catch my drift, I would come to understand that my darling Winny, while a cabbagehead of the first order, was not, as I originally thought, a _willful_ cabbagehead of the first order.

It was a conclusion I reached only after careful analysis left me no alternative. Preposterous as the idea is to all thinking people, Winny actually believed – and still believes to this day – that people are overjoyed to serve him not out of any trepidation over the power he wields or wish to curry the favors he's in a position to bestow, but purely because he's one helluva swell guy, loved for himself and not for his money.

The day I realized that about him was the day I realized his stupidity was no act.

Which is not to say that the dim light of my life was born with a subnormal intellect. If anything Winny has a slightly above-average brain. What I'm saying is my dumber half is _hysterically_ stupid. Which is a very different thing from being congenitally stupid. Because while both hysterically stupid people and congenitally stupid people are indisputably stupid, and while both hysterically stupid people and congenitally stupid people can't help being stupid, the congenitally stupid person is _honestly_ stupid whereas the hysterically stupid person, while not _consciously_ dishonest, is nonetheless a frantic denier of reality. The hysterically stupid person possesses the mental capacity to understand the ugliness of life, but he's just so horrified by it that he's compelled to blind himself to it.

Psychologists, if they had it in them to apply their insights honestly all up and down the social hierarchy – which they don't – would classify Winny's numbness of the brain as one of those protective devices they term coping or defense mechanisms – the automatic circuit-breakers that snap off and shield people from being completely paralyzed by moments of appalling clarity.

For months I fought against the discovery. I insisted that he was crafty-stupid. Conscious of his dishonesty. A willful and deliberate liar, who made a show of being a total ignoramus in order to discourage my dreams of ascending to his high social station. I labored under the misapprehension that he understood the world as clearly as I did and was just faking his stupidity to torment me. And as any headstrong young girl might do, I let my anger and resentment get the better of me. In a mounting snit over what I took to be his rejection of my aspirations to join him as one of the owners of Plantation Earth, I jacked up my prices on the carnal pleasures I provided to a point where they got so high that he might have flown in a troupe of Lido dancers from Paris for what I charged. The outcome being exactly what you'd expect – and what I should have foreseen – the withdrawal of his custom.

'Listen, Huh-boy,' I said, after doubling his rate for a private showing of a home movie of my brother Freddy bent naked over a makeshift clothesline while I, dressed in only an Aunt Jemima headscarf, used an antique wicker rug-beater to raise an ornate pattern of welts on his bare bottom, 'forget about the endless homage that you're the happy recipient of morning noon and night. Just consider the fact that you'll never know the terrible cringing shame I feel every second of every day at the prospect that someone like me, who is your superior in every way except for my lousy low-born social position, could end up working for a ginger snap like you! Ew!'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

'The very idea,' I went on, 'of filling out a _job_ application in the hope of doing the bidding of a fathead like you, no matter how much you pay me, makes me want to go on a killing spree right this minute!'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

'I can't even begin to fathom how any decent human being could perpetrate an injustice as outrageous as that! And yet I know you would! How the hell do you sleep at night?'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

'It's insulting enough that I have to sell my sexual favors to you at a price I set and deliver at a time of my convenience, but I swear I'd _kill_ myself before submitting to the indignity of going to work for a simpleton like you. It makes me sick just thinking about it.'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

'Stop fucking with me, Huh-boy! You can't be that stupid! You can't possibly believe that people are _happy_ to drudge away their whole lives for you in return for a crummy salary which you get back in the form of mortgage payments every month!'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

'Come on! You know what I'm talking about! You feel the same horror I do about living a life of shameful servitude! I know you do! We're the same person! Can't you see that? Admit it!'

Saying we were the same person was as near to abject pandering as I ever hope to come, given my clear superiority. Even so, Huh-boy answered, 'Huh?'

'Okay, so let me get this straight, lamebrain,' I said after doubling his rate again for another home movie in which I, as Lorelei, lounged naked on the diving board at the deep-end of our pool and crooned the preposterous set-up to that classic ballad "Teen Angel" where the girl runs back to the car stalled on the railroad tracks to retrieve her boyfriend's stupid high-school ring and gets run over by a train.

" _Die die-die die_

Die die die die

Die-die die die-die die,

Die die die die,

Die die die die,

_Die die diiie die-die diiiiiiiie..._ "

while Freddy, wearing only a fisherman's yellow rain hat, was affecting to drown in cut-away shots at the shallow end. 'What you're telling me is that you _truly_ believe your subjects _love_ you? Are you delirious? Get over yourself, massa! _No_ one could believe something that stupid and still dress himself in the morning and remember to wipe his ass after a bowel movement! No way!'

Huh-boy said, 'Huh?'

It was one thing for Sonny to disagree with me about how best to deal with the bitter injustice of a society that put Winny's family in control of our families, but even a goop of the Paperboy's caliber, debilitated as he was by a crippling compassion for all humanity couldn't blind himself to the _fact_ of that injustice.

But Winny could.

'You can't _poss_ ibly sit there and say,' I put it to Huh-boy after doubling his rate again for a private showing of another home movie of me dressed in only a beaded fillet with a feather at the back, doing a war dance around Freddy tied naked to a stake with kindling at his feet and a puddle of ketchup on top of his head where his hair ought to be, and ending the skit with me striking a match and making a maniacal face at the camera, 'that my life isn't a trillion times more humiliating than yours?'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

While Sonny's resistance to the finer points of my wisdom could be galling at times, at least he had _some_ intellectual integrity – enough anyway to use him as sounding board. Which I did now, putting the matter of Huh-boy's unfathomable stupidity to him.

'Is the puddin'head too stupid to know how stupid he is or too dishonest to know how dishonest he is? I hope it's the former because the latter implies a serious character defect.'

Sonny suggested a third option. A born peacemaker (the very word _confrontation_ panicked poor Sonny), he argued that Winny's limited experience with life as most people live it reflected a sincere ignorance of our suffering. In other words, having lived a wonderful, humiliation-free existence by our standards, Winny just naturally assumed we all enjoyed the same blessed life he enjoyed.

That was Sonny's forgiving take on his old friend. But I couldn't buy it.

'Hell, you can freeze piss on a stick, Paperboy, and call it a popsicle, but that doesn't make it so! Has he not eyes to see? A brain to reason with? Feelings with which to sense the suffering all around him? Has he not ears to listen when I lay the facts before him as clear as a mountain stream?'

By then I was already beginning to dread the terrible truth which I was eventually forced to face in the end: namely, that Winny's stupidity was fear-generated and hysterical and therefore blameless. And looking back I can tell you exactly why I had so much trouble acknowledging Huh-boy's psychopathology. It had to do with my father's similarly diseased mind.

You'll understand me better after I've explained that I'd only recently come to accept that the Managerial Maniac, as I affectionately referred to my father, was hysterically stupid.

By that I mean that after years of getting nowhere in my struggle to enlighten the paternal moron, trying everything from pleading with him to railing at him to threatening mayhem on him to rubbing up against him in my most seductive manner – all in an unavailing effort to motivate the peabrain to understand himself – I was finally forced to acknowledge that he was simply too _emotionally_ invested in his lies to be susceptible to reason.

To put it another way, the harrowing, soul-mutilating humiliations that my poor slave-dad had suffered all his life at the hands of an oppressively unfair social arrangement had rendered him permanently impervious to self-understanding. Because if Dumb Dad ever allowed himself to admit to even a fraction of the shit he'd swallowed, he'd have to kill himself.

But I'd only recently figured that out.

Not that I had any objection to seeing the big dope kill himself. Don't get me wrong. Once I realized he was hopelessly stupid, and I felt liberated from the frustration of actually trying to wise the idiot up, I immediately threw myself into the fun of rubbing his nose in the unfaceable truth about himself. Like a pig in slop, I reveled in it.

For example, sitting down to breakfast, I'd say, 'Morning, Dodo. How's the proudest of proud slaves doing this fine day?

He'd give me the gimlet eye and I'd continue, 'You know, old man, I've been thinking, and it seems to me that all the humiliations we submit to in this lousy life can't help but make us feel cowardly. And of course nobody likes to feel cowardly so our vanity naturally steps in and finds ways to mask our cowardice, usually by justifying it or calling it by another name or maybe even glorifying it. With the twisted result that in our struggle to reduce our cowardice, we really only add to it and instead of hating ourselves less we end up hating ourselves even more.'

As my heckling continued, Dad would either leave the table or tell Mother to get me a safe distance away lest he lose it and pick me up by the ankle and dash my brains out against the wall.

The second option is the one I was hoping to provoke. Because then Mother would usher me out of the room and meet my price to stay away from the table until Dodo had finished his Wheaties. Making the business of evaluating Dim Dad to his face both productive and fun – an entirely satisfactory experience.

Even so, I still had a hard time not blaming Dad for his stupidity. And then along comes Winny looking for the same dispensation. The timing couldn't have been worse. I mean if being unable to blame Dad for his stupidity bothered me, imagine how much more it bothered me not to blame Winny for his. Remember Winny was of the owner class. You have to bear that in mind to appreciate the full scope of the difficulty I had acknowledging his hysterical stupidity. My father's nasty slave-life made his hysterical stupidity excusable in a way. But what had Winny suffered?

We're parsing culpability here.

It was one thing to give a free pass to my long-suffering idiot-dad, but that a _rich_ person should be hysterically stupid? COME ON!

That's the point I keep coming back to.

Where Dad knuckled under to a miserable soul-crushing life for so long that he _had_ to stay ignorant of his shame or else shoot himself in the head, what load of insult couldn't Winny own up to swallowing? He'd swallowed so little! Why afford Winny the same mercy and compassion I so generously accorded my poor dickhead of a father? That's the question I struggled with.

I asked Sonny.

'Paperboy,' I said, 'having heard my views on the irremediable stupidity of my old man and my gnawing suspicion that Huh-boy might be likewise hysterically simpleminded, please tell me: how can it be? Consider how insult-free Huh-boy's life has been compared to Dodo's! What goes? What emotional trauma could possibly cause a rich kid's brain to shut down like that?'

'Guilt?' was Sonny's next suggestion.

I gave it a think.

Having failed to sell his first theory about Winny's never having suffered anything like the level of humiliation we suffer and believing therefore, having no firsthand evidence to the contrary, that our lives must be just as happy and carefree as his, Sonny was now speculating that Winny was driven to insist that his subjects are happy because he was eaten up with guilt over our suffering.

I couldn't buy that either. Apart from its being a complete reversal of the Paperboy's earlier theory in many ways, I was pretty sure Winny had never suffered a moment of _conscious_ guilt – or a moment of consciousness period – in his life. Just to make sure, I ran Sonny's idea by the richboy himself – right after doubling his rate and showing him a home movie of Matt, one of my older debt-ridden boyfriends, tied naked to the top of an eight-foot stepladder with his genitals directly under a suspended ceiling fan, the blades of which were whizzing around an inch over his lap while I perched on top of a chest of drawers in front of him and tried to induce an erection by dancing the Watusi, naked except for, in the interest of giving the hormonal post-pubescent Matt a sporting chance, swim fins, goggles and a nose clip. Winny said: 'Huh?'

He'd given the same response to the Paperboy's earlier excuse as well, the one about him being ignorant of our suffering due to a lack of affinity with our station in life, which I'd broached after doubling his rate and showing him a home movie of me and Freddy playing a game of pool, the highlights of which included twirling the cue tip in a small block of blue chalk held between Freddy's nether cheeks and using my oiled-up labia majora as a bridge to pocket the nine. Winny said 'Huh?' to that one too.

Maybe it was _unconscious_ guilt. There might be something to that, but I doubted it.

You begin to appreciate how much the exculpating factor troubled me in Winny's case.

I mean the thought of Dodo's being in the grip of some helpless compulsion that totally excused him from taking responsibility for his stupidity was bad enough. But just when I was reluctantly coming to terms with his inability to refrain from being forever dumb, to look up and see Winny hopping down that same dumb-bunny trail...'NOOOOOOO!' was my reaction. It couldn't be! It made no sense!

I'm not without pity, Sy. You know that. Just because I don't blind myself to people's suffering and all the bullshit we tell ourselves to make our disgraceful servitude a little easier to endure doesn't make me unsympathetic to human frailty. But there's a limit! And Winny's conviction that his subjects sincerely adore him and, what's more, that he _deserves_ their adoration, passes that limit!

I was _determined_ to hold the drooling imbecile accountable!

But the more I tried, the more I kept slamming my head up against the fact that he was as cuckoo as Dad!

I examined and re-examined every possible explanation for the gurgling infant's stupidity hoping for a different result. But by a process of elimination, Cuckoo was all I was left with. Finally had to accept that Huh-boy was no less lost to his delusions than my poor blockhead of a father. It's called deductive reasoning.

I explained it all to Sonny who dipped his head sorrowfully, too honest to object. Unlike Winny who said 'Huh?' after I explained it all to him.

Here then, deconstructing his case with the pitiless precision I am known for, is the theory I came up with: At some point in Winny's life – probably at a very early age – he sensed, on some subliminal level, that the smallest alteration in his circumstances could render him as vulnerable to the same crushing humiliation he saw being suffered by the people around him. And the mere possibility of suffering a catastrophe as horrifying as that drove the little darling to seek refuge in hysterical blindness, thus allowing him to keep on functioning, albeit in a sub-cerebral state – something akin to a melted fudge sundae with sprinkles on top, metaphorically speaking – for the rest of his natural life.

As I say, Sonny sighed in tacit consent when I put my penetrating analysis of Winny's case to him in just those terms. Unlike Winny, who, when I explained my findings to him, after doubling his rate and showing him a home movie of me and Freddy playing a game of "no-hands" croquet in the nude with the mallet handles clenched between our butt cheeks, said, 'Huh?'

The long and the short of it is that merely _witnessing_ the humiliations that my father actually suffered drove Winny out of his ever-loving wits. Fear, not guilt, was behind his hysterical stupidity. Or, in the immortal words of Jim Varney, Huh-boy was Scared Stupid.

On reaching that conclusion, I changed the driveler's nickname from Huh-Boy to the Fond Owner and when I asked the Fond Owner what he thought of his new moniker, he said, 'Huh?'

I further perceived that both my future husband and my father suffered from the same shared delusion, something the French call a folie a deux, which explains how two boneheads from such widely different social backgrounds could be so equally and massively ignorant of reality. Sonny took my point and made the connection between the two dunces – not with any alacrity – but he could see how the actual servitude suffered by my poor father and the mere threat of suffering that same servitude scared rich Winny to the point that both Proud Slave and Fond Owner were traumatized into finding psychological relief in the identical fantasy that the owners of Plantation Earth are fine, noble people worthy of our devotion and that the plantation itself is a near-utopia. Sonny got it, but when I took the trouble to explain the intricacies of the folie-a-deux theory to Dad at some length, he threatened to dash my brains out. And, no less predictably, when I was done explaining the folie-a-deux theory to Winny, after doubling his rate to see a home movie of me and Freddie having bacon drippings licked off our genitalia by the family dog Max, he said, 'Huh?' Winny, not Max, said 'Huh?'

It was nice in a way to have the richboy pegged at last. Still, something in me yearned to blame him for his stupidity. To this day, I continue to have difficulty accepting that he can't help himself. There are moments – many of them to be honest – when I'm certain Winny _must_ be faking his stupidity. It just seems so unlikely that anyone could have nothing but packing peanuts where his brains ought to be.

But after a drink or two, I calm down enough to realize that our slavish social structure scares every last ounce of intellectual honesty out of practically everyone. I say as much to Winny at least a dozen times a year, and guess what he says back to me every time? He says, 'Huh?'

### Sonny's Comments

When asked about Evelyn's troubled home life, Sonny said, 'I think hers may have been slightly more trouble-giving than trouble-getting. She said it was her brothers who really suffered from the motivational excesses of their father who considered it unmanly to beat women, giving Evelyn rein to insult him with impunity, which she did at every turn.

'If she happened to pass him on the lanai, reading the paper (the General used to rib me: 'Why don't you deliver some good news for a change?') or having a drink with a colleague while their wives were playing Scrabble, or just enjoying a quiet cigar alone, she'd stop and study him, the way a museum docent might run a discerning eye over a Matisse or the resurrected bones of a triceratops. Then turning to address her gang, she'd patter: 'This is a prime example of the Proud Slavicus Americanus. Professional military men represent the pinnacle of the genus. They ease their shame and rage over their obedience to their masters by their willingness to kill and die for the very people they most fear to defy, thus misdirecting their rage and misidentifying the source of their shame in the most perverse and cowardly of ways. Note the false dignity he assumes to camouflage the deeper self-disgust he feels for himself..."

'She'd go on like that until the General bellowed to his wife to "come remove the Little Empress from arm's length before I do something we both regret!" And Mrs. Hitcherson would hurry in and pay hush-money to Evelyn to leave her father alone.

'At other times,' Sonny said, 'she'd make her delivery snappy and breezy. Sounding very Cary Grantish, she'd say, "Daddy Daddy Daddy! You poor dumb helpless shame-ridden sap you! You got hornswoggled! You played their game! You let them misdirect your rage onto a foreign enemy when your real enemy was always right here under your nose!"

'During summer vacations,' Sonny further elaborated on the strained relations between Evelyn and her father, 'when school was out but our fathers still had to go to work, she'd follow the General's staff car down the drive in the morning, shouting, "PROUD SLAAAAAAAAVE!" until her mother met her price to stop.'

Returning to the subject of her home movies, I asked why she tortured her brother Freddy in so many of them. Sonny said, 'She said it was because Freddy killed their older brother Frank. Sometimes she admitted that she was already torturing Freddy long before he killed their brother. And that Frank was already dead in spirit by the time Fred sent him flying over that cliff in France in their mother's secondhand Renault. "And guess who hoisted his own petard in the process?" she chuckled. "With big bubba gone, little bubba took his place as Dodo's prime punching bag!"

'One time, clearly taking pleasure in wising me up to the full extent of life's horror, she smiled and said, "To come clean, Paperboy, the whole family killed Frank! It was a team effort!"'

When I asked about the stupid-lying-coward stuff, Sonny said, 'I don't know when she originated the phrase, but by the time I met her she was already saying: "All of the people are stupid lying cowards most of the time; some of the people are stupid lying cowards all of the time; but not all of the people are stupid lying cowards all of the time."

'That last part was her best hope for humanity. She delivered the axiom frequently to her dad in her best thus-spake-Evelyn manner. Once I heard her add, "I don't categorize you as a stupid lying coward _all_ of the time, Pop. Because I've seen your suicidal side. But some people are bigger stupid lying cowards than others. And those who defend obedience to a strict chain of command as the crowning glory of human achievement are some mighty big stupid lying cowards...'

### Round 5

Florida was supposed to be a new beginning for me. I made a promise to myself to put away childish things and wage war on my humiliations on a strict, businesslike basis. No more flip remarks denigrating people's personal appearance. No more flailing tantrums against an uncaring fate. No more pointless acts of revenge against an unjust society over my degrading upper-middle-class status. No more pyromaniacal episodes, unless money was involved. No more flinging Freddy around the backyard for distance. No more shooting of unsuspecting mid-level military officers through the neck with a scoped high-powered rifle in an access of petulance after Father was a no-show. No more homicidal horsing around. No more behavior of a vicious indiscriminate nature that was in no way profitable. With Florida. a rigorous discipline would mark my pursuit of the owner-class status I was determined to achieve.

But within weeks I was already fudging on that pledge. Under the mistaken notion that Winny was intentionally snubbing me, I had spitefully priced my physical delights right off the market, which wasn't easy, given all the money the richboy had to burn and how enamored he was of my "ischial tuberosities" – a grand phrase I ran across in a Maupassant story a few years ago about a passionate ass-kisser which I immediately shared with Winny because he's so proud of his literary credentials that I have to throw every allusion he might be unfamiliar with in his face.

Fortunately, I realized before too much damage was done that the Fond Owner was, like my dad, a serious contender for the title of the world's most self-unaware dumbbell, and Reason regained her throne.

Once I accepted that trying to teach Winny even the most rudimentary facts about human behavior was like trying to teach long-division to a dachshund – and not a particularly bright dachshund at that – I rolled back my prices. No reparations or rebates were tendered, but I reduced my rates to a level where my little icing-drizzled crumbcake could once again indulge his elemental urges without feeling over-fleeced. In short I reopened trade with the mental Twinkie.

A wanton simper marked my desire to start fresh as I presented him with an amended menu listing a more affordable selection of highly imaginative depravities available to him upon request – and receipt of a sensible scaled-down payment.

Naturally, I continued to resent his stupidity. I resent it still. I mean you can't expect somebody who takes the trouble to figure out how the world works not to resent somebody who insists on going through life with the understanding of an unweaned tittybaby. I make that observation in all humility, Sy, fully aware of all the cultural factors that pervert the ways people deal with the horrors of an unjust society – the many variables and intangibles, the overlooking of which is the unspoken mandate of the social sciences.

But, even taking into account the brain-freezing terror likely to afflict every member of a hierarchy marked by the kind of yawning chasm in economic disparity that marks ours, I think it's simply monstrous what hysterically stupid people get away with. I don't care if Winny can't help embracing the comfort of know-nothingness. I can't help resenting him for it.

At least I could enjoy those compensations I mentioned earlier: the easygoing contempt I now felt free to express for Winny once I recognized the impossibility of ever enlightening him. Realizing that he held his stupidity in a death-grip that he was psychologically incapable of ever relinquishing relieved me of any responsibility to remedy his handicap, which in turn allowed me to settle down to exacting as much tribute as I could get out of him while having a high old time calling him an intractable dimwit.

I explained all that directly to the Fond Owner in my bubbliest manner while we watched a home movie of me, wearing only a thick pair of Buddy Holly glasses, delivering a university-quality lecture on Flannery O'Connor's much-anthologized story "A Good Man is Hard to Find," and when I was done, Winny said, 'Huh?'

'Because nothing,' I put the final touch to my breezy analysis of his hysterical stupidity, 'short of kicking you in the nads twice a day for a full geologic age could possibly induce an intellectual blind man of your magnitude to see the light,' I said.

Winny said, Huh?'

The important thing is that along with my insight into the permanent nature of Winny's negligible capacity for rational thought came the restoration of my productivity. My quest in other words for ownership status was again back on track, and over the years I would enjoy some modest successes.

Ninth grade was a particularly good year for me, fiscally. One, because it was a big year for me boob-wise. You'd think that my sumptuous bottom, accentuated by a mild lordosis condition, and topped by these wide-set Ava Gardner eyes and Betty White dimples and my otherwise striking facial beauty, plus my brains to beat Einstein's – the least valued of the 4Bs, actually – would be enough to make me a force of nature. But it was the blossoming of these bazooms that drew the boys like bees to honey, ready to pay top dollar for a peek. Go figure.

Nobody admired them more than I did of course. During their growth spurt – impatiently awaited on, as I indicated – I'd step out of the shower and stand in profile in front of one of the many full-length mirrors in my room and chant like the Wicked Queen in "Snow White": 'Mirror mirror on the door, swell these Alleghenies to the size of Alpine peaks so I won't be poor.'

The mirrors took their sweet time about it, but eventually they complied, bless them, and by my fifteenth birthday, I'd left all my contemporaries in the dust, as well as my teachers (excepting Mrs. Y, the heftiest and heiferest of them). Toward the end of their blossoming, I'd nearly caught up to my busty mother, and there was still a bit of blossoming to go. It was as if Fate, after slighting me in the matter of my sub-owner parents and these enormous sciapod slave-feet of mine, was trying to make up for it with an abundance of upper torso.

... _Now_ what?!

Bobber, be a dear and get that. ...Who? ...Well, speak of the devil.

'Darling, so nice to hear from you! I didn't know you were up to making calls. ...What's that? You're worried your readers might not survive the deprivation of a Sunday without your morning benediction and you want me to write it for you? ...No? ...Yes? ...You'll have to enunciate, schooner. ...Now, don't pout. Your therapist says your speech will improve with time. ...No need to yell, dear. Volume is no substitute for clarity. ...No, I promise not to replace your hyper-literary slush with my demystifying good sense. ...Now don't wear yourself out, sugarlips. You rest and we'll talk later when you're feeling better...'

Good gormless unto eternity, Sy, His Fondness is worried that his weekly publisher's column will be missed. That's another ramification of his self-adoring delusion: He suffers from an _idée fixe_ that his readers are, one, literate, and, two, gluttons for punishment.

So where were we, ThingamaBob? Ah, yes, my ninth-grade titivation. These decorative upper torso additions were boon number one.

Boon number two, taking them in no particular order, was a new development in my parents' battle to out-stupid each other over the course of their miserable marriage, otherwise known as the Twenty-five Years' War.

Straying a bit from the strict focus of this deposition, I think you know that my father was a World War II fighter pilot, grounded after the war for a slow heartbeat. Hence the nickname Dodo. (Also the Wingless Wonder and the Chicken Colonel – which he used to call himself when in his cups, prior to his last promotion). It's a story I tell everyone because his slow heartbeat ironically turned out to be a result of how his amazingly fit he was. Something coronary specialists did not understand until many years later. As a young test pilot at Wright-Patt, Dad spent his off-hours boxing and running and lifting weights. Until it was discovered during a routine flight physical that his heart beat only 43 times a minute. The docs had no idea when they grounded him for idiopathic bradycardia that they were actually grounding him for being _too_ fit to fly.

He was never the same again.

Losing his wings marked a signal moment in his hysterically unexamined life because it led to his first honest glimpse of himself and the shame overwhelmed him.

Giving credit where it's due, Papa wanted so desperately to be brave that when he could no longer prove his courage up in the air as a military pilot, the terrible truth about his social status as a guard dog to the rich began to creep into his consciousness, and it so devastated him that he barricaded himself in his room and hit the bottle for months at a stretch, never staying conscious longer than it took him to drink himself into oblivion again.

As a kid I thought it was a hoot watching him wallow around on his hands and knees in a semi-conscious state, muttering half-intelligible words of self-loathing. Only after I got older was I able to appreciate the heroic aspect to his efforts to kill himself. Today I frankly like remembering my father trying to drink himself to death. That was Dad at his best. Because that's as close as he ever came to self-awareness.

Of course Mother took a more practical view of his destructive behavior. Worried that our sole provider was going to drink himself out of a job, she did everything she could think of to get him to go back to work and support his family. She coaxed and cajoled; she assured him that there was more dignity in being a deskbound administrator than in being a drunken bum. She sobbed; she moaned; she urged the sodden paterfamilias to stop looking down his nose at pushing a pencil for a living; she tried to interdict his alcohol supply lines and praised the sacrifice made by those who punctually clock in for eight hours of office drudgery a day, day after day, year after year.

Stepping up her game, she danced naked for the pitiful bleary-eyed sot.

All to no avail.

'SUCK IT UP!' I heard her scream frantically as his discharge loomed.

Finally, at the eleventh hour, she managed to rescue her family with the help of the base chaplain and his fiery assistant, a recovering alcoholic himself, who mounted a full-scale intervention.

Dad fought valiantly, holding out for as long as he could. But, in the end, by harping on his failure to meet his paternal responsibility to his sons, God's men were able to shame him into putting down the bottle and going back to work.

The trick to ridding his mind of the self-hate that was tormenting him was to turn that self-hate on its head and become proud of everything he most reviled about himself. They taught Dodo to glorify his subservience in the name of God and make it his life's mission to shape his sons into the greatest living monuments to social responsibility to ever walk the face of the earth.

Thus did my older brother Frank find himself nailed to the cross in order to keep our heavenly demented father on the job.

He would suffer up there for five full years until, through no fault of his own, he grew too big and strong to manhandle. In addition to naturally getting bigger as he got older, Frank grew stronger because Dad's zealous character-building programs included boxing lessons and rigorous physical training.

It was another heart-stopping moment for our little hothouse family when he politely declined to be improved anymore. Dodo hit the bottle big-time and went on his most impressive bender to date, ending up bedridden and catatonic in the base hospital. He was a year shy of qualifying for his pension when it happened – and you can be sure Mother cursed her luck over that.

She cried and moaned and got naked again...for Frank this time. She urged him to quit making such an exhibition of his misery in front of Dodo who secretly felt the same way about his own miserable life. But Frank couldn't help being sad. She encouraged him to accept Dad's kind offer to ship him off to military school. But Frank didn't wanna go. As desperation set in, everyone, including Dad, begged Frank to lead if he wasn't going to follow, but Frank could do neither, which was the thing that finally drove Dodo, a lifelong martinet used to a firm chain-of-command, over the edge.

DeeDee summoned the help of God's men again, but their ministrations proved ineffective against Frank, who could not help his egalitarianism.

That's when Fred stepped up and saved the family by committing a heroic murder.

On Frank, not Dad.

We were in France at the time, where, after languishing in the hospital for weeks, mute and immobile, Dodo was on the verge of being cashiered from the service. Freddy did what had to be done, and – _boing!_ – on receiving the glad tidings that the strapping anarchist was dead, our brain-dead father regained his faculties just that quick and sprang from his bed like Gene Kelly and danced his way out of the hospital with a song on his lips.

Returning to his hated job, he took to ruing the terrible tragedy of Frank's death with every hysterical bone in his body while simultaneously embarking on a rod-unsparing campaign to pound a heightened sense of social responsibility into his fresh victim, Freddy the Fratricide; Mother's stout new champion and sacrificial lamb.

Three cheers for male primogeniture, Sy!

About that time the President DeGaulle got in on the act and ordered the Allied military forces out of France, and Dodo got his star and was transferred to Orlando to head up a team of astrophysicists tasked with calculating ICBM trajectories sidereally. The decimated Hitcherson Fam moved into our house in Winter Park, and Mother watched with a distressed damsel's gratitude as Freddy got pummeled for the sake of her family – or, as Dad saw it, for the good of all mankind – for a solid year.

Not every day – I don't want to exaggerate – but twice a month Dadly Dearest would argue a convincing case for giving little bubba a thorough going over. And while much of nastiness I'm describing may be specific to my family, Sy, let's try to remember that our overall situation reflects a common horror of downward mobility which every member of the upper-middle-class fears more than death itself.

Poor Freddy's torment was all but unendurable – for Mother, who paid me to leave Dad alone, as my truth-telling was apt to aggravate the steady income's slave-rage, leading to more suffering for little bubba, not to mention jeopardizing our family's future, should Dodo take what I was saying to heart and decide to go on another suicidal binge.

That remained the family dynamic for a year. Until the red-letter day arrived: October 12, 1960. Mother had it circled on the calendar. In red. It marked another radical shift in the domestic balance of power. For on that day DeeDee swooped down like an avenging angel and, with a display of virtuous verve it was nauseating to behold, took Freddy under her wing and banned Dodo from ever improving another one of her children ever again.

The day before, she'd endured the last episode of Freddy's upliftment. Now, with Dodo fully vested at last, she pulled her bleating lamb from the fire over which he'd been roasting for the past twelve months and staunchly stuck out her chin and defied his tormentor to do something about it.

Which brings us to the point of all this backstory: Saving Freddy wasn't all DeeDee wanted. She told me in confidence that she also wanted out of the marriage. Wrinkling her nose in disgust, she said that the very sight of Dodo sickened her because of the way he'd mistreated my brothers for so many years.

I wrinkled my nose back at her and told her that Dodo was in fact a sickening reminder of how shabbily _she_ had treated her sons. To which DoubleDees said, 'Huh?' and gave me a wad of cash to shut up.

Pocketing the dough, I went on delivering more terrible truth in my offhand way. 'Not that it would have done you any good if you'd told him to stop and explained to him what I've been explaining to both you idiots for years: how you used my brothers as pawns in your nasty little game to deal with your hated slave-lives in ways that destroyed both Frank and Freddy. He'd only have looked at you the same way you're looking at me right now, like you were speaking in tongues, and said, "Huh?"'

To which, DeeDee said, 'Huh?' and gave me a second wad of cash to shut up.

So hats off to hysterical idiots, Sy, is what I'm saying. They sense the unspeakable truth in some hidden corner of their shriveled souls and will pay handsomely not to hear it spoken.

That's the battle my parents fought to out-stupid each other I spoke of a moment ago. At their nastiest, they used to taunt and challenge each other to blab the truth, but neither dared to do it. And whenever I blabbed it, they both chorused loudly, 'Huh?' and paid me to shut up.

Having belabored the subject of hush money this far, I may as well belabor it a little further and add that once my hysterically stupid mother made up her mind to divorce my hysterically stupid father (now that his pension was secure and she could count on his alimony payments should he drink himself out of a job or to death), she was disappointed when he didn't hit the sauce right after she took Freddy away. That had been his pattern when she used to take Frank away. He'd get drunk and miss work till she gave Frank back again. Until, as I say, Frank got too big and he wasn't hers to give back and Dodo ended up in the hospital.

But with Freddy, Ace proved cagier than she anticipated. He knew he'd lost his leverage. His infallible sense of gamesmanship told him that DeeDee was looking to dump him and "irreconcilable differences" and "incompatibility" were insufficient grounds for divorce in the conservative state of Florida, at least not then, but being a drunkard qualified. So he stayed sober. She would try to entice him to retire and move to California where the divorce laws were more liberal, but Dodo had no trouble seeing through her complaints about hurricanes and alligators and sinkholes and her efforts to pin her lackluster interest in sex on the awful Florida humidity.

No matter how hysterically stupid a slave is, Sy, there's no slyer creature in heaven or earth when it comes to subconsciously apprehending the subconscious motives and subterfuges of other hysterically stupid slaves.

The upshot was that Wily Dad, the former brutal despot who used to stay up nights inventing pious rationalizations for beating the daylights out of my brothers for their moral and spiritual edification suddenly became a model family man of the most progressive type, delighting in frustrating (subconsciously of course) poor Mumsy as she waited for the misstep she'd been anticipating (subconsciously also) since the day she took Freddy away.

In other words the fun and games continued. I watched Mom slowly evolve from the sweet fragile long-suffering martyr she believed she was into a bitter snarling harpy, while Dad, the ex-rod-wielding, iron-willed authoritarian, was transformed overnight into the epitome of a television sit-com dad embracing Doris Day's nonjudgmental resignation to "que sera sera."

The days stretched into weeks, then months, then years: one, two, three of them, as DeeDee stayed crouched in pounce-and-devour mode and Dodo lounged around her sniggering up his sleeve.

Until Mother finally broke under the strain of waiting on the foul hypocrite to slip up so that she, the other foul hypocrite, could file for divorce. Unable to take it any longer, she came to me with a proposition so honest that for a moment I almost didn't want to kill her. She asked me to lay into Dodo like never before, holding back nothing, and she paid me like never before to do it.

During of our first year at Winter Park, she used to pay me to lay off Dodo. Then, after he had his 20 years in, she stopped paying me, so I naturally slacked off a bit and Dodo had a pretty easy time of it for the next three years. But now, desperate to make her getaway and seeing her divorce-plans hopelessly stymied, she forsook every semblance of masking her agenda (while still managing to see herself as the bigger victim) and paid me to tell Dodo _all_ the nasty truth about himself ten times a day, hoping to induce him to either go on another binge or take a swipe at me, giving Mother, one way or the other, what she wanted – a husband's excessive drinking or a father's blacking of his gorgeous daughter's eye constituting sufficient grounds for divorce even in the conservative state of Florida in those good old patriarchal days.

It hardly needs saying that I proved too crafty for all parties involved and played both idiots off each other like a couple of prize chumps. For even as I had DeeDee paying me to pile on Dodo with everything I had, I had Dodo paying me to lay off him and pile on DeeDee with everything I had.

That was boon number two.

Coming to boon number three, in the interest of accuracy, I should probably retract what I said earlier about there being no particular order to these happy twists of fate, because number three was by far the most profitable. And Rodney was its name.

In the ninth grade, Sonny's Cousin Rodney came home from reform school, and I immediately put the happy little hoodlum to work for me robbing houses.

When you think of Rodney, think of my male equivalent. More precisely, think of him as my counterpart before the age of eight when I was a complete stranger to discipline. Think of the primitive Evelyn before I smartened up and vowed to have my revenge by getting rich. That was Rodney in a nutshell. He was the closest thing to a pure rebel going, certainly purer than I was by that age. And frankly he triggered heady feelings of nostalgia for my bygone days of unadulterated id. I took to the little devil immediately and enjoyed his company immensely.

Rodney lived with his mother in Chinook Village, a sprawling suburban housing tract named, I assume, for a gullible tribe of Native Americans. He'd gone to a different elementary school that funneled into our junior high and I knew him briefly in the seventh grade before he was convicted in juvenile court of trashing and burning a number of newly-built unsold homes in his neighborhood – strictly for the fun of it – and was sentenced for his moral instruction to two years in the notorious Florida School for Wayward Boys in Marianna.

The moment I laid eyes on him, I spotted him for a fellow anti-establishmentarian. We had much in common. The Charmboy (so I nicknamed him) had even been held back a year for poor deportment like me. His IQ, tested by the state, was 12 points higher than mine, and mine wasn't low. Where I was the class badgirl; Rodney was the class badboy. The difference being, as I said, his complete lack of any productive direction.

Unconstrained vindictiveness was his MO, coupled with zero impulse-control and zero moral-compass. That was Rodney. Equally capable of putting a tack on a tyrannical teacher's chair or feeding that tack to a baby, and he made no distinction between the two. It was all about easing the pain of our humiliations by passing that pain on to others. That's what mattered to Rodney, and he openly exulted in carrying out the process as often as possible.

I never knew a happier human being.

Maybe my father came close when he was in the midst of mauling my brothers in the name of a well-regulated society, but I still give the edge to Rodney, who devoured weaker people without any need to invent justifications that made his motivation look noble. For example, Dad, in feeding that tack to a baby, would have defended it on the grounds that he was helping to harden the infant through pain and suffering and thus strengthen both the kid and the society he was a part of, lest the great American experiment in democracy falter and be consumed by chaos in the form of Godless Commies or the darker races.

But Rodney would only laugh victoriously as he watched the kid cry, feeling a wonderful sense of relief over all those tacks he'd been made to swallow by people looking to ease their pain, as everyone did his utmost to pass the pain around, with interest if possible, in this beautiful world without end, amen.

And where my dad used to grudgingly haul himself out of bed in the morning feeling the full weight of his hated slave-life and didn't start feeling better about himself until he was making my brothers share in his misery, Rodney used to rise at the crack of dawn, bursting with malignant energy, and rush out to greet the new day, thankful to be a vital part of untamed nature, ready to taunt, belittle, horrify and ideally injure both physically and emotionally, the first creature to happen by, be it a twitching spastic or a champion athlete, a Downs sufferer or a renowned rocket scientist, a pathetic parvo-stricken dog dragging its paralyzed bum behind him or a healthy growling Rottweiler, or his Cousin Sonny or me.

Had he lived to a ripe old age, I'm sure the lively reprobate, cirrhotic and STD-ridden by now, would be rising at the crack of dawn as happy and amoral as ever to hop on his Rascal and scoot down to the nearest Jiffy Mart for the thrill of giving a hard time to the overworked underpaid female clerk on duty, until she finally called the law on him, leaving it to the poor cops on duty at that hour to put up with his frisky double-talk until they got him behind bars, where he would speak glowingly to his fellow inmates about the bundles of cash he saw in the register, giving those with proximate release-dates precise directions on how to get to the convenience store in question, hoping to be the instigator of another "accidental" death, which was Rodney's special talent and his highest aspiration.

You begin to understand my natural affection for the turd. He was not one the pious fools I liked to outrage by telling them the repulsive truth about themselves. There was no outraging Rodney. Rodney celebrated every repulsive truth.

Like so many whirlwinds of undirected meanness who act purely on instinct and whose mantra is "Instant Gratification" Rodney had an incestuous mother – if not literally then on the high side of virtually. She doted on him. Rodney could do no wrong in Dilsey's eyes and, as a result, he grew up thinking he never did anything wrong. "Top o' the world, Ma!"

...Just let that one go to voice-mail, Bobster. I'm on a roll here.

My fondness for the imp manifested itself in the indulgent way I let him ignore my instructions, which I delivered time and again with ever more fist-in-palm firmness, to burgle small items with high resale value – cameras, silver, jewelry, power tools, guns, prescription meds, top-shelf booze, musical instruments smaller than a tuba or a drum set. But while I played the hardass, I was inwardly tickled each time I reached into his pillow case, wondering what in the way of plunder I might pull out.

'And what's this?' I growled, examining what appeared to be a toddler's first lopsided attempt at a ceramic ashtray made in kindergarten with too little supervision.

Rodney inspected the item at length and finally speculated, 'A gewgaw?'

'So you took this,' I rolled my eyes, 'and left the big sterling silver cigarette lighter the size of an ostrich egg I've seen on her coffee table?'

I did a lot of eye-rolling around Rodney.

One time it was over a child's tiny ball cap.

'What the fuck?' I said.

Rodney explained with a look of having pleased me greatly that he'd taken it from the top tier of an illuminated curio cabinet, clearly the most prized item on display in a shrine erected to the memory of the bereaved couple's little boy who died of CF. A new low, even for him.

'Jerk!' I snarled.

'His parents value it!' Rodney's eyes sparkled with exaggerated mockery of my greed, which he didn't really share. 'You could sell it back to them!'

In the course of our three-year partnership in crime, the little monkey would supply me with a young girl's lovelorn diary, a man's man's stash of skin mags, a Shriner's tasseled fez, a 14-pound ham from somebody's freezer, a star from the top of a Christmas tree, a new-fangled potato peeler, a wrapped birthday present for "Douglas," who turned out to be a dog and his gift was a chew-toy, and a woman's douching apparatus.

Rebuked again and again for his shenanigans, he enjoyed nothing better than overdoing his apologies. When threatened with ostracism over some particularly egregious instance of tomfoolery, he'd fall to his knees and howl tearfully for forgiveness, promising to do better.

'No, baby, no! Bite me! Spit on me! But no banish the Hot Rod!'

Sounding like Brer Rabbit threatened with the dread briar patch, he'd roll around at my feet, begging, 'Tie me down! Piss on my face! Bloody my ass with a giant strap-on dildo! But no toss the ol' Roddy into dat ol' stickerdy patch where Evelyn no can go!'

It was all great sport for him. He'd grovel his way back into my good graces so he could disappoint me again. And, having disappointed me a second time, he'd worm his way into being given another chance so he could disappoint me a third time. And go on endlessly debasing himself.

All resistance to his ability to get over on you, he regarded as a challenge and he openly boasted that no one could hold out against him once he pulled out all the stops and started bawling like a baby who'd swallowed a tack.

But for my vow of upward mobility, who knows? I might have fallen under his spell and returned to my earlier ways. I mean who among us doesn't want to be free from the nagging constraints of conscience? And Rodney had a conscience so clear it was invisible.

Luckily, the vigor of my vision proved a sufficient apotropaic against the Charmboy's influence, who, in the end, would plunder enough cameras, silver, jewelry, and guns – mostly guns – to establish me as a slumlord by age 17.

Poughkeepsie – the younger son of our day-maid and the Eatonville hock-shop owner I mentioned earlier – fenced the merchandise I sent his way, the increased volume of which placed me in a still better position to haggle over price.

In fact the amount of fungible swag Rodney filched not only enhanced my bargaining power, it led in time to the purchase of three identical paint-needy shotgun houses in Eatonville. Four, if you count the one I burned for the insurance money so PooPoo could open a used-car lot on the property. The other three I rented at exorbitant rates to as many as five black families per unit, paying DoublePoo to manage them on a commission basis, collecting rents and handling all maintenance requests by evicting any tenant who insisted on some.

Not my finest hour, I admit, sugar. But while I don't quarrel with the position that poor black people suffer more than upper-middle class white people, I'm nevertheless going to ask you to keep my suffering in mind. That sense of growing injustice in my expanding bosom, roiling there and becoming even harder to bear after getting to know the Fond Owner...

Interestingly, Rodney would insist on attaching himself to me as my second-in-command, not out of any carnal interest in me, but rather for the power it gave him over my other boyfriends whose interest in me was predominantly carnal. Rodney's interest was predominantly in bennies. He used to accompany me to PooPoo's store; then dash off with his split to score truck-stop speed, further developing the habit he came home with after his stint at Marianna.

As for Sonny, while of no direct help in the robberies, he used to aid-and-abet by supplying me with his starts-and-stops list so I'd know who was on vacation in our upscale neighborhood. At first brush, the Paperboy might come across as a Boy Scout who delivered his papers rain or shine and never missed a day, but he had a touch of sedition in him. Not larceny or arsony (sic) and certainly not attempted murder – that bullet to Winny's head could not have been more unintentional. But Sonny wasn't _all_ good is what I'm saying.

### Sonny's Comments

Asked about his starts-and-stops list, Sonny shrugged and apologized, 'Where do I get off complaining about my stolen bike when she probably used the information I supplied to steal dozens?'

When I joked about Evelyn's speaking to her reflection in the mirror, Sonny shrugged again and said, 'If I looked like her, I'd probably spend most of my waking hours looking at myself in the mirror, wouldn't you?'

When I asked if he and Rodney were close, Sonny told me that his very first memory was of a Christmas morning when his cousin hit him over the head with a board. 'I was five and he was six,' said Sonny, 'and we were playing with our new toy trucks in the back yard. Rodney wanted me to watch him play with his truck, and his animated performance held my attention for a while, but eventually I turned away to play with my truck, and when I did, he took offense and picked up a plank we were using for a bridge over a narrow drainage ditch and walloped me over the head with it. "Precious memories!" he exclaimed in later years every time he told that story.'

When I asked about Evelyn's affection for Rodney, Sonny said, 'The first time she heard that story about him hitting me over the head with a board, her eyes glazed over nostalgically with precious memories her own.

'"A bullying badger one minute and a smarmy marmot the next," she sighed, remembering her own misspent youth, is the impression I got.

'The Rodney story I liked best,' Sonny went on as I poured him another drink, 'was about the time he miscalculated how much the little brother of a girl he'd defiled would stand for. He was describing in graphic detail how he'd screwed the boy's older sister every whichway, lingering over the highlights, physically and vocally acting out filling the girl's every orifice, doing her moans of pleasure and shrieks of pain, taking great delight in torturing her brother, when suddenly the boy roared like a lion and leaped on him, his arms flailing like a windmill in a hurricane. In a trice – the expression Rodney used – he had him face-down on the ground, covering his head with his hands, whereupon, his rage unabated, the brother proceeded to jump up and down on his spine, earning Rodney the monthly disability check that he was still cashing long after his back injury had healed. That was the triumphal point of the story from Rodney's perspective. Well, that and the three dollars he knew I'd be willing to lend him after telling me such a story.

On the subject of Evelyn's method of exploiting her parents, Sonny added, 'I remember she used to get her mother to pay her a monthly stipend to stay in school by finding ways to get herself expelled. For instance, in Civics class – apropos the ninth grade – we all had to write a mandatory American Legion essay on Communism versus Capitalism.

'Evelyn wrote: "Russia is a shitty place for most Russians after the Commie Rebellion, just as Russia was a shitty place for most Russians before the Commie Rebellion. I've never been to Russia myself or read any history about the country but I know that to be a fact.

"'Just as I know the same is true for the good old US of A. Shitty today and shitty before the Revolution, for most Americans.

"'I happen to be a U.S. citizen, born and raised, but my assessment would be no less accurate if I'd been born and raised in Outer Mongolia, which, by the way, is another shitty place to live for the majority of Outer Mongolians who spend their lives eating the shit of the powerful few who control their shit-eating lives. The end.

'"P.S." she concluded, "Anything more on the subject of Communism versus Capitalism is sheer shit-gobbling shinola, on either side of the argument."

'She got a two-day suspension for that blue exercise in geo-political analysis,' said Sonny, 'and her mother paid her not to do it again.'

The precise dollar amount she was paid, he did not know, but he said it was renegotiated whenever Evelyn got herself expelled which was at least twice a year as near as he could recall.

Asked about Evelyn's Flannery O'Connor lecture, Sonny said he couldn't remember it word for word, 'but her main point was that, despite writing her stories "for the ludicrous purpose of promoting the need for the Catholic Church in our lives," (Evelyn's words) Flannery, like all great novelists, revealed the suffering of people and emphasized the hysterically stupid lying cowardly ways people deal with their suffering most of the time, and that despite "minimizing the silliness of her own belief in the one true faith," (Evelyn's words again) we should not lightly dismiss the creator of the Misfit or the trenchant humor of the story's title: _A Good Man Is Hard to Find._ '

When asked about Evelyn's Eatonville properties, Sonny said, 'There was a row of dilapidated company houses fronting the creosote plant on Main Street. For generations the plant and the company houses were owned by the Chimes family until they sold their interest in the shacks for PR reasons. Over the years Evelyn picked up four of them. Called "niggertown" by the rowdier Winter Park kids who thought it daring and clever to drive down Main Street flying Confederate flags out their car windows, the black township of Eatonville was generally avoided by the media (also owned by the Chimes family), but a TV crew was there in force the night the property that Poughkeepsie torched made the ten o'clock news. A dozen, hapless, newly homeless people – not counting the three or four babies who were too young to talk – were interviewed while standing by the fire trucks in front of their flame-engulfed shack, sadly watching their few possessions go up in smoke.'

### Round 6

Hold on, boys, while I give my Tuscaloosa developer a call-back.

'Suze! What's shakin', girl? ...So now's the time to buy! Offer half the asking-price on the house that sits behind Alabama Power. Go as high as 70% if he'll accidentally burn it down so we can get around the Historical Society and really do something with the lot. Pay full price if he'll burn down the one next door as well. I'm pretty sure I can get the insurance company and the lawyers in back to go in with me on a high-rise. ...Baby, we don't really care when Saban's contract is up, do we? "Oh, so soon!" you lament when buying. "Oh, so far down the road!" you celebrate when selling. You know how these things are done, hon. Follow your instincts. And get cracking!'

The poor dear. I was so sure she'd do better than Mark, my other Tuscaloosa developer who's doing some blockbusting for me. Saban loses the national championship on Saturday and today some kid makes headlines holding hostages at the Savings and Loan down the street from the stadium. Property values fall ten percent within a fifty mile radius, and they both panic. Mark's acting like he put his on underwear inside-out and can't get his pud out to pee. And Suze, who looks like Rachael Welch in her prime, doesn't see this is the perfect time to offer Nick a free blowjob for quadrupling property values over the past nine years, because he needs the comfort. Oh, well, she's young...

Back to the matter at hand.

What with Rodney robbing houses for me, and PooPoo helping to soak my poor Eatonville tenants, in addition to the money I was taking off my boyfriends by fucking them all kinds of ways (to borrow the felicitous phrase from the Kingsmen's controversial version of _Louie, Louie_ ), plus the hush money my parents were paying me, you might think that my battle to rise above my lowly sub-owner origins was going gangbusters. That the tunnel I was digging toward the prison fence-line gave every appearance of progressing at a cracking pace. But below the surface, things weren't looking so bright.

Well, they wouldn't, would they? Things are naturally going to be a little darker underground unless you dig too near a volcano or something. What I mean is: my quest for ownership status in my various hats as slum landlord, pornographic filmmaker, thief, shapely vamp, parental blackmailer, shrewd investor and all-around moneygrubber remained an uphill social-climb.

I used to formally assess my holdings quarterly – informally almost every night – and for all my hard work and hustle, as I closed in on the advanced age of 18, my net worth wasn't looking all that rosy. Dismal may be the mot juste. At most, my marketable assets totaled a measly two hundred K. At which rate of growth, my projected goal of becoming a major financial player on the world stage would be achieved somewhere around age 50. A depressing prospect, which kept a perpetual frown on the face of this unhappy camper.

Things ultimately worked out for me. Thanks to a combination of luck and determination, I was a multimillionaire before I was 20 and a multibillionaire before I was 30, which, looking back, gives me little reason to complain. But I document my adolescent gloom by way of explaining why all through those lean teen years the idea of kidnapping Winny was never far from my mind.

I began toying with the idea not long after we met. Not seriously, but the big-dollar figure he would fetch – one guaranteed to put me on Easy Street – did enter my head as early as that, to remain there and fester for the next half-decade.

Part of my motivation initially was my misperception that Winny was deliberately snubbing me as his equal-in-the-making, but even after I realized he was helplessly stupid, the mollifying effect of that on my animosity didn't undo the knowledge that he represented a substantial cash payout on a whopping scale if only I could devise a foolproof plan for kidnapping the hysterical halfwit.

A million dollars was the nice round figure I had in mind. That untapped lump sum and the freedom it would buy would disturb my slumbers and haunt my waking hours all through my hated slave-youth, those terrible sub-owner captive years. It stood for the kind of revenge on my humiliations that made my mouth water. Imagine a gaunt wolf who hasn't had a square meal in weeks licking his lips at the sight of fat carefree bunny rabbit: that's exactly how I viewed Winny. 'A million dollars...' I rolled the words around my tongue as if savoring a big hunk of pink divinity.

Of course the second I broached the project with Sonny, he bridled in horror. And when I kept on broaching the subject with him he kept on bridling in horror.

But you know me, sugar: the more bridling my unwilling accomplice did, the more I insisted on sharing every last detail of my plans with him.

'Paperboy,' I played on his conscience, 'this is obviously a two-man job. Anyone can see that. Without your assistance, I might as well lure the Fond Owner out to a secluded spot for a picnic and a poke, and then shoot him in the head while he's chewing on a breast or thigh or reciting from the Bhagavad-Gita over a mandala created from the olives and potato salad.

'Killing him right off the bat is only viable business-model left open to me if I have to do this thing alone. Which means that by declining to help me, you're as much as saying, "Evelyn, go ahead and _kill_ my good friend Winsome!"'

Sonny shuddered but still remained dead-set against it.

'Have you no scruples?' I keened on the Fond Owner's behalf. 'After all the hours I've devoted to fleshing out how to do this and _not_ kill the nincompoop and getting nowhere thanks to your squeamishness, are you really going to sit there and _insist_ that I do what prudence demands and croak the unwitting dullard?'

Sonny wouldn't budge.

'Look,' I clarified my position with inarguable logic, 'the risk factor is exponentially greater if I allow the richboy to live. The odds of being identified are minimized by getting rid of him. So either you pitch in or _you've killed your best buddy_! That's what it amounts to. It's on you, _killer_!'

Sonny offered every argument he could think of to talk me out of it.

'It's a capital offense!' he made his case. 'If you kill him, you'll get the chair!'

'Only if I'm caught,' I smiled at his effort to deter me on practical rather than moral grounds. 'And the chances of being caught, as I keep trying to impress on you, peabrain, are far greater if I allow him to live. Use your head!'

Twice a week at least, I'd make a point of cornering the Paperboy to revise and amplify my plans and coerce his participation. But as quick as I had everything worked out to tee, he'd jump in and start pointing out the flaws. That was Sonny's forte: putting his finger on the multitude of ways there were of getting caught.

One thing we could agree on was that the money-pickup posed the biggest threat of capture.

'After giving the knotty problem considerable thought,' I spoke in signs to the stubborn hold-out who had his hands clapped over his ears but kept his eyes open, unable to stop gawping at my impression of a naked navy signalman in a swabbie's hat performing an animated series of manual semaphore gestures as I spelled out the following message: 'I now have our movements regarding the ransom-collection choreographed down to an exact science, Sunshine. After warning Winny's parents not to involve the cops, we will assume the cops are running the show on their end. That's why you will call from a pay phone and instruct Winny Senior to put a gardenia behind his right ear for purposes of identification and go to Penny Loafers Sans Sox on the College Strip and wait for our call telling him where to go next.

'We'll then proceed,' I continued signaling, 'to run the old fart ragged all up and down the bars along the Strip and also a few blue-collar taverns on the fringes of town and maybe one or two hillbilly bars far out into the country for the better part of a day before finally sending him to Mackie's Marina to rent a pram and putter out to the east leg of Dog Island on Lake Maitland. There, he'll open a can of dog food and bark three times and look for the mutt with the note pinned to his collar for further instructions.'

I presented Sonny with a note at the next meeting of our one-sided cabal along with my bill for the semaphore performance. The bill was a neatly typed statement, and the note was written on the back of a piece of junk mail taken from the garbage of a classmate I didn't like. Composed in purple crayon in my off-hand it looked like the work of a preschooler. It read: "Motor to the canal between Lake Minnehaha and Lake Yoknapatawpha and toss the money out on the north side of the overpass and keep going. Chances are, you'll see a man fishing there. He's the one who's going to shoot your son in the head if you try any funny stuff."

Sonny read it and turned white with fear.

'But the cops will be watching him!' he gasped. 'When they see him rent a boat, they'll station a cop at every canal overpass! That's what I'd do! That's what _you'd_ do!'

'Ever the voice of negativity,' I grumbled. 'Born to obstruct and hamper. Cops,' I yawned, 'are dull as ditchwater.'

'Maybe so,' Sonny said breathing hard, 'but the Chimes family is the richest family in the state! The locals may not have the manpower to watch all the canals, but the FBI will be in on it, and no matter how stupid you think cops are, it only takes one who isn't and you're sunk!'

Thus went our little back-and-forth over the years, with Sonny's opposition increasing in intensity as my plots thickened. He nitpicked every aspect of them, including my proposal to bind, blindfold and gag Winny with duct tape. The Paperboy worried his friend might suffer from the same sinus trouble he suffered from, making breathing difficult through his nose and suffocation possible if his mouth were taped shut.

'We'll cross that bridge when he passes out,' I shrugged.

When Sonny claimed he couldn't remember the instructions he was supposed to give to Winny Senior, I scripted them. And when he said they'd recognize his voice, I dismissed that quibble with a flick of the wrist. Hadn't he heard my masterful impersonations of Billy Graham and Martin Luther King, Jr., when phone-soliciting contributions for the Baptist Ecumenical Missionary Foundation and the United Negro College Fund, using Rodney's home as my mailing address? I could teach him to sound like James Cagney in a few short minutes.

Over time, the thing turned into a gag, more or less. Half a gag anyway. I mean I hardly needed Sonny to tell me what a dangerous enterprise kidnapping was. If I hadn't deemed the risk unacceptably high, I wouldn't have balked at going through with it. Still, it's not out of the question that I might have done something foolhardy and been caught and severely punished if not for Sonny's discouragement. So it's possible I owe Sonny a debt of gratitude.

'Even if you don't kill him, the penalty for kidnapping is stiff!' he warned.

'Pah,' I scoffed, 'I'm just a minor.'

'You're a teenager! Kids in their teens are tried as adults every day! Read the newspaper! You might have got away with it a few years ago! But not anymore! They'll throw the book at you!'

Sonny spotted the danger at every turn. 'What if somebody sees you pinning that note to the dog's collar on Dog Island? You think people aren't going to notice a wonder of nature like you?'

Well, who could dispute that? So the next day I added wearing a muumuu and a pair of Groucho Marx novelty glasses with thick eyebrows and a big nose to the plan.

'But your scintillating beauty is bound to show through!'

Another good point. So I adjusted the plan again: 'We'll have Winny Senior board the last tour boat doing the interlake excursion in the crepuscular hours, after first transferring the money to a duffle bag buoyed by a flotation device which we'll send him to Rocko's Sporting Goods to buy.

'But what if the cops put an electronic locator in the bag?' interjected the font of doom.

And so on.

Exhausting as the proposed kidnapping was for us both at first, my evolving plots eventually became exhausting only for Sonny as I concentrated more and more on worrying the stew out of him and less and less on actually snatching Winny.

Even so, the thought of that million bucks was a hard thing to let go of. I mean there were nights I'd talk it over with my cat Little Bitchergirl One and call myself a coward for not going through with it, and judging by the disgusted look on her face, L.B. One agreed.

Envisioning the speed with which I knew I could parlay that million into two, then four, then eight made my head spin... I'd start by having my hedge-fund manager sell stock in the most popular national fast-food chain at sky-high quotes; then make a few of my boys literally eat shit and swear they got e-coli poisoning from eating at a number of different franchises; then wait on the price to nosedive and buy low. Letting it ride, I'd plow those gains into citrus commodities just before the picking season after a balmy winter, buying low; then send my boys out at night to decimate every grove in Central Florida with a fast-acting poison and clean up when the price soared into the stratosphere.

The thought of forsaking such a fortune fueled my need to scare Sonny half to death by way of compensation.

'Listen carefully, Paperboy,' I talked tough. 'Affecting a Maurice Chevalier accent, you'll instruct Winny Senior to dress in Speedo swim trunks for purposes of identification and shave his big hairy belly and have it tattooed with a likeness of Daffy Duck before showing up at the Lovable Irish Lunk and Brawler, where the barmaid will tell him to go the bathroom and don a Ralph Kramden space suit he'll find wadded up in the urinal trough and then proceed to the Blue Moon at town's end where the bartender will hand him a Balinese Legong dancer's fancy headdress. Exchanging that for the colander he's been wearing as a space helmet, he'll proceed to the Hillbilly Goat Pen 20 miles up Highway 43 and wait for the approach of a B-girl calling herself Snuggly. She will address him as Wuggly and give him further instructions...'

Of the hundreds of convoluted plans I put together, some were plain goofy; most were fatally flawed, but a couple actually came so close to perfection that the only problem Sonny could detect in them was how brilliantly conceived they were. His objection being that, if executed, the detectives were bound to figure out that Winny knew only one person ingenious enough to think up anything so clever: namely, your humble deposer, little old me. 'Who else would use words like crepuscule or gloaming or even twilight to say dusk?' Sonny asked.

Thus the worrywart sank even the best of my schemes.

I would exact my revenge by describing in gory detail how grisly things would get unless he agreed to help. 'Well, I guess I'll be bringing a pair of loppers to the scene of the picnic to preserve a few of Winny's phalanges, an ear or two possibly, or his pug nose along with his little you-know-what in an ice-chest in case his folks want proof he's still alive, before disposing of the bulk of him in the Kissimmee River.'

'Get Rodney to help!' Sonny pleaded with bulging eyes. 'Or Poughkeepsie!'

'But I trust only you, baby,' I said, batting my eye-lashes and putting a finger in my mouth and sucking on it.

Amid this ongoing jollity, I applied the ultimate pressure by telling Sonny about my scorched-earth policy should all else fail in my campaign to achieve owner-status.

'Follow me,' I commanded my minion,' and he fell in behind me as I led the way to the royal sleeping chambers.

Entering, we approached my canopy bed, the focal point of the room, at the foot of which Sonny was ordinarily required to wait until I was naked and arranged in the lotus position atop the scented sheets before he genuflected and salaamed with his hands; then dropped to his knees and repeated the process before falling on his face and kowtowing thrice, in that order. But today we approached the shrine hand-in-hand.

Draped in yards of dimity from above, the bed was rigged-out to look like an oversized sedan chair or palanquin with four oar handles sticking out from under the mattress, two at either end, making it resemble something on which the Empress What's-her-face – Caligula's sister – would have been transported through the streets of Rome on the shoulders of no less than eight buff and oiled Nubian geldings whose large envy-stirring peckers, stuffed and preserved in all their natural glory would be hanging like pennons from the post-tops.

Slipping a hand under the mattress I brought out a dishtowel and unfolded it to reveal a rusty pistol...

'This,' I announced in my best doom-and-destruction voice as if speaking from a miked podium to an amphitheater packed with Kool-Aid-drinking worshippers, 'shall be the instrument of my retribution should all else fail.

'You and I,' I enunciated like some spooky priestess at Delphi, 'both have a deep and thoroughly condign grudge against society. But where you do nothing about it, I have dedicated my life to redressing the outrage. Where you,' I dripped disdain, 'cravenly refuse to join me in my fight to rise above our lowly caste, I valiantly seek to become one of the owners of Plantation Earth.'

We'd gone over all that stuff a thousand times before, but now I meant to show him I was capable of doing something a whole lot worse than getting rich.

'Know this, Paperboy,' I got to the crux. 'Should the day come when I feel I have no option but to ignominiously surrender as you have done to the same foul destiny both our slave-families suffer, that is the day that I shall use _this_ to go on a murderous rampage the like of which the world has never seen...

And so speaking I worked the action of the 45 and looked Sonny square in the eyes.

'Mind you,' I went on as Sonny swallowed what I assume was a mouthful of vomit, 'I pray it never comes to that. But, having expended my last once of strength contesting my foul social station, should I lose hope entirely and find myself on the point of renouncing my struggle, believe me, lollypop, if you believe nothing else, before going under and accommodating the stinking slave-life that our despicable parents glorify and defend, I shall embark on a record-setting killing spree to beat all killing sprees!'

And so saying, I held aloft my father's rusty forty-five, which my mother had buried under the hyacinths in France a few years ago to protect my brother Frank, and I fired off a round into the ceiling.

'I shall begin by shooting my parents,' I finished laying out my plans as soon our ears stopped ringing. 'Two apiece to the back of the head while they're watching _I Dream of Jeannie_ is how I envision it.

'Then I'll unlock my father's gun cabinet and avail myself of its arsenal to make a lasting statement on the subject of slave-shame and slave-rage that will ring down through the pages of history!'

By now Sonny was, in addition to shaking visibly, staring at me unblinkingly, his face a frozen grimace of fear, which inspired me to keep going.

'I intend to target executives,' I said stroking the side of his face with the warm barrel of the gun. 'Damn these random shootings from clock towers. That's sheer intellectual laziness. It is the white-collar master-pleasing executives I mean to drop like flies.

'A cold methodical process,' I continued touching Sonny's temple tenderly with the gun. 'Because I'll have no wish to humiliate proud slaves by then – not after I've given up on owning them. Their souls will have been humiliated enough by then is how I'll see it. I'll just be putting them out of their misery. Doing them a favor by preventing them from further shaming themselves in the service of their masters.

'Yes, a selective process,' I sighed dreamily. 'Call it head-hunting, to give it a name. My small effort to break the generational cycle of abuse on which our society depends.'

'I foresee,' I told my skittish cohort, 'taking out at least a hundred upper-echelon administrators before finally being brought down under a hail of police gunfire and expiring in a pool of my own blood.' Choking back an honest sob – because I meant every word – I gave bathos to the picture of my heroic demise by adding, 'As I exhale my last red-tinged bubble of breath, I'll dip my finger into my blood and scrawl across these slave-made bricks that the Winter Park streets are paved with the foulest expletive in my vocabulary: "PROUD SLAVES!"

'I shan't,' I concluded my drama in the theatrical patois I fall into at such times, 'embark on that shooting spree to end all shooting sprees until I have exerted myself to the fullest to triumph productively over the terrible burden that a heartless God saw fit to saddle me with.

'But,' I heaved a persecuted sigh, 'should there come a time when I see that I can never enjoy the relatively unhumiliated life Winny enjoys – when I realize that his good fortune is forever beyond my reach – then all I can say is heaven help the shit-eating models of respectable servitude who call themselves my family and neighbors!'

I'd just finished posing that tragic or-else when who should drop by without an appointment but Mumsy to inquire about the gunshot.

'It was a firecracker,' I told her, 'Sonny misguidedly set off as a joke.'

She went on to ask about some jewelry that had gone missing some time ago but whose absence she only just now noticed, and I let her see the gun before I refolded the dishtowel back over it and sang to the jaunty melody of "On the Bayou,"

' _Good-by, Mo'!_

You gotta go!

_Flee-o flee-o!..._ '

Taking that for her answer, she left.

Sonny departed soon after, his face no longer paralyzed with fear, but twitching uncontrollably under one eye with some not unrelated emotion.

Still he refused to help me kidnap Winny. Nor would he recede from his position that getting rich only perpetuates the problem.

I followed him out and attempted to salvage something from my otherwise wasted eloquence by offering to put his parents on the "no-kill" list for the low-low price of 19.95, or some property of equivalent value. Say, his typewriter, I suggested.

But the Paperboy, who harbored secret literary aspirations, would never part with his precious Corona.

He did his best in the days to come to dismiss my threat as the playful banter of proud father's spoiled spitfire of a daughter. But he was clearly at pains to keep his distance, lest a sneaking suspicion that I might be certifiable and a real menace to society prove correct.

Yet no matter how nimbly he ducked around corners or headed for the Boy's Room or otherwise sought cover the instant he caught sight of me, he found avoiding me wasn't so easy. Despite taking every precaution he could think of to never be in the same place at the same time with me, sooner or later, when he least expected it, he'd hear the sound of my clarion voice booming out at him from down the hall or across a crowded lunchroom, stopping him in his tracks.

'HEY, SAMBO!!! WINNY SAYS HE CAN'T WAIT FOR YOU TO FOLLOW IN YOUR FATHER'S FOOTSTEPS AND GO TO WORK IN A BANK OWNED BY THE CHIMES FAMILY CONGLOMERATE! SO HE CAN CALL YOU SAMBO! YOU DO KNOW WHO SAMBO WAS, DON'T YOU, SAMBO? SAMBO WAS SIMON LEGREE'S OBSEQUIOUS BLACK OVERSEER, THE SELF-HATING SLAVE WHO EAGERLY PLEASED HIS MASTER, WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING BY FORECLOSING ON THE MORTGAGES OF POOR PEOPLE AND REPO-ING THEIR CARS AFTER FIRST GETTING THEM INTO MORE DEBT THAN THEY CAN HANDLE AND OTHERWISE METAPHORICALLY STICKING YOUR NOSE UP TO THE HILT IN WINNY'S SKINNY WHITE ASS!!!'

Or poor Sonny might wake up in cold sweat in the dead of night to the falsetto sound of my voice serenading him from under his bedroom window, belting out the shrill refrain from "The Lion Sleeps Tonight."

' _Kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiill_

Kill kill kill

_Kill kill ki-kill..._ '

I really wasn't much of a music-lover in my slave-youth. I mean I'm as vulnerable as the next person to the seductive power of music, but I fought against it. I suppose I didn't want what Nietzsche called the savage beast in us soothed. Nevertheless I delighted in crooning the popular melodies of the day to my own distinct and individual lyrics, reflective of my deepest feelings at the time.

Call me irresponsible.

Call me unreliable.

Call me pathological toooooooo.

I'm ir-re-sist-i-bly moooved

To slaaay yoooooooooooou...

### Sonny's Comments

Asked if he questioned Evelyn's sanity, Sonny said, 'She wouldn't allow it. In assigning numbers to the various tricks she said slaves came up with to justify their subservience and ease their shame, she usually just picked numbers out of thin air. But calling her crazy was always Trick #1. She was consistent about that.'

Asked if Evelyn ever followed through on her fast-food-poisoning scam, Sonny said he didn't know about that, but she openly took credit for the fat-handled-toothbrush swindle, which she boasted earned her more money in a single year than a century of slaveholding earned the Chimes family dynasty.

I looked puzzled, and he elucidated: 'You remember a few years ago when the handles of our replacement toothbrushes were suddenly too big to fit in the holes of our toothbrush holders? Evelyn was responsible for that. She bought up enough shares in all the toothbrush companies to get the slim-handled toothbrushes taken off the market, and made a fortune producing and marketing the different holders. Of course, not to miss a trick, she also made a few million selling the slim-handled toothbrushes under the counter or on the bottom shelf – you had to look hard to find them.'

When asked about the indelicate Sambo reference, Sonny sighed wanly and said, 'She called me Sambo. He called me Tonto, Jiminy Cricket, Dudley Do-Right, Goody Two-Shoes, Don Quixote. When we were older, after seeing the movie _Moonstruck_ , she called me Mister Monument to Virtue for a time.

'I won't tell you the Indian name she gave me, but she had nicknames for everyone. Horace, the aggressively servile black houseboy in Dorothy Parker's story "Mrs. Hofstadter on Josephine Street" was one of her nicknames for Rodney.'

About her plans to kidnap Winny, Sonny said:

'I'm not sure they ever completely morphed into a merry way of worrying me like she says. It always looked to me like she meant business. But some of them did get pretty silly.

'In one, she had Winsome Senior pick up a cooler full of smelly chum from Dog Island and dump it on the dock of a girl she didn't like.'

When asked about Evelyn's singing, Sonny said, 'She could more than carry a tune. You've heard her. My dad, who knew something about singing, stood wide-eyed in amazement one night listening to her sing the single word "kill" to the melody of "Love Me Tender." He said she had the voice not of an angel but of a Siren looking to capitalize on the ships that pass too close and break up on her shores, and he warned me to "stay clear of that one."'

### Round 7

_The Shamisen_ was the feature playing the day the vice squad crashed in on us.

Of the dozens of home movies I used to show on Saturday afternoons while Dodo was out golfing and DeeDee was at her hairdresser's, _The Shamisen_ was the most lucrative of my oeuvre by far. It was standing-room-only for the third Saturday in a row as twenty or so of the neighborhood boys snacked on my exorbitantly priced popcorn and stared goggle-eyed at my naked image on screen while I narrated from the back of the garage in a disembodied voice: 'The shamisen is a three-string Japanese musical instrument similar to the Russian balalaika which you may remember from the movie _Doctor Zhivago_ , but with a square rather than a triangular body...'

At two dollars a pop, quality ticket-holders got to occupy one of the 16 folding metal chairs Mother used for her bridge parties; cheaper tickets being strictly SRO.

For all the gripping data on the shamisen I was more or less parroting straight from the Encyclopedia Americana, if I'd thrown a pop-quiz afterwards, it's doubtful anyone would have made a passing grade, as the attention of the boys was focused not on my patter but on my glistening on-screen hams. What the movie lacked in the way of plot, storyline, character development, dialogue, message and cinematic virtuosity, it more than made up for in ass.

It was just me up there straddling the neck of the Japanese banjo, travelling up and down with my vulva pressed up against the frets, while Freddy, his lips locked to the aforementioned glistening hams and losing them occasionally on the lowest and the highest notes but finding them again on the ones in between, picked out a tune with, in lieu of a plectrum, one of those prank toys called a Joy Buzzer, purchased from an ad in the back pages of a comic book. With a modicum of practice, we were able to produce an unrecognizable, yet I think still memorable, tremolo version of the melody to "Portrait of My Love."

The movie ran for about ten minutes and we were somewhere in the middle when, with nary a word of warning or identification, the guardians of the peace, the armed protectors of law and order, the snarling guard dogs to the owner class, the cops in other words, battered down the back door to the garage and swarmed in on us, seven strong, whooping and hollering contradictory commands at the assembled hardened criminals, not one of whom was old enough to shave.

The salacious wolf-whistles which had been filling the air right before the disruption suddenly turned to squeals of panic as the boys rocketed from their chairs like a bevy of quail flushed from cover by a pack of baying beagles. Flapping wildly in every direction, they went careening into chairs and walls and each other, as half the cops ran them one way ordering them to get down on the floor, and half the cops ran them the opposite way ordering them to get up against the wall.

More than one boy peed his pants; one sprained his wrist trying to dive out a shuttered window; and one – the only serious injury – suffered a broken nose when, according to the statement of the police officer not responsible, the boy unwisely used his face to attack the officer's fist which he was holding up to defend himself against the mob of "little mama's darlings running around squealing like a buncha girly-girls."

The one actual girl present lit a Kool and studied the unfolding melee with a calm and assessing eye.

The first thing I noticed was that the cops didn't get many chances to push bad guys around in high Hollywood fashion the way they thought they would when they first joined the force, and they were taking full advantage of a rare opportunity now. Their boyishly brutal grins as they chased the pint-sized outlaws every whichway told me that. Also the sullen aftermath when their spirits flagged and their pusses, after they had everyone subdued, turned sour at the realization that their fun was at an end.

They took down our names and loaded us into two vans and drove us to the precinct where the desk sergeant got his jollies by calling our parents to convey the mortifying news that their children were in custody, charged with moral degeneracy, due, his chilly monotone suggested, to the pervasive climate of permissivism that prevails among America's youth today, thanks to their lax mothers and fathers who spoil them rotten.

Under questioning, I gave my name as Daisy Buchanan, the hit-and-run villainess in _The Great Gatsby_ , but the police already knew my real name, leading me to speculate that one of my older boyfriends who wanted me for his exclusive "piece of tail" or "split-tail" had snitched me out. Either that or Rodney, who had no interest in sex with me, was just being his usual treacherous self.

In either case, the upshot was a tedious session of juvenile court where the judge, with a show of moral repugnance that helped him deal with his own "unnatural lust" by scapegoating us for all the jerking-off he did as a kid, sentenced us to ten hours of professional counseling.

We were divided into two groups of ten to be seen on Tuesdays or Thursdays by our court-appointed therapist – a Dr. Wade by name – a large man with a large head and an insufferably paternal manner who would, after three sessions with me, lose his will to live and take a header off the roof of his office building, it pains me to say.

As the ringleader, I was assigned to Group 1 and given the hot-seat-of-honor directly to the right of the Good Doctor, where I was the primary target of his therapeutic attention.

The night before our first session, I remember I was relaxing to the strains of Bobby Darin's "Mack the Knife," one of the few popular songs whose message had some merit in my opinion. That's when the idea came to me that I should live up to my recently acquired cachet as a thug with a criminal record and take on the persona of a street-wise Damon Runyon character.

And so, moved by Bobby's paean to sweet Mackie, I swaggered into Dr. Wade's office the next day pretending to be Sheldon Leonard, my favorite movie tough guy. You remember Nick the bartender in _It's a Wonderful Life?_ Nick's the one who told George and Clarence, "Look, we soive hard drinks in here for guys who wanna get drunk fast, and we don't need any pixies hangin' around tryin' to give the place atmosphere! Is that clear or do I need to slip you my fist for a convincer?"

I impersonated Nick.

Slouching in my chair, I disdained to so much as look up when the Good Doctor reached over to shake my hand. Instead, immersing myself in my role, I lifted one corner of my lip and one butt cheek and growled and farted simultaneously.

'I understand you're a well-read, highly articulate 17-year-old,' said the Good Doctor in an amused and indulgent tone, as one humoring a child too young to pose a threat.

'Boys,' I addressed my fellow patients, 'if you would be so kind as to direct your attention to the person seated in the chair to my left, you will observe there a species of analyst commonly known as a child psychiatrist. Now all analysts, as you may or may not know, are predators who feed upon the unhappy spirits of the weak and vulnerable, but child psychiatrists are the worst of the worst. They feed exclusively on the rebellious spirits of children. And the one in our midst, if you will permit me the liberty of subjecting his opening remark to my own personal analysis, is attempting to feel me out to see if I am ripe for the picking.'

The Good Doctor said, 'Huh?'

'Because all therapists,' I went on addressing my crew as Sheldon Leonard, 'are kin to the buzzard or the African hyena. They circle their prey and sniff at it to be sure it is dead or very close to dead before they begin to feed. For any sign of vitality in their prospective meal is apt to spook these carrion-eaters in human shape.'

I did not look at Dr. Wade even once when delivering my opening statement, and when I was done, I sat there looking relaxed and serenely brutal.

'I don't quite follow what you mean by all that,' the Good Doctor said genially. 'But we'll let it go.'

'Au contraire,' I again addressed my fellow patients, and only them. 'Boys, you want to watch this joker. Do not for one second be lulled into trusting this humble sweetie-pie or anything he has to say. He is a stealer of souls. And _we_ will not be letting go of anything go which I do not agree to let go of. I think a number of youz present can attest that I do not tenderize so easy. Feel free, boys, to so attest if you so desire.'

A few of them nodded and made noises of assent.

'Okay then, Missy,' said the Good Doctor, 'why don't you spell it out for me. In plain English, just _exactly_ how have you been offended? And try to avoid any animal references, please.'

I twinkled at the name-calling before saying:

'Boys, flattery may be harmless or sinister or anything in between. But with the child psychiatrist it is always sinister. Remember that. Whatever his stated motive may be, the child psychiatrist is always subliminally intent on breaking our spirits. It's what justifies his life. Only by making us as acquiescent as he is to an unfair social arrangement can he keep the cowardly truth about himself at bay, and this he must do at all costs, because the truth would kill him.

'Huh?' said the Good Doctor.

'Think of them,' I lectured on, 'as belled Judas goats walking kids up the ramp into the slaughter house. They go to school to learn how best to do it, and it's what they get paid to do. Whether it's called head-shrinking or ego-down-sizing or mental-therapy or putting-you-in-your-place or flat-out-brain-washing, these clowns live to excuse their own doomed spirits by killing the high spirits in children.'

The Good Doctor said, 'Huh?'

'That, in a nutshell,' I told the boys, 'is what I find so objectionable in the remark addressed to me in this room not so very long ago. It may have appeared to be a good-faith effort to open an honest dialogue, but it was in reality a humble-seeming attempt to dominate my spirit by suggesting that I may be fairly wise for a teenager but nowhere near as wise as a professional man who is well-stricken in years and thoroughly versed in the social sciences.'

'And are you?' asked the Good Doctor.

'Wiser,' I instructed the boys, 'if the slithering snake in our midst is foolish enough to think that a necessary connection exists between age and wisdom,' I twinkled.

'Well, that's plainly put,' said Dr. Wade.

'One thing which our large friend here will discover about me,' I told the boys, 'if he is paying the proper attention, is that I do not aim to confuse.'

The Good Doctor got homey all of a sudden. 'You know, it's a funny thing about wisdom, but in my forty-six years on this earth, I've noticed that it isn't always quite so simple and straightforward as it seems...'

'And yet,' I said with equal hominess, addressing my boys, 'there's a not so funny thing about wisdom – and it hasn't taken me nearly so long to figure it out – and that is that sometimes we overcomplicate it and turn it into something that is stupid, dishonest, and cowardly in order to ease our shame over a lifetime of obedience to the powerful people who control our lives.'

'So is it your intention, Miss Smarty-pants,' Dr. Wade harrumphed, showing real signs of impatience, 'to simply contradict everything I say without giving it a fair hearing? Because in my profession, we call that a reactive tendency!'

'Allow me to state categorically,' I reassured my boys, 'that any person who limits him-or-herself to saying only things that are intellectually honest, Dame Evelyn will not disagree with that person. This you may take to the bank.'

The boys, who were already tittering, now openly guffawed. And the Good Doctor, who I could sense was raising his eyebrows and waggling his big head to indicate astonishment at just how crazy I was (although I didn't know this for a fact because I hadn't deigned to look at him yet) was prompted by their open guffaw to incline his head in my direction to such an extent that his face was directly in my line of vision. He held it there, browbeating me with a look of such aching solicitude that to look away would have been taken as a sign of weakness. So I looked at him now.

And when I say I looked _at_ him, I actually looked through him, as if gazing in a blasé sort of way at the wall three feet behind his head. You might liken the Good Doctor to a butterfly pinned to a cork board and me to a student bored out of her skull by the whole subject of Lepidoptera.

It was a face-off. And ten seconds into it, the Good Doctor blinked first.

'Well, at least I got you to look at me,' he leaned back and tried to put his defeat in a positive light.

'Boys,' I said to my boys, 'there are looks that control freaks practice in the mirror. And unless I am very much mistaken, we have just witnessed one of somebody's most-rehearsed. I speak from some experience on this subject.'

'Okay, tough girl,' Dr. Wade huffed, 'let's have it. What's this great intellectual monopoly you think you have on the truth that makes you ten times smarter than everyone else in the room put together! Let's hear it! I'm game, Princess! Anchors away!'

I took a moment to smile my mildest archaic smile and savor my victory before answering.

'Boys,' I said, 'in addressing the question which has been posed here with what some might consider a reckless and ill-bred dearth of tact, let me begin with my take on what it is that leads a mental therapist to commit himself to life of treating people he conveniently labels as suffering from "diseases of the mind" in the first place.'

'Oh, this ought to me good...'

'This is good, boys. And if a certain loudmouth who is opening his trap right now when he should be opening his mind would only shut said trap and listen, this could turn out to be a transformative moment in the as-yet-unexamined life of said loudmouth, whose existence, extrapolating from the famous maxims of the philosophers Aristotle and Descartes, is currently a void and/or not worth living.

'A thousand pardons, Your Highness! Please proceed!'

'As I was saying, boys, before the peanut gallery insisted on getting its two cents in: a therapist becomes a therapist to ease his shame and rage over all the humiliations he has swallowed.'

'Bunk!' snapped Dr. Wade.

'A boy grows up,' I proceeded with the lesson, 'compelled by vanity to stifle the clear and incandescent truth he knows in his soul that he is cravenly giving in to the pressure applied by those around him to submit to the status quo. At first he tries to defy the authority figures in his life, beginning with mommy and daddy. But he soon learns the painful consequences of disobedience. And fearing those consequences he gets in the habit of doing what he's told. He learns to keep to the straight and narrow. But all the while his soul knows that he is selling out. His soul hates him for his servitude. His soul calls him a coward.'

'Balderdash!' snorted Dr. Wade.

'The therapist becomes defensive,' I went on. 'Thinking badly of one's self is hard. People do not like thinking badly of themselves. So the therapist looks for justification. And one way of easing the shame he feels over his submission to the powerful people who control his life is to embrace those people and glorify a lifetime of subservience to the people he doesn't dare to defy. And that is what the therapist does.'

'Boy, howdy!' the Good Doctor broke out in laughter as hearty as it was false. 'That was some mouthful! What book did you get that out of, I wonder?'

'The books,' I told the boys, 'from which I derive the seeds of my understanding are the classics of literature, which – and I feel some certainty in saying this – tend not to be the happy-in-servitude books that some people in my proximate vicinity – and only a nice sense of what is fitting prevents me from naming names – get their ideas from.'

'Little girl,' the Good Doctor bristled, 'at your age I really wonder if you have the faintest idea what you're talking about. I think you're just repeating things you read in some politically far-left magazine somewhere!'

'Boys,' I told the boys, inwardly reveling by this time in the effect of my Sheldon Leonard impersonation, 'it is the considered opinion of this humble thinker that the Good Doctor does not wonder anything of the kind. It is the considered opinion of this humble thinker that what the Good Doctor really wonders is whether I have read the same books he has read but read them more honestly than he has read them. It is the considered opinion of this humble thinker that what the Good Doctor really wonders is whether I have observed the same things in life that he has observed only observed them more honestly than he has observed them. And it is the considered opinion of this humble thinker that what the Good Doctor really wonders is whether as a result of my greater honesty I have reached conclusions which are more valid than the conclusions that he has reached. I think that is the paradigm the Good Doctor finds worrisome.'

'Well, isn't that just dandy!' Dr. Wade hissed. 'It seems you have an answer for everything!'

'If,' I told the boys, 'some public-spirited person would kindly advise the crybaby in the room that it's no good playing the victim, and please ask him to desist, I would consider it a great personal favor.'

' _I'm_ not the one playing the victim here –'

'That's my brave little man...'

'Let me tell you a thing or two, _sweetheart_! You see these diplomas covering the walls of this office...'

And so we got acquainted in that first session, sparring for a full hour in that fashion, with me drawing out the fun of pretending to be the tough-talking Sheldon Leonard while the Good Doctor grew more and more exercised in his efforts not to understand himself.

Every now and then, when things threatened to get too tense, I took time out to share an amusing anecdote or two with my boys, often at my own expense. Like the story about the G.I. I met in the dentist's office as a kid. 'It was my Narcissistic Nines. And to ease the boredom of the wait, I told the otherwise handsome corporal seated across from me, "What dingy, crooked teeth you have."

"'Sad but true," he agreed, grinning.

"'I bet they smell bad too," I said to my interim plaything.

'He laughed and said, "Well, let's see yours, darlin'. I know you must be proud!"

'I flashed him my perfect set and he said with another laugh, "Yep, you got some nice choppers there all right! If you want to keep them that way, remember to brush twice daily and avoid marrying a husband with a good left hook and a solid right cross!"

'True story.'

The boys all laughed.

Nearing the end of the hour, I took a second look at Dr. Wade. He was delivering a protracted summation of my faults at the time. 'You have a lot going for you, Princess,' he began, 'but unless you learn to play the game a little better, all your beauty and brains are doomed to go to waste and you're never going to amount to anything in this life!'

He went on to name my many psychological defects in the jargon of his profession, and he might have gone on indefinitely if I hadn't interrupted him to tell the boys: 'Blah blah blah blah. Therapy-talk, boys. Pious motivational platitudes. "Arrested social development; Emotional acting out; Poor problem recognition; Insufficient life skills." Adlerians hawk obedience to authority as soulfully as actors hawk cigarettes and skin-care products on TV. They are worse than shameless. They are full of shame and making a living denying it.

'But what is going through my mind right now,' I went on to casually observe, 'is the vision of using a certain therapist who resembles Elmer Fudd for bayonet practice. And seeing that that is the case, perhaps a certain therapist who resembles Elmer Fudd should not be _too_ unhappy that my refusal to play his game is the worst thing he has suffered at my hands – to date.'

That not-so-veiled threat prompted the Good Doctor to plant his sizable head in my line of vision again, positioning it even closer this time than before.

'It would appear,' I apprised the boys, 'that a certain large-headed acquaintance of ours is daring me to commit violence upon his person for the satisfaction of making me feel cowardly for not taking him up on his challenge. Allow me to suggest,' I said, 'that it would be wise for said Big-head to desist forthwith from daring me to commit said violence before he exhausts my patience and runs the risk of finding his nearest eyeball plucked from the parent socket. Which, if I may be so bold, is just one humble girl's magnanimous recommendation.'

When the head did not recede, I was prompted to tell the boys, 'Boys, I am currently exercising all my considerable willpower to keep from pouring a gallon of gasoline over a certain buckethead's bucket of a head and setting fire to it.'

With that threat, instead of moving back, the head came an inch closer to mine. Which is when, quick as a frog's tongue, my left hand shot out. But instead of jamming a thumb and index finger into his nearest eye socket and extricating the circumscribed orb with a satisfying pop, I instead used my extended pinkie to tickle him under his chin and say, 'Coochie-coo!'

Dr. Wade recoiled twice, first at the threat of losing an eye and then at the outrage over my familiarity, which naturally set the boys on a roar again.

That was session one.

In session two, I was ambushed by a sea of hostile faces. They belonged to the mothers of all the boys caught up in the police raid. They were crowding the Good Doctor's office, waiting on me when I arrived fashionably late. They included Sonny's Mom whose nostrils widened visibly when I greeted her by her first name, which was Betsy. 'Bets! Geez, what a zoo! Here to feed the animals?'

Before she could scratch my eyes out, Dr. Wade said with a simpering smile of triumph: 'I was struck by an inspiration at the end our last meeting, Miss Evelyn. It occurred to me that facing the combined indignation of the mothers of the young boys you exploited might serve a useful purpose.'

And it did. I felt my combative juices go straight into overdrive as I strode to the front of the room and mounted the coffee table and – after murmuring sotto voce to the Doc, 'Felt the need for some backup, eh, Bunkie?' – turned to block Dr. Wade's view of everything but my gorgeous ass. Then, addressing the assembled moms, I spoke the following words:

'Ladies, femme-serviles, fellow slavoids: We all deal with the horrors and humiliations of life in one way or another. You have your way. I have mine. Dr. Wade has his. And your sons, the drooling pups who pay to see me naked have theirs. Assuming that it's your wish to alter my way of handling life's insults, allow me to propose a solution: I ask that each and every one of you reach into your purse at this time and take out five dollars, the price of a ticket to my Saturday afternoon smokers, and pay it directly to me. Or you can mail it in.

'Just remember to continue the practice every week so as not to deprive me of the regular box-office income I have grown accustomed to over the years in exchange for supplying your entertainment-starved sons with the happiest memories they will ever have of their horribly repressed childhoods.

'In return,' I went on, 'I promise to leave the poor darlings to the exclusive machinations of your ruinous influence.

'I think you all know where I live, but I'll hand each of you a business card on the way out. That's five a week, twenty a month or 250 a year. You get a ten dollar discount on the yearly rate over the weekly rate, but if you'll do the math you'll find the monthly rate is really best deal,' I tried to gain their trust by being perfectly square with them about everything except the original ticket price.

Then I sat down and outdid Dr. Wade's smug smile – now faded – when I asked after his health and thanked him for the opportunity to address the mothers en masse, adding that for a proud slave he probably wasn't such a bad guy once you got to know him.

I went on to show my appreciation by cooperating fully in session two. I dropped the mob-boss act and spoke directly to the Good Doctor, though I continued amusing myself by voicing doubts as to whether he was intellectually honest enough to have a meaningful conversation about anything more important than male-pattern baldness, which, apropos his comb-over, I observed that he was in the early stages of.

He answered with the uninspired observation that I had a bad attitude.

'A bad attitude?' I feigned innocence. 'Would you care to elaborate?'

'Right there is a perfect example of it,' he snorted. 'The snotty arrogance you're displaying right now, which, according to your adolescent lights, I'm sure you think lends you a certain rebellious panache among your teenage friends, but as you grow older, you'll be surprised to find –'

'Well, let me ask you this,' I interrupted, 'do you think rebellion is always a bad thing?'

'I'd appreciate it if you didn't interrupt your elders in the middle of...'

'There again, just out of curiosity, are there occasions when you might _condone_ interrupting one's elders?

'Oh, please! Spare us the Socratic method!' he snorted again. 'It's not working!'

'You'd rather I were direct?' I asked.

'Yes!'

'Then I'll be direct'

'I'd appreciate it!'

'We'll see.'

Smiling imperiously, I confessed that I'd come there today with the idea of going easy on him, and not telling him everything because I worried that the whole truth might kill him.

'Are you for real?' he horse-laughed.

'Do you ask that,' I sought clarification, 'in the hope that I'm a figment of your imagination, or ironically in the hope of intimidating me into obedience?'

'I ask it, young lady, in the hope of encouraging you to give yourself a much-needed reality check!'

The mothers present all backed him up, sniggering at that comeback and offering similar noises of assent that seemed a little forced at times. These were not just the mothers of the ten boys in my group, mind you, but all twenty of them (minus my own) crammed in that tiny office, their narrowed eyes filled with venom as they waited on Dr. Wade to work his magic on me and either make good my evil spirit or, preferably, plunge me headfirst into a lake of fire.

'No, Dumpling,' I said, keeping up my whimsical smile, 'you ask it in the hope of deflecting my understanding of what a toad-eater you are.'

Dr. Wade bridled. 'What did you call me?'

'A silly-ducking servant to your owners,' I said sweetly.

'A _what_?'

'A dick-licker to the rich,' I rephrased, poking a thumb in and out of my mouth suggestively. 'Am I being direct enough for you?'

Indignation rendered Dr. Wade apoplectic with rage, during which time, he lost the power of speech. Then, regaining it, he thundered, 'JUST WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?!'

'The daughter of an ambitious fuckboy of a father,' I confessed with a carefree air, 'a father much like you, darling, in whose footsteps I prefer not to follow.'

'Now you're being downright _vile_!' he hissed.

'Me?' I asked innocently. 'All I did was sell some very appreciative boys a peek at my fabulous fanny. You're the one advocating submission to an unfair society.'

'Oh spare us that society-is-to-blame-for-your-disgusting-degenerate-behavior crap!' he growled.

'So, you're _really_ of the opinion that my behavior is worse than yours?'

'I'll ask the question here!' he said.

'Ask away, slave-boy,' I said.

'Listen to you! Do you know how _infantile_ all this ripping and tearing at the rich is?'

'What's infantile,' I smiled piteously, 'is your hysterical misunderstanding of how the world works and your cowardly part in greasing its wheels. Fetal may be the more accurate adjective.'

'Listen to you! Your attitude is _beyond_ bad! Bad doesn't even come close to covering it!'

'You're repeating yourself, lambkins.'

'Just where do you get off acting like _you're_ the expert, you foul-mouthed little BITCH!' he roared, showing unmistakable signs of unraveling. 'Are you familiar with the expression that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing?' he said as he crossed his arms and thrust out his chin, Mussolini-like, giving the impression that he had me there.

The last time he'd raised the issue of his credentials, I'd summoned up the most unimpressed look I was capable of and said, 'Horn-tooter, my dad and the dozen slide-rule-carrying eggheads who work under him planning the world's nuclear annihilation have enough degrees among them to open a sauna, and they're all just as hysterically stupid and cowardly and dishonest as they could be.'

This time I said, 'I think the better question is, are you familiar with the expression: "Some things are too important to be left to the experts"?'

In the silence to follow, I reached out to stroke his hand but he pulled away with a start, as if I were a leper trying to be infectious.

By the end of the session, I was finishing his sentences for him.

'Is there no –' he began.

'reaching you?' I said.

'It's a crying –' he said.

'shame,' I said.

'Because I really believe I could –'

'help you,' I said.

'If you would just –' he said.

'let me in.'

'Well you clearly have some –'

'deep-seated trust issues,' I said.

As the poor moms were filing out – most of them refusing my business cards though a few would deal with me secretly through the mail – their eyes expressed unspoken concern that Dr. Wade might have met his match, and possibly a bit more.

In retrospect, Sy, I realize – as I often realize too late – that I was too hard on Dr. Wade, who turned out to possess a sensitivity that I failed to attribute to him until after he killed himself. He showed precious little evidence of it beforehand, but it was there. And I'm troubled by regrets.

No doubt it ramped up my defiance a bit to be undergoing a court-ordered therapy. And then the word "ORTHOPSYCHIATRIST" on his office door was like a red flag to someone who knew the meaning of the root-word _ortho_. I mean the very idea of someone _boasting_ about making a living straightening out the minds of unhappy slave-children was bound to put the iron in my soul.

Still, I should have eased up in our third session.

Then again, not to be too hard on myself, it was Dr. Wade's rodeo, and not his first one, as he kept reminding me. Neither was it mine, as he knew that full well. He had my medical records and knew this was in fact my fourth rodeo. And he knew I'd promptly bucked his three predecessors off on their asses in very short order.

And that was over and above the ministrations of various school counselors, church pastors, and respected pals of my parents, like Dr. Werner Von Braun, who was an occasional dinner guest in our home and used to dispense avuncular advice to me over the bratwurst and sauerkraut in favor of keeping one's head in order to keep pursuing one's dream by the expedient of obeying one's leaders.

With the three previous professionals, a single session was all the toughest of them could take before telling my parents there was nothing they could do for me.

When Dr. Wade brought it up, I admitted, 'Hell, if I'd been paid to see them I'd have handled the dopes more gently, but, like you, darling, all three urged against the policy. Result: an hour apiece, max, was all they could take of my brutal truth-telling.'

One frail specimen didn't even make it to the end of an hour. Dr. Voss, the head of the psychology department at Rollins College and author of three scholarly books of motivational twaddle, after testing my IQ and insisting that I placed no higher than the 98 percentile, exited his office twenty minutes into our consultation, appalled by the sight of me suckling my own breast, which I'd intended as an object lesson in my ability to handle my own nurturing needs. The poor man left in such a hurry that he walked straight through the glass door of his waiting room.

'As he lay dazed on the floor,' I told Dr. Wade, 'covered in a thousand square-ish quarter-inch chunks of shattered safety glass, I ran to him and offered him the comfort of my breast, but he declined and I put it back in my blouse and quietly held his hand till help arrived.'

But the Dr. Wade gave every sign of being made of sterner stuff. Or so I thought. Until, after gamely putting up with me for three full hours, he killed himself.

In session three, the slave-moms were conspicuous by their absence. The boys too. It was a private one-on-one, with Dr. Wade opening on a conciliatory note. 'I'm going to lay all my cards on the table here, Evelyn,' he cooed my name in an adjuring tone. 'Everyone makes concessions and compromises in life, and I don't claim to be an exception. I admit to making my share. But I really think it's unfair of you to refer to me as a stooge to an unjust social system. After all, there are many societies far more oppressive than ours.'

It was a touching overture and I realize now I should have let myself be mollified – especially in light of the outcome – but I didn't. What a bitter resentful pitiless young monster I was. Sub-owner social status will do that to person.

'No matter how oppressive a society is,' I cut the poor Doc no slack, 'encouraging kids to obey the powerful people who control our lives does in fact make you a stooge to our owners. You can't wriggle out it on the grounds that there are nastier psychiatrists in the world sending dissidents off to asylums and reeducation camps in Siberia. That doesn't let you off the hook. Success in every respectable profession, wherever it's practiced, is contingent on sucking up to or at least playing footsy with the powers that be, whoever they are. And if you ever hope hold up your end of an honest conversation, sweetie, you'd do well to keep that in mind.'

Instead of flying off handle, Dr. Wade got even smoochier.

'I can't tell you how sorry I am about your father,' he oozed, with a flirtatious batting of his eyelashes that made me wince in revulsion and peal with laughter at the same time.

I'd been expecting it. I knew he'd been talking ex-parte to my brother, who was in a different group, and it was inevitable that sooner or later he'd get around to making this solicitous pitch.

I told him as much and he said, 'Huh?'

'After trying and failing to get me to accept the blame for my unhappiness,' I explained his tactic, 'which you considered of my own making up to now and otherwise completely inexplicable, you're now attempting to pity me into compliance by scapegoating my folks and attributing my unhappiness to bad parenting.'

'From what I understand,' he ignored everything I just said and benevolently smooched on, 'your father has been something of a monster to your brothers in particular.'

'Proud Slave Trick number 31c,' I sighed.

'Huh?' the Good Doctor said.

I gave him by best you-poor-intellectual-infant look and shook my head. 'Sweetpea, my parents are no nastier than average, and your nastiness is no less accountable; it's a reflection of the same oppression you've suffered. My folks seek to hysterically pass down the humiliation they accommodate rather than bravely oppose it. And so do you.'

The man showed he still had some slave-fight left in him. He struck a massively puzzled pose and bleated, 'Girl, are you high on drugs? Seriously! I've been meaning to ask you that for some time!'

'No, Chip Dip,' I replied with an abbreviated chuckle – a scornful chuck, as it were, 'but if you'll write me a scrip, I know someone who can get us a good black-market price and we'll split the proceeds three ways.'

'Because,' he went down swinging, selling his earnest wish to rescue me from myself, 'help is available if you'll just agree to take it.'

My contemptuous smile turned kindly as I got up and took a leisurely stroll around his office.

'So, Bradley,' I asked, getting his first name off of the many framed certificates and degrees covering nearly every square inch of his walls, 'how would you characterize someone who takes money for getting children to accept their servitude like good little pickaninnies? Intellectually craven? Self-serving? I don't want to put words in your mouth... What about a helpless hapless self-hating cog in the plantation system that broke him?'

'It's either drugs or you're absotively possilutely out of your gourd! Take your pick!' yelped Dr. Wade.

'Sugar,' I suggested as I casually ambled to and fro, 'instead of trying to help me become the same proud slave you are, why won't you let me help you to become a little less dog-like in your obedience to our masters?'

'There you go again, ripping and tearing at the rich!'

'Brad-Brad-Brad-Brad-Brad,' I sighed. 'Where do you get this ripping-and-tearing-at-the-rich stuff?' I said, coming close enough to make him back off an inch. 'I have nothing against the rich. I intend to be one of them. I mean that's my whole strategy for revenge.'

'Revenge?'

'On Fate.'

'For?'

'Giving me parents of the same upper-servant class you're a part of.'

'Huh?'

Looking back on that final session, Sy, I was clearly triumphing over a beaten foe. I can see that now. I kept challenging the Good Doctor to fight for his delusions long after the poor man was down for the count. He was too proud to terminate the session and I should have. That would have been the gracious thing to do. But I didn't. Which was rotten of me.

'So tell me,' I mused, 'after you've successfully broken some poor kid who turns around and starts acting like you, repeating the same pious tripe you feed your patients and pretending to be oh-so-deeply concerned for the emotional well-being of his rebellious friends, and yet he's still a little awkward at it because he's new to the game, does it give you pause? I mean do you feel like he's giving the game away? Do you want to rush in and get the clumsy imitator to hold back until he can pull the trick off with sufficient finesse?'

Dr. Wade said, 'Huh?'

'Does the sight of your dishonesty in him make you just a teensy bit queasy?'

Dr. Wade said, 'Huh?'

'Do you see in him a reflection of your own early inchoate fraud – those stumbling days when you first began glorifying selling out to your owners?' I wondered.

Dr. Wade said, 'Huh?'

'Does your acolyte's emulation of your dastardly way of dealing with the horrors of our society trigger any sickening insight at all into your own crippled soul?'

Dr. Wade said, 'Huh?'

Having ducked the Doc's early haymakers, I delighted in mauling the exhausted palooka by telling him more truth than he could stand. I should have stopped, but I didn't. By the end of our last hour together, I was leading the discussion, if you could call it a discussion, since I was basically just holding forth, asking and answering all the questions, while Dr. Wade sat slumped over in his chair holding his head in both hands in a state of intellectual and spiritual depletion.

'What you should do,' I instructed helpfully, 'in lieu of discouraging _all_ defiance, is discourage the more _flailing_ unproductive forms of it. In fact I strongly recommend using such modifiers when you define defiance. You should say to your patients, "I'd like to help you to express your anger more rationally and productively."

'That would be the brave, honest approach to helping troubled kids. Because to simply push for obedience to authority is tantamount to cajoling and coercing kids into accepting lives of abject servitude. And the idea of being paid to do something that lowdown...well, really, Brad, to make a living in such a way...' I grimaced at the slimy thought. 'You're better than that, sugar.'

That was not my last jab. My last jab, delivered a foot below the belt, was a reminder that if he continued to earn a living as he was currently earning it, he'd be working for me in the not-too-distant future. And after that welcome improvement in my circumstances, there would be no more of this unpleasant air of contention between us, because I'd be among the owners he strived to please. 'And for your long and faithful service,' I drilled him with a final groin-shot, 'there'll be a prize waiting at the bottom of the Crackerjacks box, provided you please me well enough. I'll show my appreciation by giving you a TV show or a syndicated newspaper column or both. Like Dr. Joyce Brothers...'

The evening news carried the story of his suicide. Not long after our final session, the poor thing, shattered by the first honest glimpse of himself, took the elevator to the top floor of his office building, climbed the staircase to the roof, smoked two cigarettes as he contemplated his life of shame, and leaped to his death.

I was more dumbfounded than saddened when I first heard the news. He seemed like such a normal everyday defender of the status quo, far too committed to denying his servitude to ever know himself. But people will surprise you.

Truth to tell, Sy, his suicide sent his stock up in my opinion. I felt bad about it later, but my immediate reaction was a surge of admiration. Like with my dad's self-destructive bouts of suicidal drinking. I felt a sudden rush of affection for the self-hating slave. In fact, I wished I'd been there on the rooftop with him so I could have grabbed him and said, 'Hell no, Brad, I'm not letting you distance yourself from the horror that easy!' And giving his thinning scalp a good goosing, I'd have shared a smoke with him and we'd have become fast friends.

My folks sent me to no more therapists after that. Not so much on account of what happened to Dr. Wade. I'm sure they suspected I had some involvement, but they were more afraid of something Dr. Wade said in our last session. He recommended seeking therapy as a family. Of course Dodo was confident he could win over a mere academic with his manly charm, but DeeDee harbored an unfounded fear that psychiatrists are not nearly as hysterically stupid as other proud slaves, and she recoiled at the suggestion of family therapy. It was her reaction that led me to push the idea and actively pester her until she met my price never to bring the subject up again.

You know what a firm believer I am in hush-money, Sy. Even when I'm not on the receiving end, I can see its good points.

### Sonny's Comments

Asked about General Hitcherson's job which, according to Evelyn, was calculating ICBM trajectories by the stars, and her claim that Werner Von Braun came down from Huntsville on occasion to assist with the project and had dinner at their home, over which he encouraged Evelyn to be a good team-player, Sonny was noncommittal. 'It could be true,' he said. 'On the other hand you know what a lively imagination she has.'

'I can corroborate,' he went on, 'the hard time she gave Pastor Billy and his visiting associate Pastor Johnny. Anticipating that they would come at her with a post-prandial double-team, she secretly tape-recorded their after-dinner chat and played it for me later.

'When they asked if she'd been drinking, she answered in her breezy imperious style, "What can I say, boys? Some find solace in supernatural spirits; I prefer the alcoholic kind!"

'Seeing the King James Bible her mother had discreetly laid out on the coffee table for the occasion, they asked if she'd read it.

'She answered, "Enough to know it's not a bad literary effort but, philosophically, it's shit. I mean encouraging us to venerate a spiteful mass-murdering monster called God? Come on!"

'When the pastors gasped at such blasphemy, she sweetly added, "Jesus was okay as rebels go, aside from that Son-of-God loopiness, because only a stupid lying coward could worship a father like. I mean, read the First Book of Samuel. The early Jews sound like a bunch of genocidal Nazis.

'"Of course," she went on, pulling a thin paperback copy of _Ecce Homo_ from her britches' pocket, "I'm not too keen on Christians either. I agree with Nietzsche that a misguided revenge is at the heart of your religion. And she began reading some of the highlighted passages from the famous philosopher's autobiography: '...moral decadence, to use a crude term, Christian morality, to use a still cruder term, is a self-annihilating attitude toward life...counting on a heavenly retribution...the terrors of reality are more necessary than the petty happiness which is called goodness... man prefers to aspire to nonentity than not to aspire at all.'"

The pastors said, "Huh?"

'"Don't get me wrong, boys," she added. "Christianity has its redeeming qualities. I think all religions begin as a form of rebellion. When slaves give their allegiance to incorporeal masters instead of earthly masters they force the earthly masters to co-opt religion as a tool to ensure subjugation, and Christianity emphasized mercy which became part of the power struggle."

'The pastors said, "Huh?"

'"Of course," she went on, "Nietzsche was a fatheaded idealist in his own right, who refused to see that revenge was also at the heart of his grandiose celebration of our will to power. He was denying how weak he was."

'The pastors said, "Huh?"

'"Fritz clearly had a chronic invalid's resentment of being pitied by his caregiving mother and sister."

'The pastors said, "Huh?"

'"If only I could have been there," Evelyn sighed wistfully, "to tell the sickly genius: 'Babycakes, if you're going to philosophize with a hammer, you should not be afraid to turn that hammer on yourself."

'The pastors said, "Huh?"

"'I mean I sympathize with his desperate search for a way to ease his feelings of cowardice over the less than valiant ways he dealt with his humiliations. Picture his older sister Gretchen or Gertrude or whatever her name was bullying her ailing brother into a cowering piteous pulp in under a minute, which she probably did at least once a week when they were kids, before tenderly ministering to him until he was healthy again so she could start back in on the bullying. That sort of treatment takes its toll. Ask any torture victim. Ask my brother Freddy."

'The pastors said, "Huh?"

"'And I understand that his father was a preacher, whose high morals and insufferable piety when over-lauding his acts of unselfish kindness doubtless disgusted the boy Nietzsche who instinctively reacted to the old man's hypocrisy by celebrating cruelty and selfishness."

'The pastors said, "Huh?"

'What Nietzsche lost sight of was the fact that the guts needed to rebel the power-structure of his day that had co-opted Christianity was nothing compared to the guts Jesus needed to defy the power-structure as it existed 2000 years ago. Also, and I don't like to go on about the way invalids deal with life's horrors, but I'm pretty sure Nietzsche, in his desperate battle not to surrender to his physical weakness, went so far as to share D.H. Lawrence's screwy idea that feelings of compassion triggered flare-ups of his tuberculosis.

'The pastors said, 'Huh?'

"'My point being that Fred went overboard when he turned Christian doctrine on its head and romantically glorified Man's inherent feasting-and-fawning nature in the same way that Christians insist on romanticizing man's capacity for goodness and decency. It's the dishonesty on all sides that I deprecate. Nothing human needs glorifying. So what if Dionysus was a tad less dishonest than Jesus or Socrates, all those poor bastards were stupid lying cowards most of the time because, well, _ecce fucking homo_ , boys."

'At which time, the pastors concluded their task was hopeless and they bowed their heads and began to pray for Evelyn, which prayers she immediately interrupted with a bray of laughter and began listing the various ways she might handle them.

"'Men-calling-yourselves-by-little-boys'-names-in-an-effort-to-disarm-and-ingratiate-yourselves," she addressed them jauntily, "I could swoon right now and pretend to be saved in order to gain your trust and then pilfer from the collection plate and the bingo fund and otherwise fleece your flock over time. Or I could ask for more of these private sessions and then go the police and swear you're a couple of pervs who told me the orgasms I experienced when you tongue-tickled my clitoris were bringing me closer to God, and sue your pants off in a civil action after winning a criminal conviction against you. But the fact is all you religious loonies give me the creeps, so if you'll just lay a sawbuck apiece on the table and beat it, I won't hint to soul that you tried to cop a spiritual feel."

'By the sound of things, the last part of her speech created quite a stir. She confirmed that the pastors couldn't get out the door fast enough.'

Apropos being creeped out by things religious, Sonny said, 'I remember a time she was looking up a word in the dictionary and showed me a page on which there were three photos in the margin: one of a prayer rug, one of a prayer wheel, and one of a praying mantis. Smiling, she said, "Only the picture of the praying mantis doesn't give me the heebie-jeebies!"

### Round 8

...Merci, Sir Knight!

My videoboy just put down his camera-phone long enough to ease my grief over killing Dr. Wade by refreshing my drink, Sy. I rather like the cut of his jib. Turn the camera on yourself a moment, dear, and show off your jib.

Not too shabby, eh? We'll have to get his teeth fixed though...

Pushing on then. The Samisen Scandal lent an added fillip to my reputation around the neighborhood. The Winter Park Mothers for Decency, taking every precaution to focus their indignation where it is safe to focus it, the way slaves do, already knew me as a brat, a tramp, a prima donna, shameless trash and a bad seed. After the scandal, they took to calling me a devouring succubus, evil incarnate, filth in human form, a hootchy-cootchy with cooties, an unrepentant professional whore with a criminal record and, pulling out all the stops, the worst insult they could think of: Frenchie.

Sonny's mom labeled me a female Rodney and put me off-limits to her fallen dove, who she confined to his room after school to keep me from further sinking my defiling claws into his sullied soul. There, Sonny would while away his time reading the essays of George Orwell and dreaming of a life of social activism, his noble musings punctuated by the sound of my bitter taunts rising up to him from under his window whenever I felt the need for some diversion.

'Hey, Dudley Do-Nothing! Let's see what you got, Mahatma! Get off your timid ass and _be_ that champion of social justice you admire so much! We're waiting, Lord Wilberforce! Any day now, Spartacus!' I razzed the shut-in with hoots of derisive laughter.

'They're calling the police on you,' he hoarsely whispered out a warning.

And, scooting back to my house, I was taking tea when the cops arrived, vouchsafing only my name: 'Puddinanpoontain, ask me again and I'll tell you the same'; my address: 'Plantation Earth'; my age: 'the same as my deciduous teeth – check with the tooth fairy over there' (I pointed to Mother); my hair color: 'ebon' and the curtains match the drapes, I assured them; my eye color: 'Bambi brown.' I also furnished them with my vital statistics unasked for, fudging a bit on the lascivious side. As for the trespassing charge leveled against me, I responded with a great big, 'Huh?'

Total amnesia together with the aggrieved air of Saint Joan at the stake add up to a stellar performance. It's the best way of handling every official interrogation in my book. Not a few of the better liars you hear testifying before Congress on C-Span these days, the ones whose lawyers howl "innuendo!" and "character-assassination!" the loudest to the media on the courthouse steps, have taken my correspondence course.

As far as Sonny's parents go, they didn't _always_ loathe me. At least his dad didn't. I remember there was a time they used to have me over for dinner. And I was included once on a day-trip to the University of Florida – his dad's alma mater – to watch a football game. My most vivid memory of that experience is overdoing the rah-rah stuff till I sounded like a drunken cowboy painting the town red after a month-long cattle drive, and the yahoos around me ate it up. Football fans do _not_ get satire.

Maybe the mothers never cared for me, but the fathers of my boyfriends all secretly lusted for me after I reached a certain age. And while Sonny's dad was not the debonair Lothario who began calling me Double Bubbles after I deemed his moony attentions and a ride in his Alpha Romeo Spider insufficient payment for sex (I wanted the car), he was among the dads who sat all the way through "The Shamisen" in order to appreciate the full enormity of my misbehavior, and then asked to see the incriminating movie a second time for further study. And on at least twelve occasions I was tickled to catch the old gospel singer eyeing me with a carnal cataplexy benumbing his slack face.

It was Sonny's mom who locked the Paperboy away in his room like Rapunsel and yelled at me to scram every time I showed up under his window, urging him to throw down money and watch me do my impression of majorette misusing her baton. A fixed animosity that marked her attitude toward me for years. Right up to the moment she heard that Winny and I were engaged. At which time she did a sudden about-face and said she always knew there was something special about me from the beginning.

But, not to get ahead of ourselves, I topped the old hag's list of personae non grata for a long time.

She was never very keen on Sonny's expanding social consciousness either, not as keen as she pretended to be in later years. When, in addition to becoming a Bob Dylan fan, Sonny taped a copy of MLK's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" to the mirror over his dresser, I asked, 'How long do you expect Mommy to leave it there?' Sonny expressed confidence that she wouldn't bother it. He was wrong. The letter was gone inside a week.

'Hey, Che! What's next on the agenda?' I heckled. 'Hey, selfless instrument of social progress! Hey, Boadicea! Are we hard at work ramping up the pace of mankind's march toward an earthly paradise!'

Under such goading, Sonny surprised me by writing two uncharacteristically bold letters to the editor of the paper he delivered. Blame me for the heat they brought down on him because I was catalyst behind them.

The first one expressed dismay over the bigotry of a local gun-store owner who hung a sign in his window advertising "nigger-back guarantees" on all the guns he sold. Intent on making an ass of himself in a big way, the redneck succeeded when his stunt was picked up by the AP. It brought considerable condemnation at the national level, but Sonny's reprimand was the only criticism from our neck of the woods. Mildly worded though it was, it was still a brave letter, particularly in light of Sonny's natural timidity. It impressed the hell out of me. The fight for social justice was never _my_ way of avenging life's humiliations – too self-sacrificing. The way I looked at it, even supposing the human race is capable of anything remotely close to social justice, the battle to get there would be long and hard, and to maintain it, endless, and I had neither the time nor the inclination for such a fight. Not to mince words, my focus was on avenging the injustice _I_ suffered.

Still, any strategy for combating our humiliations short of embracing our owners and celebrating our insults, I admired, and I thought Sonny's attack on bigotry deserved a plaudit. So I punched the air with a balled up fist and hollered, 'Give 'em hell, Paperboy! _Sic_ 'em, Son-o!'

His family was less supportive.

'My hee-ro,' his mother drawled sarcastically after reading his letter.

Her vanity had been stung by Sonny's moral courage which threw her own moral cowardice into relief. That was the real reason she hated the letter, but not the one she gave. According to her, it was Sonny's failure to clarify something that no white professional-class Southerner of that era ever doubted for a second during the civil rights turmoil of the 50s and 60s. Taking a line through Harper Lee's famous whitewash of Southern bigotry in her novel _To Kill a Mockingbird_ (a sanitized version of the truer story that no publisher would touch until half a century later), Sonny's folks maintained that expressions of virulent racism were the exclusive provenance of backwoods inbred pig farmers whose ire had been inflamed by outside Yankee agitators. My parents took the same position. And here Sonny's letter had made it sound as if the _entire_ social structure of Dixie from top to bottom was terribly racist, which of course it was – and is.

In the face his mother's displeasure, it was anyone's guess whether Sonny was going to please me by writing a second brave letter or accommodate Mama by being still.

I took the honors.

Several weeks in gestation, letter number two finally appeared and proved even more incendiary than the first. Based on an article in the _National Guardian_ which I filched from the Rollins Library reading room and shared with Sonny, he chastised our government for invading South Vietnam, calling it a clear violation of the 1954 Geneva Accords, signed off on by the Eisenhower administration and subverted as soon as it was apparent that a free election would have unified Vietnam under a communist government.

That little firecracker of a missive brought a team of FBI interrogators to town to canvass Sonny's family, friends, neighbors, teachers, preachers, coaches, doctors, and Scout masters. Leaving no stone unturned, they also interviewed every friend and neighbor and the friends and neighbors of all those friends and neighbors, plus the various employers and store owners, realtors, car dealers, lawyers, restaurateurs, veterinarians, insurance agents and community leaders who ever did business with Sonny or his family or exchanged a chance word with the suspected traitor, seeking to ferret out any whiff of affiliation with a possible covert communist cell operating in the area.

'You're a regular giant slayer, baby!' I cheered the mouse-that-roared and clapped him heartily on the back, beaming with admiration.

But when that second letter, like the first letter, ended up embarrassing the stew out of his parents and succeeded only in shifting their sympathies still further to the right of the political spectrum – exactly the opposite of what he'd hoped to accomplish – poor Sonny, unable to stand being thought ill of by anyone, hauled down the skull-and-crossbones and ran up the white flag of surrender and wrote no more seditious letters to the editor.

I groaned when, proving he was temperamentally unfit to be a social activist of any significance, his next letter to the editor had to do with potholes.

On the heels of his short-lived foray into epistolary defiance, I would reiterate my offer to team up with me and get rich together. But Storklegs – a nickname I gave to Sonny that summer after seeing him in a swimsuit and noticing that he was growing plumper around the middle but nowhere else – would only repeat his objection to "perpetuating the problem."

So I returned to peevishly rubbing his nose in what promised to be a lifetime of kowtowing to the rich, thus keeping the pressure on his struggle to find some way of handling life's unfairness that suited his sensitive nature.

But I want to confess something. Before we get too far off the subject of that gun-store owner who offered those "nigger-back guarantees," I want you to know that I came this close to pitching the knuckle-dragger my idea for offering the same deal on his ammo. A lucrative marketing strategy obvious to me, but you know how race-hatred gets in the way of business. Giddy with misdirected slave-rage, the cracker failed to see that relatively few white supremacists had the money to express their solidarity with his way of mishandling life's humiliations by buying another gun, but if he'd applied the same guarantee to his ammo, every bigot in the county would be lining up to buy a box, turning his store into a veritable mob scene. He'd have tractor-trailers circling the block, unloading day and night. He wouldn't be able to keep a single bullet on his shelves.

But I didn't follow through with my idea. Not from any moral scruples, heaven forfend. In those youthful days of my captivity, a conscience was the last thing I needed or allowed myself the luxury of. I just figured a clod of his caliber was bound to beat me out of my commission, so I said fuck it.

I had to get that off my chest.

As to Sonny's continuing search for some satisfactory way of dealing with the endless humiliations that I never for a moment let him forget he was submitting to, a way that was neither overly brave nor overly ignominious, he began toying with the idea of writing a novel.

Lay the blame on me again, Sy. Because I'm the one who first proposed that we collaborate on a piece of literary fluff. Something trashy, something entertaining, something immensely popular and profitable and guaranteed to be an international bestseller. You know, something with absolutely no substantive intellectual value.

A murder mystery or spy novel is what I had in mind.

I mentioned that Sonny had literary pretentions. That being the case I thought that between my brains and his editing and typing skills, we should be able to come up with the next Miss Marple or Philip Marlowe series. Sticking to what I knew, I proposed basing our first effort on a slew of home robberies. _All Homes Should Have a Sure Lock_ was my suggested working-title, and we'd call our detective-hero Killer O'Diller.

Clever, huh? I thought so too, but Sonny didn't think much of the idea. I guess he considered himself above detective novels by then. Anyway, ignoring my input, he set out to write the Great American Novel singlehanded.

Weeks passed. He didn't allow so much as a peek at his work-in-progress. Finally after two months he let me see what he'd done so far.

If memory serves, it was a fable about two flighty yet highly articulate gerbils who sounded a lot like Chip and Dale. They'd run away from home to escape the bullying of the family cat named Snowbell and at various times in their travels were obliged to contend with the insipidities of an ill-tempered toad, a moldy mole, a kindly tiger, and a brown-nosing badger, before returning home in the end to live happily ever after with the cat Snowbell, who had found that she missed their lip and was glad to have the sarcastic little furballs back again.

...Or, I don't know, maybe it was about two talking mongooses who befriended a pregnant pig, a lovable owl, a cantankerous kangaroo, and a bad-breathed bear who gave them a hard time at first before everything turned out swell in the end. I don't remember exactly.

I do remember that I laughed myself silly over it, and when he rewrote it, I laughed myself silly over it again, and when he rewrote it a third time, I laughed myself silly a third time. Until he finally put it aside and despaired of ever finishing it. Then he got it out and rewrote it a fourth time, and after I laughed myself silly over it that time, he finally put it away for good, no matter how much praise Winny heaped on it, comparing it favorably to Kipling's _The Jungle Book_ and promising to publish it privately if Sonny couldn't land a deal with a prominent book publisher. But Sonny sensibly bowed to my superior literary judgment.

More and more it began to look like the Paperboy was destined to live out his life as an everyday humdrum go-along-to-get-along miserable respectable drone. And I delighted in telling him so.

Keep in mind he was the only living person of my social caste who I ever bared my soul to and, as such, his rejection of my exit strategy for triumphing our bleak existence hurt me more than I can say. Sonny's snubs were a hundred times more painful than Winny's snubs. Because Winny had no mental function to speak of, but Sonny's did. Anytime I spoke to Sonny about the horror of our subservience, he knew what I was talking about. Winny did not.

Of course, I realize today, comparing the hurt Sonny inflicted on me to the hurt I inflicted on him, I hurt Sonny far more. Two or three times a year I have this horrible dream – which I guess puts it in the "recurring" category. In it I'm on one side of a door with a pistol in my hand. And in the room on the other side of the door is a ruffed grouse. It's not my dinner. I'm just shooting it for sport. And smart cookie that I am, I anticipate the grouse will try to dart out the door as soon as I open it, so I get down close to the floor and ready the pistol. Sure enough, as soon as I crack the door the grouse tries to rush out.

Opening fire, I hit him with a grazing shot. He retreats back into the room in a panic and goes running and ducking every whichway, screaming, 'You're hurting me! You're hurting me!' And I keep firing from a kneeling position, hitting him three more times. 'You're hurting me! You're hurting me!' he screams with every hit.

The caliber of my pistol must be very small because the third round is a head-shot, which you'd think would finish off something with a head the size of a prairie chicken's. But as he lays there dying, he keeps sobbing piteously, 'You're hurting me! You're hurting me!'

That's when I wake up with what feels like a block of ice in my gut and there's no doubt in my mind as to who the bird is, or the identity of his heartless killer. Sonny's voice is clearly recognizable in the dream.

Of course I suffered no such guilty dreams at the time. I felt too abused myself back then to be worried about abusing others. Not a day went by that I didn't remind the Paperboy that he would grow up to be exactly the nice well-thought-of steward to our wealthy masters that his parents were and always wanted him to be. And, with each passing day, that prediction did in fact look to be what destiny inescapably held in store for him.

Until one day, just when it seemed Sonny would never find a way out, at the very moment he appeared to give up his search for an answer to his dilemma and accept that he was forever stuck in a Bob Cratchit-like life of servitude of the kind I never stopped describing to him in the most graphic terms, the solution came to him. It struck him right between the eyes with the force of religious epiphany. A revelation so overwhelming that his spine seized momentarily, as if to remind him that he had one.

It happened on the night of Junior Prom, and I was there to witness firsthand the jaw-dropping moment of clarity Sonny experienced.

'My God...' he croaked.

'You let the joint go out, numbnuts,' I grumbled, plucking the dead doobie from his hand and relighting it.

'What I have to do,' he gasped, as one in the grip of some eye-popping mystical spell, 'is drop out of school and become a career paperboy!'

That was his earth-shattering idea.

That was Sonny's answer to life's mind-stumping riddle.

He would embrace paperboydom as his life's profession.

The solution had been staring him in the face the whole time, he declared, flabbergasted that he hadn't seen it before now. 'By never earning more than the bare minimum needed to sustain myself,' he eurekaed in a thoughtful monotone, 'I can pay my way without serving an unfair social arrangement any more than I have to...'

A smile came to his lips and slowly broadened as he planned his future. 'I'll neither be perpetuating the problem by getting rich nor adding unnecessarily to my shame by seeking out the kind of rewards offered to the boldly servile. I won't be escaping a life of servitude, but I won't be embracing it either! I'll be living my life with the least amount of disgrace possible!'

When I repeated all that to Winny the next day, he said, 'Huh?'

But I knew what Sonny meant. While not agreeing with his findings, I saw its appeal to someone like Sonny. Religious mendicants of old must have felt something similar when they got the call from God to go wandering about the countryside wrapped in chains and flagellating themselves with whips and nettles.

'By doing just as little as possible to get by,' Sonny mused aloud, his eyes starting to glaze over with a holy sheen, 'I won't be eagerly obeying anyone or boldly defying anyone!'

The sheer genius of his vision made him a little unsteady on his feet. In fact his strategy for turning himself into a complete and utter nonentity had him breathing so hard that for a minute I thought he might having one of his attacks of vertigo.

In the interest of full disclosure, Sy, I should probably mention that the joint we were smoking – the Paperboy's first – could easily have been a contributing factor to his sudden blinding inspiration. It was some kick-ass weed as I recall. In fact, it was so good that some vague entrepreneurial premonition led me to save the seeds.

At the time, my only comment on Sonny's idea was a request to be on hand when he shared his career plans with his parents. I was especially keen to see how his dad, that hardworking loan-officer who made his son take a paper route at the age of seven because he didn't want him growing up to be a spoiled no-account like his Cousin Rodney, would take the news. Would he be pleased, I wondered, to see how well the work-ethic he'd instilled in Sonny at an early age had kept him humble and subservient and empty of any inflated notions about his self-worth?

But I missed the show, drat.

As Sonny described it to me later, he sought to soften the blow by assuring his parents that in addition to delivering newspapers he also meant to pursue his dream of becoming a famous novelist.

He painted a rosy picture of the Winter Park townspeople admiring him as he ran his route of a morning, observing from their kitchen windows over their croissants and coffee, 'Gee, there goes old Son-o, our reliable paperboy and the Nobel Prize-winning author of many critically acclaimed novels...'

He told me that when he finished conveying that dreamy future to his parents, and they saw by his blissed-out look that he was perfectly serious – and probably still a little stoned as well – they had two words to say to him.

'GET!' his mother said. 'OUT!' his father said.

And so, disowned in that unceremonious fashion by his loving family, the career Paperboy bid a fond farewell to the status quo and took up residence in one of my tumbledown Eatonville tenements. To make his rent, he traded his home-delivery route for a rack route and traded his Cushman scooter in on a rusty old Rambler which he hand-painted Baby Blue – the fine striated lines of rust showing through in the troughs of the brush strokes.

Subsisting on cereal and whatever snacks I shared with him on my visits, Sonny, for all his recent dislocation and straitened means, was the happiest I'd ever seen him.

In the parlance of the day, the Paperboy had found himself. He rose a little earlier now to do his longer route and finished up around dawn with a song in his heart to match the twitterings of the waking birds. Then, turning to his novel, he wrote with that special feeling of euphoria that fills to overflowing those rare souls lucky enough to find their one true calling in life, never doubting for an instant that his decision had been the right one. His only regret had to do with the envy he was sorry to be stirring in the hearts of everyone around him who secretly wished they too could be career paperboys by night, writing literary masterpieces by day, just like him.

In the interest of full disclosure again, Sy, in terms of explaining Sonny's sunny mood, it probably didn't hurt any that he was smoking reefer pretty regularly by then.

### Sonny's Comments

Sonny said he understood his mom's sarcasm when she called him a hero.

'We both knew I was posturing myself as a brave man, and I was anything but,' he admitted, going on to add, 'My mom was embarrassed by violent expressions of racism, but when it came to the Montgomery bus boycott and the Birmingham riots and other historical confrontations between civil rights protesters and police going on at the time, she referred to the unrest as "all that mess" and I never corrected her. As for the plight of the Vietnamese, we both knew that if I had been conscripted into the army and sent to Vietnam and was ordered to save villages by destroying them and slaughter the inhabitants wholesale in the interest of spreading democracy, chances are I'd have done it rather than face a court-martial and go to jail for disobeying a superior officer.

'"Backs Down From Fights" was the Indian name Evelyn gave me, if you must know. I mean who was I to be delivering moral lectures to anyone?'

Asked about his novel, Sonny said, 'My first effort may have been a fable in the sense that there was a supernatural component to it and it had a moral, but it wasn't about two talking gerbils. It was bad, but not that bad, I hope. It was about a lawn jockey that comes to life to teach its owner something about the nature of race prejudice. A derivative story, clumsily told, and Evelyn was right to jeer at it, but in her way she was also encouraging. She told me not to lose heart because, as she put it, "you're not a stupid lying coward _all_ of the time." She suggested that if I worked long and hard enough I might produce something honest enough to be worth reading. "Stranger things have happened," she allowed.'

When I asked about the hatred his parents felt for Evelyn after the Shamisen Scandal, Sonny said, 'Anything I did that Mother didn't approve of, she assumed I picked it up from Evelyn. Especially after Rodney went away to reform school. Both my parents pinned my decision to drop out of school and become a career paperboy squarely on Evelyn.'

Sonny added, 'Rodney's mother tried to sell my disappointing choice for a profession as a delayed reaction to the blow to the head that Rodney gave me with that board when we were little. But my parents saw through that. Aunt Dilsey was forever trying to advance the theory that Rodney's bad behavior was due to the telephone he'd pulled down on his head as a baby, back when telephones were all black and corded and had the heft of bowling balls. But my folks blamed Evelyn exclusively for my disaffection.'

### Round 9

Hold on, boys. I promised to call Sonny today. To get his mind off his current troubles, I suggested some busywork in the form of an unauthorized biography of Winny's favorite novelist and bestselling ass-munch Tom Wolfe.

'...Hello, darling. Did you look over that compilation of magazine pieces? ...The little twinkletoes does love his strongmen. You saw how charitable he was in overlooking the shabbiness of that Silicon Valley tech mogul with the "Gary Cooper commanding stare" and how contemptuous he was of the shabbiness of the former publisher of _The New Yorker_ with the uncommanding stutter. And he's perfectly fine with the concept of genetic determinism when it justifies traditional gender roles and class distinctions and helps identify potential criminals so they can be force-delivered the lithium they need, but not when it "excuses" people for being gay or inattentive in class or lacking the right stuff. And you saw where he cites Sinclair Lewis favorably in one essay and deprecates him in another? He has a habit of sympathetically referencing journalistic writers like Dreiser and Steinbeck who would have despised him as a simpering worshipper of hardasses. I pointed that out to Winny, by the way and guess what he said? He said, "Huh?" And when I added that Tom is one of those slap-happy slaves who pin society's ills on the usual bogeys like lack of patriotism, lack of moral capital, lack of tradition, lack of respect for authority, lack of strong family values, etcetera, guess what Winny said? He said, "Huh?" Well, keep at it, sugar. I'm in the middle of something right now. Call me tonight when I'm drunk and in a mood to really unload on that tough-love-selling little dink.'

How do I hate a Proud Slave, Sy? Let me count the ways and we'd be here all day. I guess I don't hate them quite as much as I used to, now that they eagerly serve me. Still, I never came anywhere close to loving them the way I anticipated I would after I owned them. I mean while understanding and pitying their suffering, I can't stop being disgusted by the way they deal with that suffering. You can only witness dishonor on a scale like that for so long before revulsion gets the upper hand and you're _glad_ they suffer.

So where did we leave off, Sponge Bob? Ah, yes, the Career Paperboy.

For reasons related to finances, I took a dim view of Sonny's exchanging his home-delivery route for a rack route. For one thing, it deprived me of his starts-and-stops list which contributed so nicely to the success of my nocturnal pillaging. And in the second place, I was in cahoots with Cross-eyed Jerry, the assistant circulation manager at the newspaper, using him to service upwards of 150 home-delivery customers off the books with stolen rack papers.

Our little illicit enterprise necessarily made for some very unhappy rack carriers. And after taking Sonny's racks out of the rotation (out of the goodness of my heart), things got that much harder on the other six rack drivers in town.

Winny, meanwhile, had begun running, over the summer months, _The Commercial Press_ as a kind of apprenticeship program to prepare him to take charge of the entire Chimes Empire one day. And in his capacity as publisher pro-tem he approached Sonny and asked him to do a movie review for the paper.

It was part of a plan to deal with Sonny's defection and restore him to the more vibrant form of cradle-to-grave flunkism which had been his destiny before he had the bad luck to meet me.

At first Sonny begged off. He was busy with his novel, he explained, punching up the dialogue between those two talking gerbils. But eventually he let himself be persuaded to produce a few paragraphs of rubbish that Winny raved over, as did every hysterically stupid person who read it after it was printed.

The piece of trash was such a hit that Winny asked him to write another. And, though reluctant to interrupt his novel a second time, Sonny let himself be talked into taking the bait again and he wrote, if anything, an even more fatuous pile of goo. To which Winny and the unthinking readers of slave-friendly newspapers everywhere gave an even bigger rave.

Then, sinking the hook, the richboy offered Sonny a regular weekly column as drama critic for the paper, on the condition that he return to school and complete his senior year and enroll in college and pursue a degree in journalism.

To which Sonny, in a rare show of backbone, instead of jumping at the chance, said, 'Thanks all the same, boss, but no thanks.'

His energies were concentrated, he explained, on reformulating his novel, which had taken a turn from the original fable about two garrulous domestic rodents gone temporarily feral, and was now about a family of deliriously joyful black tenant farmers in conflict not with their masters but with the one crabby sourpuss among them, a reclusive moonshiner who hated their smiling pickaninny ways, until, on his deathbed, he disclosed the hiding place of the accumulated proceeds of his whisky sales in order to send a deserving light-skinned nephew with Caucasoid facial features and an engaging smile to college. Not a bad storyline, some would say. Too wholesome for my high literary standards, but John Grisham would have approved, and Sonny liked it enough to remain deaf to the Fond Owner's pleas to pen still more embarrassing Lifestyles muck.

If memory serves, the budding novelist had been living out his dream of self-abnegation for six months or thereabouts, happily running his paper route and writing on his novel, when in the wee hours of a chill wintry morn he heard the sound of my dulcet voice raised in song outside his door.

To the tune of "Norwegian Wood," I trilled:

' _Kill_

Kill kill kill kill

Kill kill kill kill

_Kill kill kill kill..._ '

Already up and having his Sugar Pops and coffee before running his route, Sonny opened the door and I handed him, in the order named, my cat Little Bitchergirl One, my mother's best jewel box, and a packet of three peanut-butter crackers which I stuffed into his breast pocket – I'd eaten the other three.

'Today's my birthday!' I announced. 'I'm 18!'

I followed that up in the same jubilant tone with the news that my parents were being cooked in a house fire even as we spoke.

'Freddy and Max got out okay,' I added so he wouldn't worry: Max the family dog, a boxer; Freddy my little brother, a fratricide.

'They're on the street right now with the rest of the neighborhood watching the firemen do their stuff.'

I could see that this addendum, while not unwelcome, did not entirely ease Sonny's mind. His brow remained furrowed as he doubtless wondered, even as you might now be wondering, Sy, why so lighthearted over such a grisly event?

Well, the answer to that question is _not_ that I hated my parents. I mean I did – naturally I hated Pa for putting his obedience to his owners in a mocking embrace and righteously manhandling my brothers to the greater glory of everything he despised about himself. And I hated Ma for letting him do it in exchange for his paycheck. And most of all I hated them both for saying, 'Huh?' every time I explained with impeccable logic the difference between what they hysterically believed they were doing and what they were in fact doing.

But the _overriding_ reason for my delight at seeing them incinerated was money.

My joy was a reflection of the not insubstantial holdings Dodo acquainted me with just a few short hours before he died of smoke-inhalation in his sleep, when, in response to my boast about my Eatonville properties, he recklessly riposted with an eye-popping list of assets that would devolve upon me after his (and Mummy's) untimely demise.

I had no idea he'd been such a busy investor!

Suffice it to say, sugar, that my disapproval of the dearly departed melted exactly three hours before they did, to be supplanted by a mood of exaltation which their deaths increased rather than abated.

Of course my exuberance would soften in the presence of the insurance investigators, but in all truth, Sy, I wasn't a bit sorry to see the folks go up in smoke. And if I had been, there was always my inheritance to console me.

Don't misunderstand me. I've since had occasion to regret their premature passing. I do have my sentimental moments like everyone else. Looking back on the way Mother struggled with life's humiliations, I'm reminded of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage who sacrificed her children in an effort, both valiant and cowardly, to look after them and herself during the terrible suffering of the Thirty Years' War, in which 30 percent of the population of Europe died. And Dodo was not unlike Sorkin's Colonel Jessup, whose idea of the nasty truth that other people can't handle was typical of the even nastier truth that professional military officers can't handle about the real reason they glorify following orders.

But then I think back to how DeeDee shed tears of self-pity when asking for my help in establishing grounds for divorce, maintaining that she'd stayed in a bad marriage and martyred herself for the sake of her children, and how Dodo enjoyed crushing my brothers' spirits by slobbering fatherly tenderness all over them when he wasn't terrorizing them with a strap to their backs in the name of social cohesion, and I have to close my eyes for a moment in order to savor the happy vision I have of dancing the Monster Mash all over their cremated remains, their tiny bone fragments more than their ashes acting as a lubricant to facilitate the rhythmic grinding motion of my feet, like sawdust at a country hoedown.

In other words, Sy, my feelings about my hysterically stupid progenitors will always be mixed.

A final recollection: Before leaving Sonny's room, I made it a point to ride him like a bull free of charge; then mention to him while I was dressing, 'Now you don't have to lie when you tell the police I was having rough sex with you at the time of the fire.'

### Sonny's Comments

Asked how the Tom Wolfe biography was coming along, Sonny said, 'Slowly.'

Asked what Evelyn has against Wolfe, Sonny shrugged, 'She sees a mama's boy's love of strong men in his disdain for coddling the weak. And she looks on his opposition to sparing the rod as a smooch of the sort that gruff managers and coaches give to the backsides of team owners.

Sonny was working on his ninth drink and looking fairly loose when we got to the part of the deposition where Evelyn breezily speaks of the death of her parents. 'She didn't embellish much,' he said. 'I was renting a room in one of her rundown tenements when I heard her outside my door singing the word _kill_ to the melody of...I'm pretty sure it was "Michelle" not "Norwegian Wood" at three in the morning.'

'Did she set the fire?' I asked confidentially.

'It was attributed to a faulty electrical outlet,' Sonny tightened up slightly. 'She may have used the phrase "double parricide," one or twice,' he conceded, 'but only in the context of denying the accusation.'

'In her deposition,' I said, freshening Sonny's drink, 'she suggests you took care of her cat after the fire.'

Sonny nodded. 'When she first arrived, she squeezed two cans of cat food from the pockets of her skin-tight blue jeans and used my can opener to open one, singing to the tune of "Ol' Black Joe":

" _It's comin',_

It's comin',

To a kitty's mouth I know.

She hears a can of tu-na ope-nin',

_Don't...go...slo-o-o-w..._ "

Dumping the contents into one of my two cereal bowls, she filled the other one with water and ordered me to buy some litter. If I lost Little Bitchergirl or let any harm come to her, she warned me on her way out, she'd emasculate me with a pair of rusty hedge clippers.'

I asked if she meant it.

Sonny said, after a longish pull at his drink, 'I bought the litter.'

### Round 10

Not long after my poor parents were cooked, Sonny experienced his own life-changing tragedy – one with none of the positive offsets that came with mine – when he was fired from his dream job.

He'd been doing his rack route for the better part of a year by then, earning the bare minimum needed to pay his rent and buy the Raisin Bran he budgeted for, in addition to his main expenditure – his pot – which he smoked while spending his days making slow but not undetectable headway toward learning the craft of storytelling.

He dropped some weight under these strapped circumstances and for a while never looked so trim or healthy until he lost too much weight and began looking like a refugee. But, spiritually speaking, he was sated.

I choose the word _sated_ advisedly. As in "on the cusp of surfeit." Meaning if you tried to shove another ounce of self-negation down the Paperboy's throat, he'd have popped like a party-favor. He was that blissfully happy to be such a complete and utter cipher.

Of course whenever someone as sweet and pure and true as Sonny becomes aware of the greater suffering of those around him, he's invariably wracked by sympathy pains. Which is what happened when he learned about the five rack carriers whose papers Cross-eyed Jerry and I were pilfering on a grand scale.

It was down to five carriers now instead of six because, in addition to laying off Sonny's racks at my request, Jerry was also laying off of Opal's, a long-haul trucker's wife he was boning when her husband was on the road. Which made life still harder on the remaining unlucky five. And, after learning of their plight, Sonny's happiness – Sonny being Sonny – naturally began to be impinged upon.

One of my nicknames for Sonny was Virtue Incarnate, and I didn't mean it as a compliment. His saintly tricks could get on my nerves at times. Like how, back when he was doing a home-delivery route, before turning over his starts-and-stops list to me, he played the role of censor and ran a Magic Marker through the names of the customers on the less affluent leg of his route near the high school, where the "little people" lived – the engineers and teachers and architects and meteorologists and veterinarians and journalists – the "least" of the Winter Park set who netted no more than the combined income of his parents.

Now a rack driver, his anguish grew as he watched five unhappy colleagues turn into ten; then fifteen; then twenty, as his fellow carriers quit after two weeks of tearing their hair out in frustration over the theft of their papers – which they had to pay for – then worked out their month's notice as required under their contract while replacement drivers were hired and trained and took over the routes until they too quit two weeks later and worked out their month's notice. It was a pattern that indicated an ongoing system of abuse which sweet Sonny couldn't ignore for long.

Though loath to rock the boat, he felt conscience-bound to ask his bosses about it, and when they told him that the grumblings of the rack drivers who claimed they were making less money than they were led to expect when they signed on were lying lowlifes, Sonny did his best to believe it was so, but the high turnover rate suggested otherwise.

Winny hardly ever talked to the Paperboy anymore – miffed over the nose-thumbing Sonny had given his offer of a regular weekly column, conditioned upon returning to school. But friendly feelings still lingered from their early days and when our carnal transactions were concluded, the Fond One occasionally filled the post-intimacy awkwardness by asking after his apostate.

On one such occasion, I decided, purely as a precaution, to mention Sonny's concern over the crippling theft that most of the rack drivers were experiencing.

While I had no wish to put my income from the stolen rack papers at risk, you can never be too careful when dealing with an irresolute opportunist like Cross-eyed Jerry who had that squirrelly aura about him you often see in Confidential Informants.

I figured by mentioning Sonny's concern to Winny now, _en passant_ , I'd be building credibility should it become necessary at some future date to righteously triumph over Jerry by lying more believably than he was capable of telling the truth should he get caught and attempt to mitigate his crime by renouncing Satan and selling out his accomplices. I mean he'd already been caught once and had agreed to be the assistant to the circulation manager to keep his job.

So, as I hung naked upside-down on the parallel bars in Winny's basement gym with my hands behind my head, chuckling at my image in the mirror across the room which put me in mind of a limber yoga master peeking out from beneath his own butt cheeks, I went ahead, knowing that there was little chance the Fond Owner was going to do anything about it, and disclosed Sonny's pangs of conscience.

After thinking over what I'd said, Winny removed his whipped-cream-covered lips from my whipped-cream-covered boobs, which bore, as I say, an uncanny resemblance in that inverted position to my plush buttocks – also whipped-cream-covered, by the way – and parroted some dictum about not wishing to micromanage the newspaper.

When we first began working the scam, it was just me and Cross-eyed Jerry, and the worst-hit racks were the ones most convenient to Jerry's home-delivery route. But after he got caught, Jerry had to give Fat Jack, the circulation manager, his dog-like loyalty plus a retroactive cut on all theft-generated income in return for keeping his job. That's when things got complicated.

The arrangement worked out so well for Fat Jack that a few months into it, he promoted Jerry to assistant manager so they could expand the operation to include two other dishonest home-delivery carriers caught supplementing their incomes by dipping into the racks.

As assistant manager, Jerry had access to all the drop-sites and could enlist the unwitting help of the honest home-delivery carriers whose bundles he was now in a position to short and use those papers to work still more customers off the books. Thereby forcing the honest HD carriers to dig into the racks to get the papers they legitimately needed to finish their routes, and when they called those shortages in to the office and named the locations of the racks they got them from, Jerry was told to ignore their calls and the rack carriers were never credited for those papers.

That went on awhile until one of the rack carriers got to talking with one the home-delivery carriers and found out what was going on and Fat Jack, with a look of jaw-dropping surprise, pretended it was a clerical oversight committed with unimaginable regularity, and cleverly made himself look sympathetic to the rack drivers by boldly instituting a new policy banning home-delivery carriers from making up shortages out of the racks under any circumstances, knowing that most of them had full-time jobs to get to and didn't have time to drive all the way back to the sub-stations for more papers so they would continue to dip into the racks to get the papers they needed to finish their routes and just stop calling in.

Through it all I kept getting my slice of the growing pie without Fat Jack's ever knowing about it, for no other reason than Jerry adored me. Well, that and the fact that the scam was initially my idea and I threatened to put my own faux paperboys to work doing exactly what they were doing if I felt slighted in any way.

Eventually the beating taken by the carriers on those five lousy routes got so bad that you could mark your calendar by the turn-over. Every six weeks a new driver would start his route and be gone six weeks later, claiming, after pulling his coins at the end of each week and paying his paper bill, that he barely broke even. One even swore that he owned more for his papers than he collected one week, a claim Sonny was certain had to be exaggerated until it happened to him the week after he posted his petition.

Sonny's petition was his undoing.

Point the finger at me again, Sy. Because I'm the one who suggested, just as a taunt, that he ought to rekindle his long-lost social-activist spirit and organize the carriers.

And damned if the dummy didn't take me seriously and sit down and type up a statement complaining about the theft, leaving the bottom half of the page blank for signatures. He taped it to the mirror in the carriers' bathroom and all five of the carriers working the worst routes signed it. Sonny made six, signing it out of solidarity though his theft wasn't that bad – until he posted that petition. Up to then his income varied within acceptable limits from week to week, depending on how many parents with athletic kids who'd shined in last night's game grabbed handfuls of papers from the racks for the sports section, or the children of parents who died recently wanted extra copies of the obituaries.

Of course bringing public attention to any inequity in the workplace marks you as a snitch, a crybaby, and an enemy of your owners, and the minute Sonny posted his petition his fate was sealed. His career as a paperboy – his answer to dealing with his humiliations in the least ignoble way he could think of – was effectively dead in its tracks.

Making his situation even worse, he took pains to avoid coming across as a wild-eyed malcontent by offering a simple easy solution to the problem, one that was all too inoffensive and workable. He suggested that since a newspaper's real revenue comes from advertising, why not simply pay the rack carriers a flat fee per paper delivered, like they do with the carriers distributing the free publications to the open racks – The Penny Saver, the Real Estate Listings, the Rollins student weekly, and so on?

Not only would the carriers benefit from the arrangement but the newspaper would increase its overall production numbers, because as things stood, rampant theft was leading the carriers to short their racks in a constant cat-and-mouse game with the thieves, and they were bringing back tons of returns which they didn't even put out.

He also recommended making the papers free to the customers and doing away with the coin-operated racks altogether since they were increasingly getting stolen by drunks and addicts looking for booze and drug money. Home delivery subscribers would pay a modest fee for porch-service, but if the papers were free, the number of customers would soar and so would the advertizing revenue. Result: the best of all possible worlds for everyone.

The only problem with a system that sensible and straightforward was (1) the circulation department was already grossly exaggerating the number of papers being moved and the advertisers were grumbling about the cost, and (2) instituting Sonny's suggestions would mean drastically reducing lower management's power to punish and pet and bully and play favorites and otherwise make chumps of their underlings in the same way that higher management played lower management for chumps, thus keeping every employee on Plantation Earth feeling harassed and hungry and broken in spirit and motivated to please his superiors and lord it over his subordinates.

In short, Sonny's solution, despite increasing the paper's bottom line, would have been intrinsically anti-humiliation and therefore anti-competition and therefore anti-business and, ultimately, by extension, treasonously un-American.

When word of his petition reached Fat Jack's desk, his days were numbered. He wasn't canned right away, but the seditious document spelled the end of his dream-career, and I told him as much.

' _Paperboy is now your superhero name!_ ' I exulted, permitting him a free motorboat, pushing my tits together on either side of his rotating head while he wet his lips and blew.

Winny's reaction was exactly what you'd expect. Coming as it did on top of his refusal to be molded into a Lifestyle's writer, Sonny's petition did nothing to lessen the Fond Owner's sense of betrayal. After reading it, a faint sigh of dismay leaked from his prim lips. No further articulation of his feelings was needed for Fat Jack. That barely audible exhalation prompted the head of circulation to turn livid with outrage and storm from the publisher's office as if carrying a written order to hang Sonny from the nearest tree.

He whistled for Cross-eyed Jerry, his go-to boy, who immediately came to heel for a planning session which Fat Jack for some reason liked to do while using the john.

The minute their meeting broke up, Jerry caught his breath and ran to give me the news: 'Open-season has been declared on Sonny's racks,' he said. 'And there's nothing I can do about it,' he apologized.

'Is he fired?' I asked.

'As good as,' said C-eyed J. 'They'll do a show-investigation first and pretend to look into his complaint while robbing his racks blind. Then, after a few weeks, if he hasn't given notice, they'll can him under Paragraph-15.'

'Paragraph-15?'

'The clause in the Independent Carrier's Contract stating that either party can terminate the agreement without cause after giving thirty days written notice.'

'Giving the paper time to find and train another carrier?'

'That's the way they do it.'

'So, whether a carrier gets fired or quits, either way Paragraph-15 works entirely to the benefit of the newspaper?'

'It's a standard clause.'

I gave a low respectful whistle, like Yossarian after hearing Doc Daneeka's definition of Catch-22. 'That's some paragraph that Paragraph-15,' I said.

'It's the best there is,' said Jerry.

Later that day I offered my condolences to Sonny and tried to make a teachable moment of this turn of events by explaining to him the fundamentals of business, still hoping to get him to partner with me and get rich. 'Baby,' I said, 'think of the flim-flam games on the midway. Your strawbosses are carnies and there's no such thing as honor among carnies. While it's true that every carnie is also a rube being cheated by bigger carnies and every rube is also a carnie cheating lesser carnies for a bigger payday, in the newspaper business the only total rubes are the paperboys who sit at the bottom of the pyramid of carnies. And at the pinnacle sit Winny Senior and Winny Junior: Messieurs Barnum and Bailey. They are never rubes.'

But apt as my analogy was, Sonny still wanted no part of my revenge on an unjust society.

I told him he was lucky his pal Winny was running the paper over the summer months because if an underlings as gung-ho as Fat Jack had seen Winny's old man wince with displeasure, there's no telling how far he might go. 'He might have read into Big Daddy's body language a clear directive to assassinate you!'

It's a frightening fact that on seeing their owners suffer the most trifling inconvenience, proud slaves will take it on themselves to inflict untold punishment on the source of that suffering, ranging from job-loss to ostracism to police harassment and worse. I told Winny as much and he said, 'Huh?' as he says to all such frightening facts.

A week after posting his petition, Sonny changed his Sunday prices over to the daily rate, emptied his coin trays and made his tally and found that he owed the _Commercial Press_ more than he collected. A shortfall that repeated itself every week for the next three weeks while his bosses pretended to look into his complaint. Which meant Sonny was out of pocket to pay his paper bill, in effect drudging twenty hours a week for negative income.

But instead of threatening a lawsuit for unfair practices or carrying his complaint to a labor board or a union organizer or marching up and down with a placard in front of _The Commercial Press_ , he shouldered the injustice like a seasoned dish-rag and went right on doing his route, proving once again that he had no stomach for any sort of sustained confrontation with the status quo. The champion of the downtrodden had shot his bolt with his petition.

When management finished up its phony investigation, it concluded Sonny's complaint was groundless and he was given four weeks' notice.

At which time, the doormat, after being pink-slipped, continued to run his route for less than nothing, fulfilling his contractual obligation to do his route for an additional four weeks rather than say fuck you and sue the bastards for wrongful termination or, as I recommended, go on a workplace killing spree.

At one of our demimonde sessions, I casually mentioned Sonny's subzero income to Winny, and the Fond Owner could not have pitched his voice with a more poignant blend of haut-monde grace and de-rigueur sorrow when he said, 'Huh?'

In firing Sonny, he might have spared his old friend the indignity of doing it face-to-face, but he didn't. Letting Sonny go by proxy would be bad form, Winny said, so he extended an invitation to a sit-down with Fat Jack, at which meeting Winny promised to be present to monitor and dispassionately evaluate Sonny's case in order to ensure that the ex-Paperboy understood exactly why he was having his ass kicked to the curb. 'Masked torture,' is how Shelby Foote characterized such courtly shows of kindness when I shared this humorous anecdote with him years later.

When I tell you I had to drag Sonny to said sit-down, I mean I literally had to drag him to said sit-down.

I insisted on the right to accompany the lamb to slaughter, knowing that without me it would amount to just another shameful episode in Sonny's endless flights from a lifetime of insults he was too weak to answer at their source. Not that there was any hope of any actual redress. There rarely is. But at least with me by his side there was a chance that some mischief might be accomplished.

We arrived at the _Commercial Press_ at the appointed time and were accorded an over-cordial welcome by Tim Bass, Chief of Operations, a community college dropout who effectively ran the newspaper for 70 years, until he died in office a few years ago. Good old Bass-Ass made it a point to know where all the bodies were buried.

Escorting us back to the conference room, he ushered us in. Behind me I could feel Sonny trembling uncontrollably with terror as I pulled him through the door.

It was me and the canned Paperboy on one side of the long conference table versus Bass-Ass, Fat Jack and the Fond Owner on the other. A helmet-haired secretary was positioned at the head of the table some distance away to record the proceedings in shorthand for future redacting in the event of a lawsuit...

Looking back, I like to think of that meeting as my _Scent of a Woman_ moment – except that the ruling went against the railroaded protégé I was there to defend. It might be more accurate, as the details come back to me, to call it my "Scent of a Dog" moment since I deliberately stepped in pile of dog shit outside the front door prior to the showdown, just to liven things up a bit.

Bass-Ass wrinkled his nose as he took the floor to M.C. the proceedings. He opened with a bland noncommittal statement about the normal everyday mistreatment that paperboys are subjected to all over the world and are expected to put up, ending with, 'And so, in the interest of fairness, Mister Chimes has called this conference to hear your side of things...'

That's when I rose on Sonny's behalf and addressed the opposition with an air of easygoing contempt, calling their attention to the obvious scam that is the Independent Carrier's Contract. 'Which management,' I horselaughed, 'likens to the Magna Carta, ringing out freedom throughout the land for the little people even as you proceed to dupe the over-trusting souls into signing their lives away, knowing that the contract serves to protect only the interests of the newspaper, primarily by limiting the company's liability in the event of traffic accidents, hence the word "Independent," but also as a way of denying the newsies any benefits and giving them zero bargaining power when faced with any changes in the duties that management decides to impose on them after they've been hired, giving you time to train new carriers when the old ones quit in frustration over all the hoops you make them jump through.'

Winny sat serenely through my opening statement, looking too ethereal to be moved by such appeals to mundane concepts like social justice and human decency. Bass-Ass, following his lead, rather overdid it by suavely studying his nails. Only Fat Jack took the bait and asked if I was calling Mr. Chimes deceitful.

I winked at Sonny and wrapped an arm around his neck before he could duck. 'Play along' I whispered in his ear.

Then, putting my ear in front of his mouth, I pretended he was whispering something back to me for a solid minute.

Finally, I straightened up and told Jack with the same loosey-goosey pugnacity I'd used in my opening statement: 'Not exactly, Fats. Sonny says he's calling you all a bunch of stupid lying cowards. But worse than that, he's calling you all _deliberate_ stupid lying cowards.

Fat Jack came forward in his chair to glare Sonny.

'Personally, I think he's wrong,' I added in the interest of accuracy, 'I don't think you're _deliberately_ stupid lying cowards. I think you're _hysterically_ stupid lying cowards. But Sonny's too honest to understand the hysterical component that infects the souls of simpletons like you. He doesn't know you like I do. He accuses Winny in particular of hosting this oh-so-solicitous hearing as a way to _willfully_ lie his goopy ass off about his fake benevolence and flaunt the horseshit fiction that he's devoted to fairplay while enjoying drawing out Sonny's humiliation. And he's accusing you, Jack Shit – which is by the way what all the carriers call you behind your back – of being Winny's dick-licking hatchet man, making your living by coercing the poor carriers with threats and bribes to submit to these abysmal, shit-eating conditions in the workplace.'

Sonny didn't really say any of that. I did. And it would have been nice if Winny had taken offense. But he just sat there looking mildly baffled. Bass-Ass cut his eyes over at Winny for his cue and looked more baffled. Only Fat Jack bridled, not at the insult to him but at the insult to his master.

'Did you just call Mr. Chimes a coward?' he asked Sonny.

I feigned another consultation with my client who was quaking like a fever patient under my arm, too petrified to speak. 'Are you deaf?' I said when I straightened up. '"A stupid lying coward," is what Sonny said. Those are his exact words, and he'll be glad to spell them for you if you like and give you the precise dictionary definitions and the Latin etymology of each opprobrious root word.'

'I want to hear it from him,' snarled Fat Jack.

I covered Sonny's head with my head again, nodding every few seconds. Sonny was in reality too paralyzed with fear to utter a peep, but I could barely hold in the laughter pretending otherwise. After a minute I faced forward and said: 'Sonny says he has a touch of laryngitis this morning, but he's asked me to clarify that we're all physical cowards, especially you, Jack. But the cowardice he's referring to is a worse form of cowardice than the physical variety you're talking about. He's talking about the moral and intellectual cowardice you reek of – all of you.' I swept my hand across the table to indicate the lot with casual contempt.

'You watch your mouth, mister!' Fat Jack snarled, his bulldog jowls jouncing in anger.

I calmly sat down to be nearer to Sonny who looked in need of some mothering, and using my left hand under the table to tug at my right elbow which was next to Sonny, I leaned over and feigned some more consultation. After a minute I faced forward and said to Jack, 'Sonny says that while your physical cowardice wasn't the form of cowardice that _initially_ offended him, you now appear to be going out of your way to prove that you _are_ in addition to being a moral and intellectual coward of the first order also one of the worst _physical_ cowards it has ever been his misfortune to know.'

'We're going to take this outside in about three seconds!' Jack menaced.

I pretended to consult my client again, then looked up and said, 'That, says Sonny, and I'm speaking verbatim here, is exactly why you're such a thoroughgoing coward in every sense of the word, right down to your big fat cowardly toenails. Because, as Sonny notes, you wouldn't be so quick to challenge Muhammad Ali to a fistfight, but you're just itchin' to fight someone you know you can beat up. And picking fights with people you know you can beat up is the very definition of physical cowardice. The cowardice of backing down from a fight you don't stand a chance of winning is nothing compared to your brand of cowardice, Fats. So says Sonny, and I'm quoting.'

That little exercise in shaming seemed to make Jack uneasy, and he sat back in his chair and stopped staring a hole through the jittery ex-Paperboy, though his jaw muscles continued to pulse.

At that point I knew the day was mine. Jack was clearly a spent force. But I was having too much fun to let up and I put my ear to Sonny's mouth again, and pretended to share some more make-believe communication with Jack. 'Sonny says that you have been overheard on the dock to say that a monkey could run a rack route.' (I had this straight from Cross-eyed Jerry). 'And Sonny concedes that may be so. But Sonny offers the further observation that a monkey do all of _your_ jobs as well, including the publisher's. The only difference is, Sonny makes this critical distinction, that to do a rack route, the monkey would need a driver's license.'

'Jack's ears shot up like an attack dog's and he looked intently at Winny, begging for the "kill" command.

Winny looked benign.

Jack said, ' _Please_ let me take this jackass outside and teach him some much-needed manners!'

I huddled again with Sonny.

'Sonny says he's willing to sign a written statement of physical inferiority, conceding that you're capable of beating him to a pulp if you'll sign one admitting that you stole from him and lied to him and that you are now and always have been and forever will be a stupid lying thieving cowardly unscrupulous company fuckboy.'

Fat Jack's pig-eyes were pinwheeling with homicidal rage as he jumped up and said he wasn't putting up with anymore of this shit and he stormed from the room.

He did not shut the door behind him, which I recognized as a gesture of contempt, and, skipping to the threshold, I bellowed down the hall in a voice that could be heard from one end of the building to the other, 'DON'T GO AWAY MAD, JACK! SONNY DOESN'T REALLY THINK YOU'RE STUPID! SONNY THINKS YOU'RE A VERY CLEVER THREE HUNDRED-AND-FIFTY-POUND HEXAPOD IN HUMAN SHAPE!"

My words were still shaking the walls of the upper offices as the Unbearable Bass-Ass brought the meeting to a bumbling close.

And the following day, looking like the embodiment of Majestic Suffering at the Hands of Bloody Commoners, Winny called on Sonny in person and took the only chair in the shabby room Sonny was renting in one of my tenements before delivering his rueful stamp of approval on Sonny's termination.

He was doing Sonny a favor, he drawled, adding with infinite goodwill that Sonny had too much to offer to be making a career out of delivering newspapers. With a grimace, he took in his surroundings and observed that living in such squalid conditions was beneath someone of Sonny's potential.

It was Winny's most poignant appeal to date to get the Paperboy back in school and stop wasting his life. He explained that a paper route is considered a starter job – the assumption being that the aim of all paperboys is to work their way up to positions in which they can serve their owners more ambitiously.

'It's all just so perverse,' Winny echoed his wish that Sonny would call a halt to his foolishness and go back to putting his heart and soul into some more dynamic form of servitude.

And later that day, between achieving multiple orgasms in Winny's Olympic-size swimming pool by pressing my clitoris against the inflow pipe of the pool's filtration system, my future spouse listened as I expressed my understanding at his taking Jack's side. 'He keeps _The Commercial Press_ ahead of the competition, mainly by the expedient of fudging on the number of papers being moved – especially but not limited to the free publications, like the TV Listings, The Car Shopper, The Rollins College weekly and so on – thus hoodwinking the various small-business owners who buy ads in all those publications – advertising being, as Sonny accurately pointed out, the paper's real source of revenue.

'Of course there's no way,' I sweetly observed, 'you guys could get away with the level of fraud being perpetrated without giving the slickos who handle the promotional activities at the various grocery stores and car dealerships and bowling alleys a little taste – but I think one or two of the _owners_ of those establishments might resent being so brazenly swindled if the truth came out.

And Winny, before tripling my fee for the evening's performance – entirely his idea this time, not mine – said, 'Huh?'

### Sonny's Comments

Sonny said the first he heard of Evelyn's stealing from the racks was when he saw her deposition. And when he asked if it was true, she gave him one of her how-bout-them-apples! chucks on the chin and chortled, "Ain't life a kick in the head!"'

Asked if Evelyn was trying to get him clobbered by Fat Jack, Sonny recalled the following anecdote: 'After watching me get clobbered in the sixth grade by a fourth-grade bully, Evelyn felt so sorry for me – or disgusted – that she typed out a written statement declaring my physical inferiority. She made three copies and told me to carry them on my person at all times and fill in the blanks and sign one the instant anyone challenged me to a fight.

'The statement read, "To whom it may concern: I, the undersigned, of sound mind and health, do of my own free will and without undue pressure or coercion hereby admit that _____ is my physical superior and capable of beating me into a crying cringing pantspissing quivering whimpering jelly. Signed _____ and dated _____."

'It worked surprising well the time my Boy Scout squad leader threw me across the room and threatened further violence on me for something I said that he considered disrespectful. But it wasn't much help later on when I was mugged working my rack at Hardees.

'Rodney wrote a song to mark that unhappy occasion,' Sonny remembered. 'To the tune of the old Marty Robbins hit "El Paso City" it went:

" _Orlando Cit-teeee,_

By the rack at Har-deeees,

I turned my back, felt the bandit's attack,

A blow to the head,

_And he left me for dead..._ "

'The truth is I saw the bandit coming and gave my money up without a fight, even though I had a box cutter in my pocket for snipping my bundle straps. I was so scared I forgot it was there. Not that it would have made any difference.'

I asked what happened to the other carriers who signed his petition, and Sonny said, 'Management juiced their racks for a couple of weeks to get them to withdraw their signatures. Then when the threat had blown over, they went back to their old ways, knowing the carriers' complaints carried no weight anymore because they'd allowed themselves to be bought off. And they had my example of how futile it was to organize.'

Sonny added that Fat Jack and Cross-eyed Jerry were eventually caught when one of the rack drivers got fed up enough to go to the expense of putting Xeroxed notices in all his papers saying, "If you got this paper delivered to your home, you're reading a stolen paper" and to please call him. He got tons of calls.

Sonny said 'Jerry was made an example of: fired and forced to pay restitution. Jack cried and vowed to reform and made such a heartfelt act of contrition that he was relocated to perform the same duties at another newspaper in the Chimes media conglomerate, where he was caught again and sent, after some more conspicuous blubbering, to yet another paper, like a disgraced pedophiliac priest.'

### Round 11

Sonny had been a conscientious paperboy who took his paperboydom seriously. During his time as a rack driver, if we bothered to run the numbers, we'd probably find that he made more money for the paper on a monthly basis than any other driver before or since. Particularly after he posted that petition and lower management began robbing him blind, since he had to pay for all those stolen papers.

All told, counting his home-delivery route, the poor baby delivered _The Commercial Press_ for 12 straight years, getting up at the crack of dawn every morning for 4383 days without a day off, working weekends and holidays without a single vacation, no sick days, no perks of any kind, faithfully serving the Chimes family in fair weather and foul, only to be summarily dismissed from his dream-job for trying to help his fellow rack-drivers, thus dashing his hopes of continuing to get up at the crack of dawn 365 days a year without a day off for the rest of his natural life, receiving no bonuses, no raises, no health insurance, not even a free paper anymore – a policy that was discontinued in the interest of meeting projected increased annual profits – all of which humiliation he was willing to endure in his struggle to avoid doing something even more ignominious than delivering newspapers, like writing for one.

The worst of it was, just when it seemed that his arduous search for a satisfactory way of coping with life's horrors and humiliations had finally produced solid results – to Sonny's humble way of thinking anyway – he was back to ground zero, and this time he sank so deep into the slough of despond that I felt moved to reach in and pull him out.

Not right away, but after a few days.

In the first flush of anger, after the ex-Paperboy refused once again to adopt my world-view and join me in getting rich, I evicted the jobless loser from his rented room and had PooPoo take possession of his belongings, including the hand-painted Baby Blue Rambler, for defaulting on his lease. But a few days later, compassion overcame my better judgment and I went looking for the poor bum and found him living under the floorboards of the ramshackle house he'd been evicted from. He was sharing the crawl space with a couple of mangy mutts that the other tenants compassionately fed their table scraps to because they couldn't stand to see them starve to death. They did as much for Sonny, but they played no favorites. Sonny had to whine for his dinner and yelp joyfully when it arrived just like the others bony curs.

'How the unmighty have fallen,' I observed as I whistled him up from his wallow so encrusted with grime that he looked like he was wearing dirt clothes. After hosing him down, I installed him in one of the two Victorians I was gentrifying near the Rollins campus, purchased with the insurance money I got from the house-fire that charbroiled my parents.

In exchange for room and board Sonny pitched in with the gentrification, performing various home-improvement tasks with such a painstaking attention to detail that I had to rebuke him for being _too_ conscientious.

'You have to set standards,' I reproached my other workers, 'and take care not to fall too far below them.' But with Sonny, I was forced to add, 'Or rise too far above them either...'

Sonny's pace was glacial. What a professional could do in an hour, Sonny could accomplish in two...weeks. Experienced carpenters and plumbers were hauling down eight bucks an hour in those days – the equivalent of 35 of today's dollars, adjusted for inflation – and even after doing the same job three times before it passed my inspection, the experts were still cheaper than Sonny, who consumed around five bucks worth of food and pot per diem, because the pros worked 80 times faster.

If I'd paid Sonny by the job he'd have starved to death. But that's how I paid the others; never by the hour – satisfaction guaranteed before I would cut a check. As in the case of the poor house painter who came highly recommended by the Historical Society. He chose Annapolis Grey for the exterior of one of my rehabs. But when he finished, the color reminded me of concrete so I had him repaint with Georgia Peach, which I liked better. The H.S. was aghast, and on further inspection, I could see some merit in their objection. In the full glare of day, the south wall in particular evoked a Bahamas-beach-house ambience. Something darker would be closer to the "vintage brothel" I was going for by then. So I had him paint the house a third time in what the cards called Tangerine Beguine.

Gazing on the new color with a sovereign eye, I saw that it was good. 'Peach is just peachy,' I told the exhausted painter, 'but Tangerine has more a-peel.'

A year or two of road-soot gave the place exactly the hue I wanted and the community raved over it, favorably in some cases. The five young hookers I let the place to on a percentage basis to service the rowdy frat boys in the neighborhood couldn't have loved it more.

Sonny's perfectionism wasn't the only thing slowing him down. He'd gone back to writing his novel, stealing time away from my projects to pursue his own. His opus-in-progress was now a satire targeting the bosses who'd recently fired him. By gently ridiculing their behavior, he said he was hoping to induce them to become better people and behave a little less shamefully in the future. His main characters had morphed from the happy sharecroppers into a Paperboy named Buddy and a beautiful, imperious girl-next-door named Barbara, or "Barbacuda" as she was known to her multiple boyfriends. The storyline went as follows: Buddy gets fired from his paper route; joins the beautiful Barbacuda in kidnapping the newspaper publisher's hysterically stupid son, a classmate of theirs named Monty, short for Montgomery. Things go horribly wrong in a darkly comic sort of way during the side-splittingly funny ransom imbroglio, and everyone's life ends up a little worse than before, except for the beautiful girl-next-door who comes out smelling like a rose.

It was a précis that had literary masterpiece stamped all over it to my mind. After reading a few pages of it, I found myself laughing _with_ Sonny for once, instead _at_ him. In fact I was so impressed, I came back gushing with suggestions, including swapping his kindly, affectionate Horatian brand of satire for the sardonic Juvenalian brand I favored. But Sonny was adamant about keeping the gentler tone.

Even so, my influence was not unfelt.

For instance, where he wanted to use the Paperboy to narrate of the story, I convinced him to let the livelier, more playful girl-next-door tell it. Because her delivery was...well, livelier and more playful.

And where his idea had been to make the Paperboy and the girl-next-door both hard-luck, grubby, semi-literate kids from the wrong side of the tracks, living in the same trailer park, I was able to convince him that he was employing a cynical marketing stratagem there, aimed at capitalizing on cheap sympathy for the plight of the poor while disarming liberal condemnation of the girl's ruthless determination to get rich, a formula which let the executive class off _way_ too easy, rendering the whole work a morally craven distortion of reality and a stinking rotten mile-high midden of hackneyed overwholesome sentimental pigshit.

Sonny was too honest to disagree and made the necessary changes.

As his novel progressed at a snail's pace – the way Sonny did everything – after a hard day's work of putting together two or three sentences that he didn't entirely hate, the tuckered belletrist would knock off in the evening and we'd fire up a joint and have a little fun at Winny's expense by filling up the Fond Owner's Sound-OFF! answering machine with the dopiest things we could think of.

Scurrilous commentary on famous literary figures was my specialty.

For example, I might kick things off by telling the answering machine: 'Listen, cuddlecakes, I just finished reading _Out of Africa_. And I'm not saying the Baroness Blixen isn't telling the unspeakable truth about her servants when she observes how willful they are when begging her favor or proudly vouching for her superiority over the masters of other servants, or the embarrassment she noted in her number-one servant when she didn't act imperious enough around the lesser servants or how disappointed a really true-blue servant feels when his master neglects to give him the thrashing he feels he deserves on those occasions when he gets above himself, because those observations are doubtless true of all lackeys in every age and on every continent. But to my ear, if there's any irony in her amateur anthropologist's detachment, it's not intended to subsume moral judgment to the scientific ideal of clinical observation. On the contrary, to my ear she's trying to keep from busting out laughing at the sight of slaves degrading themselves, which she thinks is simply precious. Cute as a damn button, in fact.'

Then Sonny would call to say, 'Today's my birthday! Whoopee! Nose-hair clippers! Thanks, honeybunch!'

Then I'd call to lament, 'Some say J.D. Salinger burned himself out with the honesty he put into _Catcher in the Rye_ and subsequently lapsed into a diabetic swoon over Andy Griffith and Lawrence Welk. I say he went to a helluva lot of trouble to make lovable old Holden as sweet as old Andy and Lawrence put together.'

Then it was Sonny's turn, and he'd call to sing a verse from "Jimmy Crack Corn." ' _One day he ride around de farm; the flies so numerous they did swarm..._ '

Then I'd call to say, 'Fuck "The Swimmer"! That's just the sort of fantastic story university pundits feel safe in praising because they know their self-unknowing owners can easily duck its implications. Cheever's best story is "The Crimson Van"!'

Then Sonny would call to say, 'What does a polite baboon say to the mate he's grooming? "Pass the fleas, please!"'

Then I'd bellow a sequence of increasingly frantic commands to the ghost of Ernest Hemingway – 'Keep it up, UP! UP! UP! YOU BEER-BELLIED BUNGLER!' – as if he were making a botch of doing his uxorious best to please me sexually. A skit I stretched out over the course of five calls, as the poor intern monitoring the system – probably a Papa-lover who resented my fun at the expense of his hero – kept beeping me off before I finished getting off.

Then Sonny would call to crow, 'It's Friday and we're having fries!'

Good times, Sy... I don't remember exactly when I began deliberately offending Winny by taking every opportunity to share my literary opinions with him, but the practice continues today. 'Tweedledum,' I relished telling him as recently as last week, 'Stephen King tiptoes around the real horror of life. There's ten times more horror inTennessee Williams' _The Glass Menagerie_ than there is in all of Stephen's sensational yet essentially conventional, socially punch-pulling novels with the possible exception of _Rage_ , which he's pleased to see out of print because it would hurt his overall sales to say otherwise.'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

And not long ago when the Sweet Patron of Happy Art thought the novel _Suttree_ was disturbing on a scale that I could appreciate, I scoffed because all I wanted to do after reading it was wring Cormac's delicate neck for getting me all excited and then leaving me unsatisfied by doing nothing more than dropping a few coy hints as to the _reason_ behind Suttree's disaffection, the little twat-tease.

Winny said 'Huh?'

As for the Poised Pad's greater appreciation for James Joyce's later work over his early work, I told him flat-out that he finds _Ulysses_ preferable to _The Dubliners_ because of its prophylactic impenetrability.

Winny said, 'Huh?'

Of course Winny knew who was filling up his Sound-OFF! answering machine with all those jeering messages, but he couldn't _prove_ it was me – no caller-I.D. in those days, praise low-tech. So I felt free to add my thoughts on firebombing _The Commercial Press_ for its mistreatment of its carriers, on the high-minded grounds that I can't stand social injustice unless I'm the one committing it.

I was ready to make good on those threats, too, and have PooPoo torch the place if Sonny had given his okay, but he wouldn't.

As the evenings wore on and the hour grew late enough to where one felt safe in assuming the day's chores were behind us, Rodney would drop by to cadge my liquor, my pot, and my insights.

The Charmboy and I were no longer robbing houses together, but he and his new partner Snags, a one-time cook on a river barge, fired for insobriety too many times to be rehired, would often, before knocking, have carried up to my porch an item of interest – maybe a 100-year-old, hand-carved armoire he claimed was once the property of Sam Houston or a Persian rug he swore dated back to the time of Xerxes, which the boys had borrowed on a permanent basis from one of the abandoned country manses they scoped out while meandering the back roads drinking and loafing during the day, to return in the dead of night to make off with whatever treasures might be lying about and offer me any that might compliment my Victorian décor at a few dollars over what PooPoo was willing to cough up.

Rodney had a good eye for antiques and Snags had a flatbed and a strong back needed for transporting the heavier chifforobes and such.

Our close partnership in crime had dissolved the day my folks went up in flames. I told Rodney it was time for me to leave the burglary business behind as I stair-stepped my way up to owner-class status. But, to tell all, by the time the house-fire boosted my assets to a level where I could afford to ditch the Charmboy as a business associate, he was already taking the best of the stolen merchandise directly to PooPoo and cutting me out of the loop.

During his visits, it was only a matter of time before Rodney brought the subject around to Sonny's paper route. When they were younger he used to apologize profusely for being the catalyst behind it. And the day Sonny made his decision to quit school and become a career paperboy, Rodney was not slow to pick up on the pain and frustration it caused Sonny's parents. No one expressed more devastation on the outside or was more jubilant on the inside than Rodney at seeing their plan for ensuring Sonny's social responsibility backfire. And now that Sonny had been fired from his job, Rodney doubled over with an aching display of indignation at Winny's mistreatment of his poor cousin to match the inner glee he felt over Sonny's suffering.

Inflicting ironic sympathy on people was something Rodney took to a high art. I thought of him not long ago when reading the famous poem "Please, Water, Hear My Pleas," in the novel _Wigfield_ , which made me laugh so hard I peed myself. It was classic Rodney.

But the thing the Charmboy loved more than inflicting ironic sympathy on people was inflicting "accidental" death on people.

Rodney was one of those thrill-seekers who drop everything at the sight of a flashing red light and chase after it, hoping for a major conflagration at the end of the line. But where most people addicted to witnessing disasters get off on the feeling of having escaped the tragedy themselves, Rodney's excitement was less convoluted: he was hoping to find dozens of crispy corpses dead in their beds after the fire was put out, or a gruesome highway fatality with bloody body parts strewn over four lanes of the Interstate.

But the thing Rodney wanted more than any other was to be the blameless cause of another person's death: to be at the right place at exactly the right time to destroy a human life, or better yet multiple human lives, and escape even a whiff of culpability for his actions.

For instance, to be the person who happened to sell to the charred family that faulty space-heater that started the fire, or the one driving right behind that fatal car wreck at the exact moment it was happening and to see its victims catapulted from the spinning cars and flying through the air in front of him, men women and children, also family pets, who might otherwise have survived the accident if he hadn't dexterously swerved ever so slightly to make sure he ran them over, squashing their skulls like cabbages and their smaller organs like smaller vegetables. That was Rodney's beau ideal. The crowning apex of his hopes and dreams.

It's what moved him to distract Snags with a story of the nookie he was about to sink his tongue into at the drive-in just before the girl told him to ignore the white cream she'd applied to her yeast infection while Snags laughed and inadvertently backed his truck up over a child on a tricycle. Ditto the suicide he caused by pretending to have no idea how emotionally unstable the cross-eyed daughter of his landlord was, whose affections he'd been toying with for months until the girl was literally mad to marry him. Also the hypodermic filled with nothing but air that eventually stopped Snags' heart.

Almost as dear to him were the many close calls and near misses he was responsible for. Sighing woefully, Rodney relished telling the story of the friend whose left leg and half his face were scraped off when they were out riding their motorcycles without helmets one day and Rodney caused him to ride over a stone and lay down his bike. Also the story of the loose knot he saw on the rope-swing over the swimming hole which he did not mention to the person who dropped 15 feet and landed on his head on the riverbank, rendering him quadriplegic for life.

If not the full-bodied satisfaction he found in completely wiping a human being off the face of the earth, those injuries provided a sweet fraction thereof.

You may be wondering why I didn't try to urge Rodney to deal more productively with his slave-rage. Urge him like I used to urge Sonny to come over to my way of dealing with life's insults. The answer is our priorities were just too different. Rodney was a natural-born pirate who couldn't convert money into pleasure quick enough. He lived a pill-to-mouth existence, destined like so many rebels of his purer stripe to die young, often with needles in their arms, like Snags.

He was not so different from his Cousin Sonny in the sense that neither was interested in owning a big chunk of Plantation Earth. But Rodney lived by his wits, spending tens of thousands of dollars a year on speed, where Sonny barely eked out a living as a paperboy and later, by the grace of my patronage, as a hod carrier. So, in another way, the two were quite different.

Whenever Rodney dropped by my fixer-uppers to mooch my booze and Bogart the bong and listen to me and Sonny fill up the SoundOFF! answering machine, he'd stick around till I said something he liked; then he'd bolt, taking my insight with him to the college bars where he'd repeat it and get stood drinks on the strength of it, until by closing time he could barely stand up. At which point, driving home shitfaced, he'd catch a DUI.

It happened again and again.

The first time was after hearing me compare him to Cousin Lymon in Carson McCullers' _Ballad of the Sad Café_.

'Remember,' I told Winny's Sound-OFF! answering machine, 'how Carson so incisively and indelibly described the spell Cousin Lymon cast over the people in the Sad Café. Miss Mac wrote: "People are never so free with themselves or so recklessly glad as when there is the possibility of commotion or calamity ahead." Well, that's a spot-on one-line description of the heart and soul of Rodney.'

And at the bar, Rodney told the patrons, 'Remember how Carson so incisively and indelibly described the spell cast by Cousin Lymon over the people in the Sad Cafe...'

He didn't even substitute the word "me" for "Rodney" he boasted to me the next morning after his mother bailed him out. He spoke of himself in the third person and repeated Carson's pearl of wisdom all up and down the Strip till closing time.

'And the Rollins literati ate it up!' I never felt so admired in my life!' he said.

Weaving his way home, he was happily figuring out the precise dollar amount to which he'd exploited my insight in terms of drinks and comestibles – a pizza was ordered for him at one establishment – when _Whoop!_ a cruiser lit him up...

Within a year he'd put his poor mother in the poor house. Dilsey went from reasonably well-off to broke to inextricably debt-ridden, sacrificing everything for her darling boy. She lost her savings, maxed out her credit cards, triple-mortgaged her home, which was subsequently foreclosed on, forcing her to move into a trailer, all to pay the lawyers to spare Rodney the hardship of doing any serious jail-time.

It was great sport for the Charmboy, who had the morals of a cat, and whose mother, until she ran out of money, was the handiest mouse around.

As far as career-goals went, Rodney's highest aspirations in life were (a) carnie-barking or (b) televangelism.

Carnie-barking would have been his dream come true. He used to practice his pitch on us. 'Step right up, ladies and gents, and see the miracle of the ages that is Ophidian! Yes, Ophidian is her name! A naturally malformed female, born with no arms or legs! Found in the wild when she was barely a year old, she's full-growed now and has never wore a stitch of clothing in all that time! Completely au naturel for your wonder and inspection! Come one, come all! She stuck her tongue out and hissed at last person who tried to dress her! Showed her teeth and threatened to bite him if he tried it again! Watch her undulate in all her sinuous glory! One thin dime...'

His fall-back position was televangelism.

Apropos plan B, I remember walking in on him one Sunday morning while he was watching TV in his mother's house-trailer. I was there to take possession of their new refrigerator while Dilsey was at church. The heist would pose no hardship for Dilsey because she'd got the extended warranty which included theft insurance, and I was careful to give the money to her, not Rodney, even though I knew she'd only use it to pay for his lawyers.

While my boys dollied the appliance out to the truck, Rodney gallantly spread a dishtowel over a puddle of dried puke on the sofa next to him and invited me to sit and watch the famous Billy Graham preach up a storm on TV. Declining the seat, I lingered long enough to point out the seminary-taught strategy of alternately tenderizing and terrorizing a congregation.

'This,' I instructed the Charmboy, 'is the tenderizing. He'll hold that tack for a few minutes before delivering the terror. ...Get ready...Look for it...right...about... _now_! Give 'em hell, Billy!'

Rodney's mouth fell open in amazement, which is how I like people to react to my analytical prowess. Then he was up and out the door like a shot. Only to return a minute later when he realized the bars weren't open yet.

At 18 he became a regular fixture on the Rollins College Strip, reaping the benefits of my Sound-Off! insights and gaining a reputation as a sort of drunken wonder boy, a young Wizard of Oz who appeared to drink his way to stupendous revelations about the nature of man and society, and then at least once a month pick up another DUIs on the drive home.

Inevitably, the little ape started believing his own press, compelling me from time to time, on hearing my wisdom repeated back to me with an air of originality, to smush a grapefruit in his face or put a cigarette out on his arm. But for the most part our dealings remained cordial.

It was around this time – stitching our deposition right along, hon – that I embarked on my abortive pot-growing enterprise.

It so happened that in addition to the home insurance and the life insurance and the settlement from the electrical contractor and the real estate income from my strip mall and part interest in a suburban housing development as well as my father's slim, play-it-safe portfolio of blue-chip stocks (all of which he flung in my face the night I boasted to him about my Eatonville rentals), my legacy also included a fallow 80-acre tract of swampland a few miles southwest of town. Ostensibly the least of my inheritance, it was intended to be a country retreat, a plot on which the poor Roasted One was looking forward to erecting a modest hunting lodge as a private getaway after his retirement – his final earthly reward, he told me, after a lifetime of providing for his ungrateful family.

It was now mine, and, looking over the deed to the acreage, I hadn't a clue what use I could put it to.

My first thought was to sell it. But before I even had time to put it on the market, someone made an offer, and I grew curious and rode out there to have a look around.

The place was a veritable sinkhole, so wild and wet and desolate and rank with vegetation that I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to build there – certainly not a permanent residence – which is what the prospective buyer told me he intended to do.

I sensed something afoot and wondered what it might be.

Driving home in that suspicious frame of mind, I was struck by an idea as wild and (as things turned out) as rank as the property itself: I decided it was the perfect spot for growing pot. I remember thinking that could very well be what the man who offered to buy it had in mind. True, he looked a little too old and respectable for that line of work, but he also struck me as shrewd, a bit of a smoothie.

These thoughts and conjectures come naturally to the business-minded, Sy, but in this case I was wrong. About the pot, anyway.

Wrong or not, the next morning I set out to transform that white elephant of an asset into an oasis of productivity by trying my hand as a pot farmer. To which end, I told Sonny to read up on horticulture, specifically the cultivation of hemp, and I fronted Rodney the money to buy a seedy lid of the most potent pot on the market to add to the seeds I'd already been saving.

Sonny's researches would teach him how to sprout the seeds between wet paper towels wrapped in tinfoil and placed in a warm spot. After two days he transferred the seedlings to styrofoam cups filled with potting soil.

Marijuana, Sonny discovered, is a ruderal plant, which means it grows well in waste, and behind a ramshackle sharecropper's shack on my property was a fallen-in hen house whose floor was thick with a layer of chicken shit two feet deep. Sonny made liberal use of those droppings as fertilizer when transplanting the seedlings to the ground. And the operation was off and running.

I provided the brains and capital and land and entrepreneurial will; Sonny and Freddy provided the grunt labor.

When deer and rabbits decimated our young plants, I moved the boys out there full-time to rough it in the battered sharecropper's shack and keep the herbivores at bay by setting out some Ol' Roy for the stray dogs that hunters typically abandon at the end of deer season to starve to death rather than meet the expense of feeding them throughout the year. (Gillies take delight in telling it like it is to the soft affluent hunters they guide, watching their sickly accommodating smiles as they drive off on that last day of the season leaving swarms of barking dogs running after them, remarking: "Hell, man, any damn dog will run a deer!" Bastards.)

For cover, I enticed PooPoo's mildly retarded older brother Boise who made bent-willow porch chairs for a living, to set up shop in the sharecropper's shack. At the sight of the "willow wonderland" (Rodney's phrase) covering the bulk of my 80 acres, Boise's eyes lit up and he agreed to my proposition; especially as I promised that Sonny and Freddy would cut all the material he needed to his specifications and deliver it to the front yard.

I also contracted to buy all the chairs he made at his regular price, five dollars a unit, confident I could resell them at a 400 percent mark-up with the help of Marsha, a decorator renting a storefront in the strip mall I inherited.

And so Boise went to work building his rustic chairs, unaware of the nearby patches of pot that Sonny and Freddy were tending in dozen different locations, each sown with about twenty plants apiece.

Before we knew it, the crop was up over our heads.

Cannabis needs room to bush out, but for all his research Sonny thought it grew like goldenrod, and he spaced the plants too close together. Reaching for the sun like Jack's beanstalk, each patch soon had a canopy high enough to walk under. Around the perimeters, where there was available light, they filled out, making a dozen enclosed bowers. I called them copses, a word that generally apply to trees but our plants grew as tall as small trees, reaching a height of fourteen feet, according to the write-up they got in _The Commercial Press_ after the bust.

Despite Sonny's oversight – which he promised not to repeat the next season – I was seeing dollars signs. Rodney, who used to drive out there to pilfer late at night, remarked that between Boise's willow chairs and my pot, I was determined to prove that money does indeed grow on trees.

The months passed; the nights grew cooler, and the plants started to bud. They dropped their big sucker leaves called "shake" which is typically discarded. But our crop, grown from the best seeds and stressed due to overcrowding, produced a surprisingly potent shake that got you higher than most of the buds on the market at the time. That made it worth saving and the boys gathered up all they didn't smoke and stored it behind my parents' burned-out house in one of the unused outbuildings on Winny's estate. It eventually filled 19 liquor boxes.

'Good old nature and nurture working together! Start with hardy stock and whip it regularly: a proven formula for success!' said Rodney who sampled the shake and pronounced it mighty fine.

PooPoo, who was to be our principal distributor, agreed, but he wasn't going to bother marketing shake when something a better was on the way, and we all sat back to wait on the buds to fully mature.

As they lengthened, Rodney began showing up almost every night to pick his guitar and blow his harmonica and sing his songs of anguish over man's inhumanity to man; and boost a pocketful of buds by moonlight after putting the tired laborers to sleep with his lullabies.

He'd been known to peddle a little Illinois Roadside around town in years past, but the weed he peddled now – my weed – outstripped even Panama Red for quality, and suddenly the Charmboy was the best buddy to every midnight toker in the county. His popularity, it goes without saying, went straight to his fat little head, and watching him swagger around like some campus football hero being stood drinks at the bars and getting energetic bjs in the bathrooms by the potheads he was turning on made his mewling complaints all the easier to ignore when I put his ass to work to pay for his thieving.

'Good _God_ , Evvy, the _heat_! The poison _oak_ , woman! The poison _ivy_! The stinging _nettles_! The _water_ moccasins! And, Jesus-Joseph-Mary, the insects! The mosquitoes and gnats are bad enough! But the _ticks_ and redbugs! And the _fire_ ants and wasps and those pesky sweat bees that won't leave a body alone! They're unbearable! The worst are those cute little green _caterpillars_ with the venomous hair! They pass the limit! I have a doctor's note saying I'm allergic! And that shack is _rife_ with fiddleback spiders! It's a wonder Boise's still alive! I guess they don't bite black people! They nest in that cardboard some tenant tacked up for insulation! They _pullulate_ in it!'

Come October, he had to help haul water up from the creek. Brief afternoon showers in Central Florida are a daily event over the summer months, but a dry spell threatened our crop in the fall and Rodney was called on to pitch in with the irrigation. That's when he fell into some quicksand, and we liked to never hear the end of it.

'This weren't none of that _slow_ sand like you see on TV or in the movies!' he emoted stark horror. 'No _ma'am_! I was up to my armpits before I could holler _MAMA!!!_ '

### Sonny's Comments

When questioned about Evelyn's help with his novel, Sonny said, 'She didn't spare the red pencil. Her comments usually started with the words, "Too formulaic." And then she'd add, "Avoid giving perfectly nuanced flaws to your characters in a calculated effort to keep them from looking too bad or too good."

'Or "Too formulaic. Stop creating soluble moments of mystery and suspense that toy superciliously with your intellectual inferiors."

'Or, "Too formulaic. Stop creating eternal cosmic conundrums that give the mystical impression you're more ethereal than the average vulgarian."

'Or "Less art, more matter, Slick-o."

'Or "Give some dentures to this toothless pumpkin of a passage."

'Or, "Pick up the pace, Ace."

'Or "Insert some carefree bullshit now and then (here for instance) to break up the pious flow of finding the hidden virtue in everyone, including Proud Slaves, Fond Owners and Adolf Hitler. There's a fuck-humanity component to every great work of art."

'Or "Back off on the breezy cocktail-party wit, twit. You're approaching if not hard aground on the shoals of facile fatuity. There's a fuck-humanity component to every lousy work of art."

'Or "Bitter harangues are like the sight of a starving dog eating a soiled nappy. _Suggest_ the smoldering rage that gets us out of bed in the morning. Appear to be careless of the humiliations that lacerate our souls. Give wings to your work by telling the brutal truth about our suffering with just the right touch of detachment.

'Or "Less sorghum, sweetums. You're pouring it on like that Cunningham farmboy drowning his dinner in syrup [a Harper Lee reference].

'Or "Psst! Your slip is showing, dear – I mean the tawdry appeal of deliberate ambivalence."

'Or "Get on with it! Your delivery gives the _appearance_ of being snappy, but you're going nowhere fast; did you take some of Rodney's speed before going to work today?"

'Or "Bravissimo, Paperboy! Casual and combative in just the right mix and at the expense of just the right targets! Take a bow!"

Sonny credited Evelyn with the idea of making Barbacuda's father a former professional football player, sidelined in a chapter she called "The Sinister Number 13." In it, the dad shows himself to be a superstitious lowbrow who, on losing count of the squats he's doing in weight-training, does an extra two to avoid ending up doing 13, and with the last one, he blows out his knee. It ruins his career as a professional athlete and he has to go to work at a regular job which fills him with such feelings of worthless workaday normalcy that he embarks on a suicidal drinking spree and nearly drinks himself to death before being saved by the ministrations of his wife, a bosomy former high school prom queen, who persuades him to think of their two boys.

'Taking her advice, the "gimp" (as Barbacuda dubbed him) goes back to school; earns his PhD in Political Science and justifies his subservience to his masters by zealously embracing patriotism, rightwing politics, and a staunch authoritarian attitude toward his sons, combined with an unshakeable belief in himself as a great humanitarian. He becomes a professor at Harvard where he lectures on the historical inevitability of motivated capitalism prevailing everywhere around the world, including the Soviet Union sooner or later. His asininity draws the admiration of Robert McNamara (who turned into Henry Kissinger in later rewrites), who gives him a job as a policy-adviser in the Johnson administration. It is in that capacity that the "gimp" couldn't be prouder when both his sons die bloody agonizing deaths in Vietnam fighting to make the world safe for capitalism.

'I thought one son dying in Vietnam would make a sufficient statement,' said Sonny, 'and she bowed to my judgment. It was my novel after all, she said, going on to take issue with my working titles – _The Paperboy and the Girl Next Door_ was one; _Please Try to Behave a Little Better, Boss_ was another. Her suggestion – _Paragraph-15_ – was the one that stuck.

'...It was really her novel,' Sonny concluded.

When asked about the intellectual property Rodney stole from Evelyn and took to the bars and was stood drinks on the strength of, Sonny said, 'He took her insights not just to the college bars but to the redneck bars as well, spinning them in different ways, ruing here what he cheered there, denouncing there what he celebrated here, and being bought drinks in both venues until, even with the aid of his pep pills, he couldn't walk straight. Or, more to the point, drive straight.

'According to Evelyn, thanks to the Janus-faced appeal of Rodney in combination with his eidetic memory and natural stage presence, Rollins College became a hotbed of liberal unrest in the mid-60s, while the surrounding countryside simultaneously became a bastion of reactionary fervor. And Rodney, in quick order, collected a total of 13 DUIs.

'There were times he'd lose track of which room he was working, only to be snapped back to reality by the menacing sound of silence so he could reassure the rednecks that he was only testing their patriotism or tell the college crowd that he was only verifying their humanism, thus saving himself a pummeling in the parking lot of a country tavern or an icy snubbing in the bars along the college strip.

'Not all of Evelyn's insights needed spinning,' Sonny went on. 'Some appealed universally to the same rebellious spirit in all drinkers and thinkers. "In the name of raising healthy productive members of society," Rodney held forth everywhere, "our parents train us to obey our owners just as surely as Orcas are trained to jump through flaming hoops at Sea World. And when the occasional rogue whale with a fighting spirit turns on his trainer, he gets labeled a fiend and is put down – euthanized – with a fulsome show of sorrow and regret. But who's really the fiend?"

'Liberal and redneck patrons alike lined up to pour beers down him with a funnel when he said things like that – the funnel being Rodney's signature move.

'Such was his celebrity that he was able to sneak Freddy and me in with him without being carded (we were only 17 at the time), so we could listen to him infuse Evelyn's insights with his own special theatrical flair.

'Insights like: "Katherine _Anne_ Porter's _A Ship of Fools_! Now _there's_ a rare instance of the movie doing _justice_ to the novel!"

And we'd watch the better-read patrons ready the funnel.

'It was Evelyn's comment on Joseph Heller that got the lucky dog taken home one night by a hot American Lit. professor.

'Plagiarizing verbatim from Evelyn's _Catch-22_ lecture (which she filmed, dressed in aviator's sunglasses, her father's dress uniform cap with the grommet removed for a more rumpled look, a cigarette in an onyx holder, and nothing else – she had her own panache), Rodney observed that Heller compared the flippant tone of his famous war novel to Nabokov's _Laughter in the Dark_ and gave generous credit to Celine's _Journey_ , in which the protagonist was determined to avoid military service in World War I, " _But why_ ," Rodney asked, "didn't Joe mention John Cheever's _The Wapshot Chronicle_? Did _John_ perhaps give a pass to blurbing _Joe's_ book?"

'Rodney added (as Evelyn had added) that _Catch-22_ was better than anything Cheever ever wrote in his (her) view, but dodging combat duty was clearly, if not the leitmotif, then a howlingly funny aspect of _The Wapshot Chronicle_ , published four years earlier than _Catch-22_.

'That parroted literary acumen,' said Sonny, 'won the heart of the beautiful professor, a favorite at Penny Loafers Sans Sox on the Strip, who was clearly famishing for some intellectual stimulation which her students and colleagues were failing to provide. She fell ravenously on Rodney and took him back to her apartment where she made the point that "Some critics think Heller made those references to Nabokov and Celine to ground his work in high-grade literature instead of Borscht Belt comedy. But you're absolutely right! Why snub Cheever? It wouldn't have hurt to name an American he no doubt admired! Cheever very likely snubbed him first!"

'At which point, Rodney dug an even deeper hole by plagiarizing one of Evelyn's thousands of SoundOFF! calls. Looking off into space (he told us this later) he wondered, as he'd wondered for many a bedazzled beer-buyer at the college bars over the past weeks, "Do you think _humanity_ might have been spared World War Two if Hitler as a young artist had had a more _evolved_ sensed of humor, capable of appreciating the combative _potential_ of hyperbole and caricature as weapons for expressing his _rage_ through dissident art? Instead of a militarist whose slave-rage led to the deaths of 70 _million_ people, he might have become a _cubist_ and a pal to Picasso and _Stein_!"

'The intellectually starved professor was so bowled over by that Evelyn-generated insight that she threw Rodney down on the floor and consummated their relationship then and there, ravishing him with a scary voracity that mirrored Rodney's own sexual practices with ingénues.

'It was all downhill after that, said Rodney.

'The next morning, knowing how much Evelyn relished the cringingly painful truth, he omitted no embarrassing detail when confessing that during the course of the long night's journey into day he managed, left to his own devices, to thoroughly disappoint the educator over and over again in every department, both libidinal and intellectual.'

### Round 12

All through the long hot summer Boise kept steadily churning out those porch chairs, and they were piling up. The man was a chair-making machine, producing three a day on average. And he was not so dumb that he didn't demand payment on completion.

At five bucks a chair, I could afford to shrug it off at first. But after three months, I was sitting on an inventory of over 200 of the damn things. Marsha, the decorator renting a spot in my strip mall, had moved only 50 or so and she had to come down to a 100 percent mark-up to accomplish that, which was her profit margin, meaning I got nothing out of her except my monthly rent.

You do the math, hon. By mid-September, I had a 1000 dollars tied up in rustic willow porch chairs. They filled the shack, most of Marsha's stock room at back of her shop, plus the hairdresser's waiting room next door and the TV repairman's disabled van out back, and they all expected me to knock down their rent a bit for the favor. Sonny and Freddy had to sleep under them on pallets at night. Boise had the only bed in the house but to reach it he had to pick his way through a maze of his own chairs stacked to the ceiling.

Any chairs set outside immediately sent down roots into the swampy terrain and sprouted leaves and became living chairs, or else rotted and sprouted mushrooms, or both. It's the nature of willow.

Any time Rodney saw me paying Boise, he took the opportunity to push for a sales trip to the flea market in New Orleans.

'Just look at all these beautiful examples of romantic gypsy art poor Boise has worked his fingers to the bone to lovingly craft, just sitting here collecting dust and mold! Soon there won't be room to do his framing! Tell her, Boyz! Don't be shy, brother! We need to reduce this inventory!'

He was angling not just for Boise's support for the sales trip, but also for the use of his truck.

The day I banged my knee on one of the chairs and cursed it, he sensed my vulnerability and stepped up his campaign. He knew he could wear me down if only he could get Boise's truck. But he had his work cut out for him there. Because just yesterday he'd called Boise a moron and the chances of borrowing his truck were poor to none.

How Boise felt about Rodney on any given day followed a close pattern. For a few days of every month Boise hated Rodney, and for a few days of every month Boise loved Rodney, and in between those hot and cold antipodes, his emotions were conflicted and confused.

That dynamic pretty much describes what passed for social interaction between Rodney and just about everyone, aside from his mother Dilsey who worshipped him unconditionally. Which made playing Dilsey for a chump tediously easy, whereas playing Boise for a chump was no end of fun.

The rules of the game were as follows: He'd call Boise a drooling moron and Boise would hate his guts for a few days while Rodney bent over backwards to apologize and do penance, keeping it up for as long as it took to get Boise to drop his guard and start loving Rodney again. At which time Rodney would call him a drooling moron again.

Rinse and repeat, as we say these days.

With each cycle, Boise naturally grew more leery of his tormentor, obliging Rodney to work ever harder to get Boise to forgive him the next time so that as soon as he gained the chairmaker's friendship again, he could enjoy the fun of calling him a moron again and get hated again so he could start apologizing all over until Boise loved him again, and so on.

At the moment Boise was in no mood to do him a good turn. Which meant Rodney had to bring the full force of his charm to bear by doubling and redoubling his groveling over the next few days, digging a fairly deep trough at Boise's feet before he was through.

At first he made little headway. Things dragged. But in the matter of getting over on someone, Rodney was no quitter. The emoluments he offered included banana splits and brasserie burgers from Dairy Queen, where Rodney ate free thanks to a slip-and-fall lawsuit. He called them "brassiere" burgers, of course.

Finally, after a solid week of what had to be the most disgraceful exhibition of effusive fawning and cosseting any member of the human race has ever stooped to, Boise came around and starting loving Rodney again and gave him permission to use his truck. The energetic show of heartfelt thanks Rodney showered on him was, it goes without saying, in reality an expression of self-congratulations on the captivating power of his own inescapable charm.

Then the very next day he called Boise a drooling moron again and Boise went back to hating him and took back his offer of the truck.

Which was fine by Rodney because the night before his mother had come through and swung a personal loan from her dead husband's misogynistic ex-boss in return for painful sex. And she'd used the money to buy Rodney the flashy pickup he'd been hounding her to buy for months, so there was no need of Boise's old clunker anymore.

His prize was a restored '53 Ford pickup. A tricked-out, candy-apple-red Mexican cutie. 'Jubilee edition, boys!' Rodney crowed, rolling up in it: '350 Chevy engine! Rolled Tijuana upholstery! Wide butyl tires! Ain't she a beaut, moron?' he addressed Boise.

'I figure we can carry forty chairs,' he turned to address me, 'stacking them five high! We may have to detour around a few low bridges, but at twenty a chair, that's – well, you figure it out! A sales trip is in order, Empress! After expenses you'll clear 500 easy!'

The Charmboy knew the way to my heart. And yet the second I okayed the sales trip, I knew it was a mistake. How big a mistake, I was about to find out.

Sonny did his best to wriggle out of going, but someone had to keep an eye on my investment and do the driving. Not that Rodney let a little thing like a revoked license stop him from getting behind the wheel, but I wasn't going to have my chairs impounded and sold at auction to pay his fine if he was pulled over.

'No!' said Sonny. 'Absolutely not.'

'Sweetums,' I said.

'I unequivocally refuse!' Sonny put his foot down.

There was also the matter of Freddy, who had been jollied by Rodney into a state of eagerness to join the boys for a weekend on the road, and someone had to look after him.

'Darling,' I said.

'I won't! And that's final!' said Sonny.

'Sugarplum,' I said.

'There's nothing you can do that will ever induce me to –

'Baby Dumpling,' I said, pulling up my shirtfront.

'Aw, Jeez...' he withered.

Rodney was dancing in ecstasy as preparations got under way. Selling was his métier, after all. The thrill of hoodwinking people was in the blood: his father had been a professional salesman, first selling popsicles from his Good Humor truck; then whole life for Mutual of Omaha. As a Good Humor salesman his policy had been to concentrate on the working-class neighborhoods, staying abreast of which factories were booming, and staying away from areas where they were not. As a Mutual of Omaha salesman his signature gambit was something called "poling a lineman," the basics of which involved starting his day out with a little snort as he hit the road to scour the places where the evening before he'd used his revolver to shoot out a couple of transformers. Locating a poor lineman up a power pole in jacklegs making repairs, he'd stop and ask directions. Then he'd linger to tell a joke or two and go on to schmooze his mark to find out if he was a family man before guilting the hard-working rube into buying a policy to protect the faithful wife and kiddies lest he fall and break his neck or brush up against a hot wire and explode in a ball of flame...

Rodney liked to boast that his dad had been sentenced to community service once for shooting a tricky black man who handed out four dollars worth of ice-cream sandwiches to all the kids on his block and then refused to pay for them. But he was most proud of that poling-a-lineman stunt. It took a special somebody willing to work long hours kissing up to people, often for less money than factory workers drudge for, to originate a scheme as rancid as that, was his point, 'and Daddy was definitely one of those somebodies!'

And yet as often as he bragged on the old man, that didn't stop him from "accidentally" killing him when he developed heart trouble in early middle-age. Rodney achieved the murder by the simple expedient of embracing the trappings of the counterculture and growing a ponytail and dating a black girl (who he made call him Mister Rodney), and otherwise aggravating his father to the point where he suffered a minor coronary at dinner one night and died on the operating table the next morning in the middle of having a stint inserted.

Within a year, Dilsey, the poor widda-woman, as Rodney began calling his mother at the funeral, managed to lose every penny of her husband's life insurance, in addition to the house which was free-and-clear after his death till she mortgaged it three times over to keep Rodney out of jail on those multiple DUIs.

Of course nobody rued the death of his dad more than his killer. Particularly when it came to blaming his addiction to drinking-and-driving on the trauma of losing a beloved father.

Grief also played a role in securing that peacock of a truck which he pressured his mother to buy with the insistent lament that 'Poor Daddy would understand! Daddy would know we'll never get top dollar for those chairs if people see us rolling up in Boise's rusty old rattletrap! And the smell! Oh, Mama, the smell! You know what I'm talking about! That darky scent you say doesn't bother you, but it does most people, particularly people with money!'

Riding high now, Rodney swigged Early Times and prattled nonstop words of encouragement and inspiration to Sonny and Freddy as they helped Boise load the truck, happily foretelling the _bon temps_ they were about to enjoy in The Big Easy where, as it turned out, the chairs were a big hit.

Driving through the night – my cost-saving idea – they arrived at the flea market at daybreak and sold every chair but one, going steadily up on the price and regretting at day's end that they didn't ask more for them from the beginning.

They all did their part. Rodney's salesmanship would have done his father proud. When one prospect tried to drive the price down by pointing to the head of popped nail which might snag his clothing, Rodney assured him that true artisans have a saying that only God is perfect and so they mark their creations accordingly with a flaw. Adding, under his breath: 'You'll see God's praises sung all over these goddamn chairs...'

'What's that?' said the prospect.

'Nothing. Nothing. Only that the popped nails serve as great back-scratchers!'

Any time a sale started going south, he'd palm the customer off onto Sonny, knowing that Sonny's honest shame-ridden face would push it through.

The industrious trio finally knocked off at a little after noon, and made a beeline to the nearest titty bar to celebrate their success. There they proceeded to blow the bulk of their profits on overpriced drinks and generous tips inserted into the various cracks and crevices of the strippers until Sonny finally got them out of there at around one a.m.

But the party was only getting started. In front of the seedy motel they checked into, Rodney made the acquaintance of Randi-with-an-i, a sweet underage hooker in mesh stockings and padded bra who he invited back to their room.

The girl claimed to be 18 but looked closer to 15 said Freddy and might have been as young as 13 Sonny groaned.

It was Randi-with-an-i's life's ambition, she told Rodney with stars in her eyes, to be an exotic dancer when she grew up.

'Well, I'll be!' said Rodney suavely taking the girl under his wing. 'Did you hear that boys? If God don't work in mysterious ways! This is your lucky day, little lady! It just so happens I'm a seasoned connoisseur of the art of seductive dance, introduced to it as a mere lad by my dear departed daddy, God rest his soul, right here in your fine city! A strong patron of the traditional school of burlesque, the old scamp was! Since then I've become versed in the modern runway style as well! In point of fact, me and the boys here have just come from furthering our research on the subject!'

Ushering her into their motel room, Rodney switched on the radio and dialed it to a blues station and was soon giving Randi the benefit of his personal hands-on instruction in pursuance of her chosen career...

'No, no, baby! Like this! Watch and learn, hon! A little more bump, a little less grind! That's it! Now down with the panties! Slowly! Slowly! Let me help! Ro-o-o-ll them partway down...now back up again. Be sensual about it! Don't forget to smile! Now stick that butt out! _Way_ out! It's a sweet one, honey! Nice! All the way off with the panties now and use the elastic to shoot them off your thumb into the audience! Oh, that's so nasty! Now flaunt that big juicy thing! Don't be shy! Be proud! Wiggle it! Excellent! _Excellent!_ Be still my heart!'

I can picture Freddy drinking in the girl's ample behind like one mesmerized. Poor Sonny, meanwhile, distanced himself from the proceedings by going up to the office to buy a newspaper from the rack. He lingered there awhile, hoping when he got back to the room Randi would be gone. But on his return, not only was Randi still there but she'd taken a special shine to him and appeared for some reason to be performing exclusively for his enjoyment, keeping a bright come-hither look fastened on him the whole time she jiggled and gyrated and undulating buck naked a foot in front of his newspaper which he sedulously tried to keep his nose buried in.

He might have guessed that Rodney had orchestrated the whole thing. I mean, while AIDS was unknown at the time, facilitating the transmission of a dose of some non-lethal STD would have afforded Rodney a small measure of accomplishment.

'Psst! Cuz! She wants you first, bud!' the Charmboy whispered loudly over the R&B as Sonny finished the op-ed page and, still scrupling to engage in a clear-cut case of statutory rape, took up his pen and turned to the crossword puzzle.

'Comon, man! Look up! You're hurting the poor girl's feelings!' Rodney chastised the party-pooper between whoops of encouragement at Randi.

His impatience at Sonny's failure to get with the program increased until, halfway into the next song, he removed his belt, and while Randi pranced and shook and shimmied and blew kisses at Sonny, he stood behind her and held his doubled-up belt over her head, one end of it in each hand, and repeatedly snapped it taut while smiling maniacally, as if savoring the thrill of whipping and/or strangling Randi.

'Some like it rough, Cuz!' he flashed his eyes.

Long story short, Sy, it fell to poor Sonny to save the teenybopper's life, or at least avoid a charge of forcible rape by having unprotected sex with an underage prostitute.

According to little bubba – he of the goggling unblinking eyes – that's how it played out.

According to Rodney, Sonny was tenderly pumping away in gentle fatherly fashion, when Randi verified his assessment by looking over one shoulder and assuring him in a giggling rebuke that she wouldn't break.

'Might I add,' Rodney informed me loftily in a voice full of more dignity than any human being deserves, 'that your magnificent fanny isn't the only one Freddy likes to bury his nose in. _I_ ' he added with a sanctimonious sniff, 'was the only one who did not partake of her bounty!'

...Ip. It's Winny again, boys. Smoke 'em if you got 'em...

'Intruding again so soon, dear? I thought you'd reached your quota of interruptions for one day. ...As a matter of fact I did make a few helpful suggestions along those lines. Did who's-it call you at the hospital to wish you a speedy recovery and complain? ...Well, since you ask so nicely, that posthumous bio of Vidal he's been assigned to review is a total hatchet job, chock full of inaccuracies, and I want him to mention one or two. ...For instance, it's not true that Gore hated everything. ...Yes, he called himself a terrific hater, but he admired the work of Tennessee Williams and Iris Murdoch and William Golding. And Gore didn't exalt man's devouring nature; he simply called it a fact of life. He said it was asinine to deny our rivalry, but he thought celebrating it was just as stupid. ...I have it straight from the horse's mouth, hon. ...In the pool house one night, he snickered in my ear, "To imagine that we humbly serve our masters because we're sweet and pure and true and not because we fear to defy the powerful people who control our lives is just as dishonest as a good soldier's belief that he fights and dies for those who control our lives because he's valiant and loyal and not because he fears to defy them." ...Crass of you to ask, sugar, but of course we fucked. ...Well, Gore was given to that sort of Flashmanesque bluster, wasn't he? But I started out on top and finished on top. Frankly I was no more interested in his pleasure then he was in mine. ...No, I did not "turn" him, hon; Gore was bi. ...Well, I didn't take a ruler to it, but it was adequate to the job. ...Listen, puddin', I'd love to discuss the dimensions of Gore's cock another time, but right now I'm in the middle of filming a deposition for the Honorable Judge Sy. ...No, scooter, I'm not usurping anything from you. I'm just filling in while you recuperate. I count the moments till you're well enough to resume your duties. ...Yes, of course. Tell your boy he only has to make the emendations I recommended and I'll be glad to run the piece. Now don't over-exert yourself, dear. Wait till you're feeling better and we'll talk further.'

Bu-bu-bu-bu-buh. So many writers these days – even the most dissident ones – shy away from exchanging insults in public. Unpracticed at badinage they end of sitting through interviews seething with murderous hatred – most of it directed at themselves for being too cowardly to kill the interviewer. But Gore was an excellent trash-talker. Naturally Winny never cared for him. Brain-dead before the accident; brain-dead after the accident; he'll be brain-dead till the day he dies. After that, it won't be so noticeable anymore.

So, Bob-tail, where were we?

Ah, yes, the sales trip...

Reconstructing events from the various reports I got after their return, the boys quietly hit the road late the next morning while Randi slept off the effects of the booze and whatever pharmaceuticals Rodney fed her the previous night.

To soothe his conscience, Sonny slipped ten dollars into her purse before they left along with a note wishing her every happiness and hope for success in her future endeavors, whatever career path she chose to pursue.

My grilling of Freddy confirmed that the dopes not only squandered most of my profits at the titty bar, but on the trip home they got as far as the outskirts of Slidell before stopping at a redneck dive for a cold one at around ten a.m. Two hours later, when they were ready to leave, they found that Rodney's fancy souped-up truck wouldn't start due to a misaligned starter motor that had ground the flywheel teeth down to nubs, forcing them to remain at the bar for another four hours while the truck was being worked on at a nearby garage.

The adventurers utilized their time – in the tradition of meandering homeward-bound dolts down through history – romancing the local honeys to the growing resentment of the local swains who sat at the next table and seemed all in favor of the influx of newcomers at first, until as time went on, they saw that Sonny wasn't going to let the girls cut Freddy from the herd, and the swines (sic) grew impatient.

When the truck was finally ready, after paying for the new flywheel and settling their bar tab, the big spenders found they were dead broke. The news fazed all but Rodney who casually bade a merry adieu to the girls, telling them he was California-bound and with a flourish of his pen, he awed them with his literacy by writing a made-up phone number on a napkin where he said he could be reached in case they wanted a guest-spot on _Gilligan's Island_ , a TV show he said his brother Bob Denver was the star of. Then he led the boys with something between a stroll and a saunter in conjunction with a bit of a mosey and a strut out to the truck. They were halfway across the parking lot when gunshots rang out. And seconds later, gravel spewed like projectile vomit from under those wide butyl tires as they roared away under a hail of lead.

Now _that_ – unlike his pressuring Sonny to screw Randi – I maintain was an instance of Rodney's penchant for "accidentally" killing people.

He knew Sonny and Freddy were nowhere near as quick as he was to run, duck, and roll when the situation called for it. Like psychopaths everywhere, the Charmboy prided himself on his jungle sense of vigilance when leading others into danger. Take my word.

Their bumbling drawn-out odyssey did not end there. The feckless knuckleheads made it as far as Cross City, where they ran out of gas. Outside a Jiffymart, broke, thirsty and sitting on empty, they realized they'd have to sell that last chair to make it home. But when they looked in the bed of the pickup, it was gone. Somewhere between Slidell where they last gassed up and Cross City, the one chair they hadn't sold at the flea market had fallen of the truck.

Imagine their relief when Rodney informed them that, on seeing Sonny sneak that ten-spot into Randi's purse back at the motel, he'd sneaked it back out again. It was enough for a six-pack of Pabst, and they pumped the remainder in gas and managed to drag their sorry butts home.

The second I saw them coming up the drive, I knew the worst. Their hang-dog looks told the story. Particularly Rodney's, who overdid everything.

Not only did they squander my 500-dollar profit at the titty bar before Sonny finally got them out, they failed to recoup my initial investment – the 200 I'd paid for the rustic porch chairs Boise had hand-crafted so lovingly and stacked ten feet high and tied down, using cardboard buffers so the bark wouldn't rub off during the journey. Those two bills had gone for truck repairs and beers for the Slidell floozies. Also the hundred in start-up money I gave them for gas and lodging and the flea-market fee. The three stooges blew every last penny.

Bottom line: their legendary first and last sales trip, instead of putting me 500 to the good, put me 300 dollars in the hole.

I apprised all three Good-time Charlies that 900 bucks (800 plus penalty) was coming out of their end of the pot profits – 300 apiece.

I was especially disappointed in Sonny for not pulling the reins on his cousin. Drinking in strip pubs and getting half-and-halfs from aspiring underage exotic dancers, forsooth! That wasn't the Sonny I knew, and I gave him an earful on the subject.

As for Mister Salesman Extraordinaire, he got a steely warning of the consequences should he ever "accidentally" kill my brother. No matter how unconnected the circumstances of his death might _appear_ to be – "If lightning should happen to strike Freddy..." I presaged The Godfather's famous line.

We were tasting Stingers at a bar called Tubs at the time. I'd never had a Stinger before but all those sweaty colonial civil servants in Somersault Maugham's South Seas stories seemed to be devoted to them so I was curious. After being told by the mixologist on duty that it was brandy with a splash of crème de menthe, I ordered a round just because they sounded so vile.

Wincing with my first sip, I pointed out the window and said to Rodney, 'See that dog leading that pack of strays down the street? See how he manages to get back to the shoulder just in time to save himself from being hit by passing cars while leaving the younger, dumber mutts out in the road?

'That lead dog is you,' I told my attentive listener, who was nodding his head to beat the band. 'And that little pup that just got hit by that bread truck and is now squealing and limping off to find a place to die alone, whimpering in agony, before the rest of the pack go back tonight to feed on his carcass?'

Rodney nodded avidly, on pins to hear to the punchline.

'That dead doggy,' I said coldly, 'is Freddy.

'And the only reason I don't go out and shoot that lead dog in the head right now,' I said, patting my purse which the boys all knew contained the rusty 45 that I kept under my mattress at night, 'is because the innocent dog he caused to get run over isn't _actually_ Freddy.'

Rodney literally fell over backwards, riding his tall barstool all the way to the floor at the accusation, a performance meant to indicate how flabbergasted he was at the very notion that I could think him capable of doing such an awful thing to my sweet brother. The tumble confirmed (a) that my accusation was correct and (b) that my metaphor was understood, and I called for a round of house bourbon to cleanse our palates of the foul taste of Stingers.

To finish the story, Sy, I sent Boise and Sonny up to the flea market the next weekend with better results. In addition to the bedrolls they had to take because Boise couldn't get a room at the Howard Johnson's in those days, they took some raw willow and a crowd quickly gathered to watch the champion chairmaker in action.

Newspaper and magazine articles followed. Guilt-ridden white people wanting to declare their compassion for poor black special-needs victims were lining up to put in their orders and I would finally realize that 400 percent mark-up I'd envisioned and a little more. To enhance sales, I encouraged Boise to act dumber than he really was when interviewed by the newspaper cadre. And to wear a slouch hat and bib overalls with a single gallus.

### Sonny's Comments

I wondered at Evelyn's lack of caution when it came to Rodney's impending treachery, meaning the pot, and Sonny exhaled and said, 'She admired his combative joie de vivre, even if she thought how he dealt with life's humiliations impractical and lowdown in many respects.

'And he was quick with a quip,' Sonny added.

'As the pot-growing season progressed and she put Rodney to work to pay for his pilfering, I remember we were out cutting willow for Boise one day – well, _I_ was cutting willow while Rodney was lying on his back cloud-gazing and smoking a joint and advising me to shitcan the cast of lackluster losers in my novel and ghostwrite his moneymaking story about lovable losers – when suddenly I felt the onset of an episode of vertigo. My head began to spin and I grew nauseous and weak. My limbs went limp and I starting panting like a bellows. And Rodney, noticing me in extremis, chose that moment to sit up and open his mouth in a rictus of agony and wail, "Son-o, I don't know about you, Cuz, but I'm _Winded in the Willows!_ "

'Another time,' Sonny went on, 'Rodney brought Boise a watermelon as a peace-offering, in an effort to get back on his good side, but Boise wouldn't let him use his willow knife to cut it. Fashioned from a rusty section of an old two-man saw, Boise's willow knife was about the wickedest piece of cutlery I ever laid eyes on. It looked like an elongated meat cleaver, sharpened to a razor's edge, with a looped metal handle welded to one end. The old gypsy who taught him how to make the chairs gave it to him before moving on and told him not to dull the blade with other uses, an admonition Boise regarded as sacrosanct.

'So Rodney was forced to bust open the watermelon with his fist. The first meat he scooped out with his dirty fingers he passed to Boise. The next chunk he offered to me, and when I recoiled, he whimpered with a wounded air, "Jeez, Son-o, I'm just trying to be communicable!"'

As for the mystery behind Randi-with-an-i, Sonny said, 'Right before she fell asleep she gave me a cunning sidelong look and confessed that Rodney had told her my deep dark secret.

'My what...?' I asked, kneading the bud of her left breast which she'd placed my hand over.

'You're Patty Duke's little brother in real life!' she giggled knowingly.

I sighed and had another drink. I didn't bother to correct her, but it explained a few things.

### Round 13

The state investigator showed up in person to tell me about the bust. I answered the door in a see-through teddy to confront the tanned, ruggedly handsome, very official-looking Detective Efrem, who seemed a little too intent on showing me just how unimpressed he was by my hourglass figure.

He gave a curt, 'No' to my breathy invitation to come in, and went on to inform me without missing a beat that Sonny and my brother Freddy were currently in custody, under arrest for the manufacture of cannabis.

In portentous tones he filled me in on the parts played by a Mr. Rodney Rannygazoo and a Miss Misty Morningfall in the events leading up to the bust.

'Sunday last, the night of October 24th,' the investigator laid out the time-line, referring at intervals to his notes, 'at or about 10:30 p.m., Miss Morningfall was backing down her driveway on her way to work when she realized she had a flat tire...'

Detective Efrem broke off at that point, seeing that I was drawing the attention of the frat boys across the street who were whooping and hollering and whistling from their balcony.

'Maybe we should do this inside,' he rethought his position on my hospitality.

'That may be best,' I agreed. 'Before you're forced to arrest me for public indecency.'

His name wasn't really Detective Efrem, by the way, but he sported a pompadour that reminded me of the actor Efrem Zimbalist Jr. of _77 Sunset Strip_ fame, so I dubbed him Detective Efrem for his resemblance to that TV actor's hair.

Moving Efrem's story right along, he told me Misty returned to the house to get her boyfriend Rodney's help changing the tire and found him exactly where she'd left him: at the kitchen table, face-down in a plate of turnip greens. He'd been up for three straight days and nights, trying his manly best to finish off every last drop of liquor in the house before going to bed, but he didn't quite make it and had passed out with two unopened beers in the fridge.

When she finally roused him, he told her to call in sick and damned her for making him lose track of a sweet dream he was having about his AA counselor, a kindly nonjudgmental man, who had called earlier in the day to "touch base" with him and who, before Misty woke him, he was happily eviscerating in his dream for ruining the buzz he had going right before he, the counselor, had phoned.

Tramping back outside, Misty tried changing the tire herself but she couldn't break the lug nuts loose, and in her frustration, she delivered herself of a world-class hissy-fit the like of which legends are made.

Her vehemence roused Rodney a second time. And, being close enough to the fridge to open it from where he sat, he did so and grabbed one the two remaining beers, drank it and felt invigorated enough to stumble outside to help with the tire, picking dried turnip greens out of his hair as he went.

But he couldn't budge the lug nuts either.

So, cussing Misty's lower-class work ethic, he ordered her to get her yokel-ass in the classic '53 Jubilee that he was famous for showboating around the countryside in and he went back to the house to fetch the last beer before carrying her to work.

What they didn't know was that Misty's quondam shrieking had reached the normally deaf ear of her mother who lived twenty-five acres of orange groves away, and in an uncharacteristic gust of compassion, worried that her daughter might be getting beaten beyond all acceptable limits, she had picked up the phone and called the sheriff.

As soon as Rodney hit the blacktop in his flamboyant candy-apple-red pickup that snacked on flywheels, _Whoop!_ he was lit up.

I had the pleasure of knowing Misty slightly. Shortly after they hooked up, Rodney brought his new conquest over to show her off. She was a handsome big-tittied country gal who reminded me of Rodney's mother Dilsey. The resemblance was more than just superficial. Misty, like Dilsey, felt it was Woman's duty to serve Man and to do it sweetly in the hope that by pleasing them, they might beat them a little less hard and a little less often. Which sometimes worked out and sometimes didn't.

I'm reminded of D.H. Lawrence's essay on Hawthorne's _The Scarlet Letter_ in which he calls such women devils in disguise and recommends backhanding them across the mouth multiple times for treacherously reducing men to the same sweet nothings they are. He accused Hester Prynne of secretly gloating over destroying the dominant male will with a seductive pretense to weakness. After reading that essay, I always regretted that D.H. died before I could explain to him that a fist to the face of someone physically weaker isn't a particularly noble method for dealing with life's humiliations, and certainly not the only one. And if he'd said 'Huh?' which I suspect he would have, I'd have scruffed the little pipsqueak by the neck and run him through a gauntlet of Spanish bayonets until he begged me like a whipped puppy for a little human kindness. Which he would have done – bet on it, hon.

Bet too, while you're at it, on the thing Winny said to me when I shared that insight into D.H. with him. Winny said, 'Huh?'

What Rodney was betting on was that Misty, having recently hired on at the tire factory, would pinch-hit for his mother and keep him out of jail on all future DUIs, now that Dilsey had run out of money.

After introducing us, he wasted no time in demonstrating the culturally accepted moves that Misty's step-dad had helpfully passed on to him, which consisted of a number of hand-signals that Misty was trained to obey. When Rodney held up two fingers in a V-sign, Misty quickly fetched him a cigarette, inserted it between the middle finger and forefinger, not too high or low, filter to the inside, and lit it.

And when Rodney gestured with one hand like he was holding a drink, Misty asked his pleasure; poured the exact libation named, and put it in this hand."

Next Rodney held up an open hand and then closed it into a fist, which meant "Quiet, cunt, your lord and master is about to hold forth and if I hear a peep out of you, my fist and the arm it is attached to will go straight up your ass all the way to the elbow." And Misty clammed up.

While I didn't endorse it, I had no trouble understanding Misty's subservient way of dealing with life's horrors and humiliations. Her compliant please-don't-hurt-me personality is a common way of placating the patriarchal morons who humiliate women to ease their own shame over sweating long hours in the fields or down in the mines in exchange for the squalor of company housing and food bought on chits from the company store.

Which pretty much describes the essence of all sub-owner life. The truth is there's hardly a difference worth mentioning between my poor slavefolks and Misty's poor slavefolks and D.H. Lawrence's poor slavefolks, except that the humiliations theirs suffered were more labor intensive.

Misty resembled my mother DeeDee in many ways. And I'm not just talking about the big tits. But she resembled Rodney's mother more. Because Dilsey was farmgrown. I'm speaking loosely here, because Sonny's mother was also farmgrown and also had big tits. But where Betsy hated farmlife enough to go to college and become a nurse, Dilsey, though she married a man with enough spunk to strike out on his own and become first a popsicle salesman and later a life-insurance salesman, she would remain a farmgirl at heart, with a farmgirl's low self-esteem, complicated by survivor's guilt after her only brother choked to death on a peanut hull, fed to him in infancy by Betsy, possibly accidentally – opinions vary. There were five girls in her family and their father called them all boys and they grew up to idolize men, except, as I say, for Sonny's mom.

I remember taking the time the share all that keen psychological insight with Rodney one day, and he couldn't have agreed more. 'Yessiree,' he hallelujahed, 'you can take the girl out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the girl!'

I also explained it all to Winny, who said, 'Huh?'

So Misty was a traditional slavegirl is the point I'm making. Until the moment she took that factory job working the night shift in the tire-stem division. A development that threw a major monkey wrench into the machinery of the status quo. Because once Misty started suffering the same workplace horrors and humiliations as the men, she stopped believing she deserved the beatings she took at their hands.

On her last visit, she drank too much and vomited on the inlaid side table Rodney had just sold me, assuring me it had once been the property of Jefferson Davis (he went so far as to do a crude job of faking provenance papers). Poor Misty, trying hard not to puke, clenched her mouth tight and ended up vomiting through her nose.

Wretched with embarrassment, she buried her face in her hands and began sobbing, and Rodney, solicitous beyond all decency, crouched in front of her and pried her hands away from her face, the better to enjoy the sight of her devastation. He cooed sweet words of comfort in her ear and dabbed at her face with a napkin until she stopped crying. Then he ordered her to clean up her mess and get her fat ass out to the truck because the sight of her, packing on the pounds the way she was, sickened him.

It did my heart good to see Misty unexpectedly rear up and scream in his face, " _GO TO HELL!_ "

And the next night, prompted by the girl's unwonted show of willfulness, Rodney decided to test her reliability. Taking the long way home from the bars, he began tossing empty beer cans out his window in front of the Highway Patrol Headquarters on Skyland, just to see if Misty would post his bail when he was pinched for another DUI.

'But no one pulled me over!' he hurrahed. 'That witch is my little good-luck charm!' was the conclusion he drew.

Dry here, Bobalobadingdong!

While Bob-o passes the bottle, Sy, I'll just briefly fill you in on how Dilsey was able to keep her darling boy out of jail for so long, because I know how perfectly unfamiliar you are with the process.

In a nutshell, she paid a savvy lawyer to keep postponing his cases. Whenever a court-date rolled around, Rodney was either deathly ill or had a wheelchair-bound granny he had to push to her doctor's appointment, or a dead relative's funeral he was compelled to attend because he was in charge of delivering the obloquies (sic). Until enough time had elapsed and enough dollars had changed hands – some going to the county clerk, some to a corrupt ADA and most presumably split between the lawyer and the right judge who enjoyed his whiskey and took a boys-will-be-boys view of such happy-go-lucky rapscallions as Rodney, until his cases were quietly dropped, one by one, from the docket; lost in the shuffle as it were.

A sweet system for people with the wherewithal to bankroll it indefinitely. The problem for Dilsey being that her funds were now exhausted. Rodney had reduced her to living in a trailer, eating fried-egg sandwiches for dinner and snacking on Vienna sausage straight out of the can and using her meager income from dressing patients' hair at a nearby old-folks' home to pay her rent and foot the bill for the flywheels destroyed by the chronically misaligned starter motor on the flashy truck that she made the payments on by screwing her dead husband's sadistic ex-boss.

None of which worried Rodney in the least, so long as he could count on Misty.

But, as I said, Misty upset the applecart the day she took that job. And when Rodney caught DUI number 13 a few weeks later, he found he'd misread the signs and was plum out of luck.

"She's done with him," said Detective Efrem, looking up from his notes.

For 36 hours, Rodney paced the drunk tank, too worried about being raped to risk going to sleep, while Dilsey did everything in her power to raise his bail. Because she still owed the bondsmen from the previous DUI, they refused to work with her and she had to come up with the full amount.

Listening in on their conversations in the interview room, Detective Efrem heard Rodney complain at one point that his mother wasn't trying hard enough, going so far as to tell her there was such a thing as Grandma porn and with a rack her size, she'd be just what the producers were looking for.

The next day Dilsey told him that she'd looked into Grandma porn but couldn't find anyone producing it locally, and, showing a better filial regard, Rodney said he didn't want her doing it anyway.

'Instead,' Efrem delivered his punchline, 'he rolled over on his friends.'

The state investigator fixed me with his steeliest look as he added, 'Your pal cut a deal and squealed on his partners in crime and left town without so much as a fond fare-thee-well for y'all to remember him by.'

I could see from the way he overdid his flinty gaze that he was fishing, trying to convince me Rodney had fingered me as the head of the pot operation. But I knew if I'd been mentioned by name, I'd already be in handcuffs.

I almost hated to take the wind out of poor Efrem's pompadour as he stood there studying my reaction, expecting me to fall to pieces, according to the script playing out in his mind.

'Sweetie, you certainly don't think _I_ had anything do with it?' I ruined his day.

'He sold you out without a qualm,' said Efrem with a menacing air.

'Watch yourself, hon,' I said sweetly. 'That sort of ugly accusation leaves you wide open to a civil action for slander, from which if I recover even a fraction of the damages my greedy lawyers are sure to seek, you'll be a pauper for life.'

In deducing that Rodney had snitched only on the location of my pot without naming names, I was correct. And the only link between Misty and the bust was that her meltdown led to Rodney's critical DUI number 13.

Even if he'd come up with the bail money, Rodney would have had to skip town because he was still carrying those original two DUIs on his record, and three convictions meant mandatory jail time, and Dilsey had no more money to make that third one go away. Only by joining AA and convincing the judge he had a job selling porch furniture had he been able to stay foot-loose and fancy-free over the past year while his mother went into the poorhouse getting that third charge dropped over and over again.

So Rodney did the smart thing. After 36 hours in lockup, he made his deal, and poor Freddy and Sonny looked up with thumping hearts from their early-morning labors to the sight of a caravan of cop cars rolling down on them, led by the sheriff's big Dodge Delacroix _De_ luxe, an "asset forfeiture," the favorite truck of drug-dealers and sheriffs alike back then, the equivalent to today's Humvee. Bringing up the rear was the frill-less, understated banality of the state investigator's laughably easy-to-spot unmarked car.

Boise immediately took off running. It was a cultural thing. He knew nothing about the pot, but at the sight of the law, he automatically ran like hell.

'STOP OR I'LL SHOOT!' shouted the chief deputy who was chauffeuring the sheriff. He already had his 44 magnum unholstered and extended out the driver's-side window. Boise was noncompliant, and a shot rang out, blowing the chairmaker's left knee to shreds.

In the official case-review, the chief deputy was dealt a stern reprimand for his actions and threatened with suspension for any future violation of the same rule: specifically, for aiming at a fleeing suspect's legs in direct contravention of departmental shoot-to-kill policy.

While Boise lay writhing on the ground, screaming in pain, one of the under-deputies on the scene casually sauntered over to him, observed the blood-soaked ligaments that used to be his left knee, and said, 'He told you to stop,' and he sauntered away again.

Sonny would inadvertently deliver Boise's coup-de-grace by suggesting with insufficient humility that they should apply a tourniquet to his leg while waiting on the ambulance.

The chief deputy told Sonny to shut up, and a moment later, when Sonny and Freddy were being placed under arrest for the "manufacture of cannabis," the chief deputy mispronounced the Latin word for pot, calling it ca- _nah_ -bis, and, as if to rub their noses in what he thought was _their_ ignorance, he added: 'You boys know what ca- _nah_ -bis is, don't you?'

That's when Sonny, out of a kindly wish to prevent the not-so-bright lawman from embarrassing himself again at some future date, took it on himself to correct his Latin and found himself promptly shackled hand and foot for his trouble.

While he was being hooked-up the same lesser deputy who had casually informed the mortally wounded Boise that his boss had told him to stop, now sauntered over to Sonny to casually inform him, 'He told you to shut up,' and he sauntered away again.

By remaining silent, Freddy was allowed to move about unfettered as the work of chopping down the plants began.

The law-and-order boys had come prepared with machetes, which they commenced to swinging with exactly the kind of zeal you'd expect from men who never exert themselves beyond the mowing of their lawns on weekends with self-propelled lawnmowers. Unused to real labor, they quickly worked themselves into sopping wet masses of panting beet-faced dishtowels.

All but the sheriff, who did not stoop to any form of labor, and whose absence of any sort of weapon signified his power. He stood gazing into the distance the whole time like some effigy of a Roman emperor on a coin or a bronze statue of a venerated college football coach, vouchsafing only the occasional word to his spaniels who wiggled and waggled at his feet, awaiting direction on what to do next and how to handle any problems that arose.

The size of the trunks was the main problem that arose. Thanks to the chicken shit we grew our pot in, the trunks were as thick at the base as the high sheriff's pig-knuckly wrists. And after an hour of hacking and hauling, the breathless, sweat-drenched deputies had felled only half the patches and were on the point of dropping from exhaustion.

That's when little bubba, bless his heart, offered them the use of our almost brand-new chainsaw which Sonny used three or four times to cut the heavy willow material needed to frame some of Boise's larger specialty items like the majestic peafowl pattern.

The cops said thanks and the moment they fired it up the chainsaw became their property. Like conquering soldiers, our law-and-order boys tend to be very free about taking what doesn't belong to them, and very stingy about holding onto it once they've got it. We never saw that chainsaw again.

Freddy also offered them iced beer from a cooler in the shack and, for his consideration, he got to ride to the jailhouse unshackled in the front seat next to the state investigator while Sonny was unceremoniously tossed in the back of a squad car, trussed up like a bulldogged steer.

With their new "asset forfeiture" the deputies made quick work of the timbering. They were finishing up about the time the ambulance whooped onto the scene and everyone took a break and popped another beer as Boise's body was loaded up and carried off.

Then they piled the bed of the sheriff's pickup high with as many of our plants as it would hold and packed as much of the rest as would fit into the trunks of their squad cars and burned a token amount.

It being an election year with November just around the corner, the sheriff embarked on a triumphal campaign tour of the county and made political hay out of our grass.

'How'd they go?' his giddy constituency was eager to know at every whistle-stop.

'The nigger ran a course,' drawled the old ham hock, serenely lacing his hooves atop of his big belly. (Registered voters in the rural districts were all crackers in those days.)

'The city boys,' he added with a satisfied grunt, 'went like lambs. Jes a coupla fleecy white lambs.'

That's according to Misty, whose people were among the appreciative gawkers at our contraband.

Winny would listen with smiling interest to my story of the bust, making no comment till I got to the part where I described the sheriff and his deputies as typical slaveboys, full of murderous rage over their subservience to their rich masters and desperate to misdirect some of it onto safe targets by killing Boise and pushing Sonny around. At which point, His Fondness cocked his head to one side and said, 'Huh?'

Detective Efrem denied Sonny and Freddy their phone calls till he'd taken a shot at tricking a confession out of me, but I played it cool. Cool Hand Evelyn.

'So you're telling me my brother and Sonny are behind bars?'

'Correct,' said Efrem.

'The poor babies. I hope they're not facing any serious jail time.'

The investigator made no response, other than a deflated look.

'Well, thanks for dropping by, Efrem.'

'Who the hell's Efrem?' he snarled.

'You can show yourself out, slyboots,' I said, picking up the phone and touch-toning my lawyer, the one who'd got me my settlement from the electrical contractor's insurer when that ungrounded outlet next to the bathroom sink failed to trip the breaker in time and a spark flew to an open bottle of aftershave on the vanity, sending my parents to their just rewards, just like it happened to that poor family I'd read about in _The Reader's Digest_.

### Sonny's Comments

About the pot bust, Sonny said, 'Evelyn knew that Rodney had brought Misty out to the Sugar Shack (Rodney's name for the dilapidated sharecropper's house that Boise used for a workshop) a couple of times, to show off the hand-signals and have her slither over him to the accompaniment of his guitar-picking, and knowing she would have seen him pick a pocketful of pot before leaving, Evelyn went to have a talk with the girl.

'Misty told her the cops had already questioned her, but she didn't dare breathe a word about the pot because she was deathly afraid of me.'

"'Afraid of Sonny?" Evelyn asked.

'"Rodney told me all about him," Misty nodded anxiously.

'"He did, did he?" said Evelyn, her curiosity piqued.

"'Yeah, but he warned me not to tell anyone."

"'Well, that was prudent," Evelyn played along. "Exactly what did he tell you?"

"'You know."

"'Of course I know. I just want to know how much he blabbed."

'It turned out Rodney told her that I was the low-key, up-and-coming presumptive heir to the aging kingpin (whoever he might be) of the Orlando criminal underworld, and the major supplier of homegrown pot to the greater Orlando area and points beyond.

'What his motive was in telling her something that outlandish it's hard to say. It may have been a stratagem aimed at keeping Misty quiet. Or maybe he was just being playful. Or, as Evelyn speculated, "Knowing Rodney, he was probably hoping she'd spread the word and get you knocked off by some rival young hood looking to make a name for himself and take over your territory."

'In any event, it cleared up the mystery of Misty's deferential attitude toward me, the closest thing to reverence I've ever experienced in my life. She kept her eyes on her feet and never spoke above a whisper in my presence both times we met.'

### Round 14

Poughkeepsie was inconsolable. I can't say with certainty which loss he was more inconsolable over, the loss of his brother or the loss of our pot. Frankly I felt some uncertainty about it myself. But the combination was devastating.

900,000 dollars. That's the street value they assigned to our crop. A ridiculously exaggerated figure. Nobody knew that better than the cops, but they typically preen themselves on announcing such inflated numbers to a gullible public. They had their picture splashed across the front page of _The Commercial Press_ , holding up their machetes – but not our chainsaw – posed in front of our plants piled up on the back of the sheriff's pickup, smiling victoriously like big-game hunters over their trophy kill.

Back when PooPoo and I used to toss around harvest projections, our numbers never rose above 50 thousand even in our wildest dreams. But after the police made off with it, killing Boise in the process, our estimates began to climb. Until eventually we conceded that selling our product one doobie at a time at jailhouse prices over a period of a year, the sheriff and his deputies might conceivably achieve their heroic figure.

When he first got the news, PooPoo went on a cop-killing rant. For an uninterrupted hour he stormed around his shop, swearing to kill both the chief deputy for murdering his brother and the sheriff for confiscating our pot, vowing to torch their homes and shoot their families one by one as they came running out. At one point he located a miniature edition of The New Testament in the book-nook section of his shop and covering it with his left hand, raised his right and made his bloody oath official.

After years of teasing his disabled older brother unmercifully, I guess the thought of not having him around to torment long into the future rankled a good bit. Personally I had no reason to mourn Boise to the extent a sibling could be expected to, but I felt bad about his murder and you can be sure my half of that 900,000 was sorely missed.

I finally quieted PooPoo's tirade with a reminder that we still had 19 liquor boxes full of very potent shake which the boys had stashed away in the old well-house on Winny's estate. And waiting till midnight, we went to recover it. Only to discover that Rodney had beat us to the punch. Before skedaddling, the little sneak had had the foresight to stop and grab the shake, all 19 boxes of it.

PooPoo erupted again, making Rodney the new focus of his wrath; reflecting fiercely on what he was going to do to him when he caught up with him.

'White boyeeeeeeeee...I weeeeeeeeell...keeeeeeeeell...you for this!!!' he threatened in a high-pitched voice, stretching out some words and pausing here and there for dramatic effect.

Then in a basso profundo voice, syncopating some words and running them together for a different dramatic effect, he added, 'Then put a penny in the fusebox and shock your muthafuckinsnitchbitchass backtalife and kuh-ill you allover _again_!'

His sentiments pretty much echoed my own as I looked at the empty space where Rodney had left a half-smoked joint on the floor, a parting insult that had his name all over it.

Bail was set at 5000 apiece for Sonny and Freddy, and I got bubba out the same day. But after learning from my lawyer that a prisoner's bail was typically converted into the amount of his fine, I hesitated with Sonny.

I misbehaved, Sy. When my lawyer said the DA was naming the price of the boys' freedom, I balked at buying Sonny's. I'm not saying it's the shittiest thing I ever did in my life, but it ranks right up there. To save shelling out 5000 bucks I was willing to sell poor Sonny down the river.

Abjuring every dissident thing I ever preached to him over the course of our friendship, I tried talking him into looking on this as his chance to get back in the good graces of his family.

'All you have to do,' I urged, 'is tell your folks you've reformed and tearfully recant your wayward ways and promise them you're going back to school, and they'll forgive you and step up and make your bail!'

I said it with a perfectly straight face, and the memory still jerks me awake some nights after all these years with a stab of self-loathing.

It's no excuse but at the time I was feeling considerably ill-used over the loss of my pot and was in no mood to further fund the law-enforcement branch of the greater civic combine that was the Chimes family conglomerate in whose holdings I did not yet own the controlling shares.

As it turned out, Sonny never bothered to approach his parents about going his bail because his incarceration mortified them a hundred times more than his dropping out of school. In fact there was a consensus among his family and friends – which including the Chimes family – that it would do the scofflaw a world of good to languish in jail awhile.

He'd been languishing for eight days when I couldn't stand myself any longer and came up with his bail money. But Sonny refused it.

'Is this dudgeon,' I asked, 'for not springing you sooner?'

Sonny said no and explained he was getting back into his writing and, based on his knowledge of the famous works produced by other felonious literati – Bunyan, Cervantes, Kropotkin, Sade, Martin Luther King, to name a few – he was hopeful that a stint in jail might prove a boon to his own efforts.

His first couple of days in the slammer had been a claustrophobic nightmare, he admitted, but after eight of them, he'd found a couple of poker-playing buddies and had calmed down a good deal and had begun to have those romantic notions of himself as a literary menace to society as presently constituted, and was more or less inured to the horror of being caged.

If he wouldn't let me buy his freedom, I would at least insist on equipping his cell with a mini-fridge, a hotplate and a small TV, and sneak him a couple of pints of gin every Sunday during visiting hours, plus a carton of smokes and enough money to buy the goodwill of his cellmates and the guard who developed a crush on him and liked to pull his hair ever chance he got.

As foretold by my lawyer, both Sonny and my brother were offered the same plea-deal: a fine of 5000 dollars or a year in jail, plus five years' probation. In a move I didn't see coming, Freddy, who was about to turn eighteen, was given the option of enlisting in the military, an offer I gave a firm thumbs down to, but the Army recruiters, under pressure to make their quota and earn another stripe and a few extra bucks a week, worked on him till he signed the papers.

For Sonny, enlistment was not on the table. He'd been called up a couple months earlier – the only time his parents were happy to get in touch with him was to give him draft notice – but he failed his physical due a shortened Achilles tendon – the result of a mild bout of polio that apparently went undetected in infancy, the doctors speculated. Still, he would show his own perverse streak of independence by choosing to stay in jail and serve out his sentence.

Thus I found myself deserted by the two closest people in my life. First by my weak-minded little brother who, in the grip of some shame-generated access of manliness, declined to let me pay his fine and chose instead to undergo the time-honored process of being humiliated to the point of wanting to kill or be killed, otherwise known as Basic Training, and now Sonny, demonstrating his own brand of weak-mindedness, was choosing to buckle down and write his novel behind bars rather than let me pay his fine so he could write in the comfort of my home.

Freddy and I parted on an acrimonious note. I called him a moron, a chump and a stooge to his owners, and after he left I wrote to him regularly repeating those insults for three full months without hearing a word back. He later informed me that he got my letters but his drill sergeant caught him writing a maudlin letter home to me the first week of training and made him wipe his ass with it, and thereafter, for the rest of his indoctrination, everyone in his unit was instructed to call him "Sob-Sister" and they all took turns urinating on my letters to him before giving them to him.

It's what proud slaveboys do, hon.

Sonny fared better with his writing. He made real progress on his novel. This, despite the endless demands of his fellow inmates who vied to get him to type, edit, and compose love letters to their wives, mothers and girlfriends; also cease-and-desist letters to bill collectors, fan-letters to country music stars, hate-letters to snitches and ex-wives. Some even got him to do their taxes to their everlasting sorrow, math not being Sonny's strong point.

He learned that outlaws are fairly needy creatures. On top of their desire to make a secretary of him, they insisted on reading and critiquing his creative output, and they were not shy about giving him their honest opinions. Sonny thanked them for even the most unsparing of them, which grew ever more unsparing in proportion to his unwillingness to follow their recommendations to abandon his story and devote himself to writing their much better stories, requests he managed to skirt without hurting their feelings by agreeing that their stories definitely deserved to be written, only not by him, as he had to concentrate on his own story, which as they so astutely observed, needed a ton of work requiring all his limited energy and unimpressive talent.

His cachet was his typewriter, which got him into hot water after he typed a letter to the DA on behalf of a prisoner who had been locked up for a year without being arraigned. Into that letter Sonny not only incorporated the words "habeas corpus" but got the spelling correct, and the DA's pride was pricked. The very idea of a pot-growing high-school dropout daring to question the ethics of a District Attorney was galling, and he made such a fuss over it that the sheriff took it on himself to have Sonny's typewriter confiscated the next day.

Only to return it the day after that, after the prosecutor got a call from my lawyer who politely mentioned the civil liberties repercussions of a second violation of the Bill of Rights, the first violation being the one Sonny had alluded to in his letter.

The sheriff returned Sonny's typewriter in person and sheepishly explained that they'd only taken it to get the serial number off it in case it was stolen. And sweet Sonny made a kindly show of believing him and expressed his gratitude over their concern for his property, taking care not to inquire into the whereabouts of our chainsaw.

And for his diplomatic handling of the situation, he was brusquely awakened at two in the morning by a painful yank to his hair and escorted by the under-deputy who had a crush on him to a cell on the third floor, where he was the only white inmate.

Leave it to Sonny not to know he was being punished until I explained it to him.

Funny sidestory: his bunkmates threatened to riot after he took his first dump up there and I had to add a can of air freshener and an extra carton of cigarettes weekly to placate them.

Through it all, Sonny kept plugging away at his novel. And thanks to the quality of the weed he'd grown and was able to buy back from the trusties at jailhouse prices, his mind stayed loose enough and inspired enough to rewrite the first two chapters of _Paragraph-15_ to his satisfaction.

When he shared them with me, I was amazed. The pages spilled over with a fun-loving spirit of defiance I never would have guessed he had in him. The best thing about the story, of course, continued to be the beautiful girl-next-door who narrated it. Smart, breezy, and gorgeous, and with a fearless grasp of life's realities, she tells the tale of the Paperboy's ordeal at the hands of a well-oiled community controlled by Monty's rich family.

Sonny deflected my lavish praise by saying his only talent was in seeing how awkward his writing was, leading to endless rewrites. But behind that humility he knew he had the bones of something special. The premise, the framework, the narrator, the delivery were all there. He just needed to keep going.

At the end of three months, he had four perfect chapters, containing all the ingredients that make for great satire, mixed in exactly the right proportions. To his credit, he was able to communicate a sympathetic aspect to even the worst of Barbacuda's cruel and abusive conduct by deftly reminding the reader at intervals that she was only expressing her slave-rage in her all-too-horribly-human way, and that by kidnapping the class richboy and holding him for ransom she was simply out to overcome her suffering at the hands of the rich people by becoming rich herself.

Her denunciation of the titular paragraph-15 in the Independent Carrier's Contract under which the Paperboy was fired, for all its eloquence, was merely a bit of fun for her, not her real focus at all. But by using her as a tool to deliver that ethical component to the story, Sonny was able to speak the terrible truth about the slavishness of our society in a way that was not too bitter and not too sweet. As when Barbacuda counsels the Paperboy in chapter three: "It's important, Knobbyknees, never to conquer your fears, because most of the ways we ease them tend to be stupid, dishonest and cowardly. It's better to stay in touch with those earliest flutterings of horror we experience as kids and try to figure out their source, the better to battle them honestly and intelligently. Because more than anything, it's those earliest fears that point to the truth about the society we're broken to serve."

When I showed Sonny's chapters to Winny, a growing puzzlement disfigured his face as he plodded through the first page. He hadn't finished the second one before he laid the chapters aside and began hunting every excuse under the sun to deprecate them. Too didactic, he said. Too blunt, he said. The literary references don't work, he said.

The self-unknowing fraud actually went so far as to pronounce the work misanthropic.

'Faugh!' I snorted. 'It's not the ethereal twaddle you swaddle yourself in is what you mean!'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

'Misanthropic?' I snorted again. 'Sonny? Why? Because he acknowledges our suffering and reveals our flailing efforts to deal with it, hoping to encourage us to do a little better?'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

' _Mis_ anthropes have no compassion for human suffering,' I railed on. 'And Sonny's _crawling_ with compassion! But we both know who _isn't_ crawling with compassion, don't we? Hell, you don't even _acknowledge_ slave-suffering! How can you feel compassion for something you deny the very existence of?'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

'No, Popgun,' I said. ' _You're_ the misanthrope! You're the one who turns a blind eye to the horror you're determined not to understand your part in!'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

'Listen, Fluffbrain,' I said, 'great literature is about exploring human suffering, and where human suffering is concerned, you were born to privilege and have zilch in the way of understanding what most people suffer. Which means appreciating great literature requires a _very_ substantial act of imagination on your part.

Winny said, 'Huh?'

'Just for one second, Boopsie, _pretend_ – and I know what a daunting acting-exercise this is for you – but _try_ to pretend that you're _not_ the world's biggest fathead and heir to an investment income that allows you to dodge harsh reality.'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

'Because the closer you come to seeing the world through _my_ eyes, the closer you'll come to appreciating Sonny's amazingly brave novel. Are you pretending yet?'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

I gave another snort of disgust, ' _Sonny's_ not the goopy lover of ambitiously servile people who stink up the human landscape! You are!'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

Come Sunday's visiting hours, I whispered breathily into Sonny's ear – after a couple of snorts of his gin – 'Baby, we're kidnapping that hysterical hypocrite for _real_ as soon as you get out of here!'

But sweet Sonny, while thanking me for my endorsement of _P-15_ and for the gin I sneaked him – the pint I didn't polish off myself – ducked being a party to kidnapping the Fond Owner anywhere outside of fiction.

'ALL YOU EVER SAY IS NO!' I shouted. NO, NO, NO, NO, NO! DAMN YOU, ONE OF THESE DAYS, I'M GOING TO STOP BEGGING YOU TO FUCK ME UP THE ASS!' I hollered so the whole jailhouse could hear and flounced out.

At this distance I know it was foolish to get so upset with Winny. I mean, looking back, Sonny was writing a novel worth reading, which was something Winny could never do. And the Fond One's natural sense of rivalry wouldn't let him admit it. Simple as that.

I scored my first big financial coup while Sonny was in jail. I'm talking about selling that swampland we'd been growing pot on. It netted me – get this, sweetie – after some skillful negotiating, a whopping million point two-seven. Which was twice the figure I was warned not to ask a penny more for.

Stop me if you've heard the story. I'll just hit the highlights in case you're not familiar with it:

Shortly after the double requiem for my deep-fried begetters, a stranger with a suspiciously smooth manner phoned my hotel room and asked to speak with me at a convenient time about a business matter. My ears naturally stood up at the word _business_ and I told him to come right over. An hour later, with a couple of highballs in us and the introductions and niceties out of the way, he made his initial offer on the swamp. And had it been a little higher, who knows? – I might have accepted, instead of riding out there the next morning to check on the place.

The prospective buyer was a silver-maned gent who claimed to be a Comparative Lit. professor. He looked the part: glasses, jacket with elbow patches, sweet-sly expression. He told me that his favorite book as a boy had been _The Yearling_. I acknowledged having read it and debated whether to keep my opinion of his early literary taste to myself, but I didn't. I told him it seemed to me the overall message of that book was fairly cowardly. Along the lines of: "life is hard; therefore the mature thing to do is shoot hungry young stupid thieving animals no matter how innocent and genetically inferior they are so we can go on serving in good order the unfair society that wealthy people control."

'I was young,' the old smoothie apologized, adding, 'I wrote my dissertation on Thomas Wolfe.'

Before I could register my reservations there (he was speaking of the Look Homeward Tom, not the Electric Kandy-Ass Tom), he laid down a yarn with the home-spun smarm of a professional storyteller about having grown up in rural circumstances a few miles north of Orlando. He was now, he said, contemplating his retirement a few years down the line and nostalgically wishing to recapture some of the memories of his childhood, but alas his family's old farm was now the county dump.

'I guess the message of your dissertation was you _can_ go home,' I said as I got up to refill our glasses. And I almost believed him.

Better offers followed with suspicious speed, always emphasizing the sweet emotional component, but I declined them as our pot operation was underway and soon flourishing. He made his last bid over dinner at the most exclusive restaurant in town. By then I'd definitely spotted him for a ringer and was a bit resentful that he'd almost got over on me to begin with, in addition to being a bit tickled that he hadn't. I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu and their best bottle of wine.

For months I'd had a strong hunch that something big was in the pipeline. A sprawling factory was my best guess, possibly an aircraft or car assembly plant. Something privately owned. Possibly my plot was adjacent to a proposed municipal airport or that cross-Florida canal they kept talking about digging or a military base or a reservoir. Not the actual site itself because, if that were case, the government would simply write me a check for fair-market value and tell me to vacate under eminent domain. Whatever it was, I knew my little parcel was valuable.

By a combination of luck and intuition I kept refusing his offers till they topped triple-market value and I knew I was definitely sitting on a gold mine of some sort.

Confirming my suspicions, the private investigator I hired to get the dirt on the ringer informed me a few days before our expensive supper that the well-groomed old fraud was a movie actor who had played Gidget's father or some such role in a Hollywood B-movie. Apparently all of Disney's ringers were minor Hollywood actors and they'd successfully fooled a number of local property owners, the biggest chump forking over upwards of 20,000 acres is my understanding.

But it was my little 80 acre inheritance that turned out to be the fly in the ointment, the crimp in the project that Walt wanted straightened out, as it sat smack dab in the middle of that 20,000 acre plot and he worried I might turn it into a reeking pig-farm if they didn't own it. Which is in fact exactly what I threatened to do in the course of our negotiations if they didn't up their ante.

Research showed that the land had been willed in 1850 to a manumitted slave named Bop to fulfill the dying promise of a stingy but word-keeping plantation owner whose life Bop had saved in some way. It was the worst 80 acres on the farm and it would stay in Bop's family through several generations, coming down at last to a woman named Judy Touché who had a thing against malaria and alligators and decided the ancestral shack wasn't worth paying the taxes on, which led to my father's acquiring it at auction for a song.

To make a long story short, in keeping with my amazing – if not infallible – good luck in business, it turned out that the mosquito factory Dad had intended to make future hideaway but never got that far due to the unfortunate electrical-outlet tragedy was situated at the very hub of what was to become the world's largest amusement park, a highly coveted piece of real-estate indeed.

Walt, rather pathetically I thought, would keep up his subterfuge for a full week after I gloatingly called him on it.

Finally, he set up a meeting with four wealthy businessmen, including Winny's dad, plus a couple of government hotshots and me. We sat down together and a number was put on the table that was as high as Walt was prepared to go and the government big boys and the four major campaign contributors who owned them were prepared to match, and I was sternly advised to accept the offer because if I asked for a penny more, the Disney Corp. would shut down operations and build elsewhere.

Four hours later, we settled on twice that number.

I remember shaking hands with Walt at the close of our meeting. I eyed the debonair red bowtie he wore in an effort to sweeten me and called him 'my little rainbow cactus.' To which taunt, the empire builder smiled back and told me he was prepared to go much higher if only I'd held out.

He died of cancer a few weeks later, RIP. I gather my rainbow cactus had been a heavy smoker for most of his life.

And there you have it, hon: The story of my first million. Every time Mammon closes one door, He opens another, hallowed be His name.

By deliberately prolonging our negotiations beyond the six-o'clock-news hour, I was able to stay up the rest of the night investing in local real estate, sending my lawyer and his runners to get signatures on written contracts wherever possible and otherwise secure binding oral agreements via recorded phone conversations prior to the big public announcement which sent property values over the moon. Between me and the big boys at our meeting, all doing the same thing I was doing, there wasn't a "For Sale" sign on any house in the greater Orlando area by the time Walt's smiling face appeared on the TV the next morning.

After watching his announcement, I took stock of my net worth and got gloriously drunk. In the bustling hours preceding his announcement, I calculated I'd parlayed my million point two-seven into at least four.

I called Sonny, after catching a few winks, to share the happy tidings and insisted in the first flush of good fortune – I was probably still a little drunk – on cutting him in on my bonanza to the tune of a quarter of my newfound wealth. A million dollars. To be held in escrow of course so I could keep growing his portfolio alongside mine, the maturation term of its accumulated capital to have an open-ended expiration date with the expectation of regular extensions: I had to handle it that way because Sonny was such a cupcake there was a good chance that if given a million dollars free and clear he'd give away every penny to sick and starving children by the end of the day.

'Together we'll rule the world!' I exulted.

And how did the jailbirdbrain react to my most exuberant effort to date to buy his friendship? What did the monument to virtue have to say to the joyous news that I'd hit the jackpot and in a mood of reckless magnanimity was willing to share it with him?

Instead of taking me up on the offer and becoming my spiritual consort, he mumbled, 'But won't we just be perpetuating the problem?'

' _NOT FOR US, ASSWIPE!_ ' I screeched.

On my honor, Sy, the angelic dunce _turned down a million dollars_! He preferred being poor and behind bars in the belief that he might write something to match the great works of past imprisoned writers – Sartre, Thoreau, Wilde, Milton, Solzhenitsyn and that French writer, what's-his-name, not Gide, but the _Our Lady of the Flowers_ guy...Sartre raved over him, the gay thief...it's on the tip of my tongue... Genet!

I knew I'd get it. Old age, hon...my fast-talking courtiers would be finishing my sentences for me if I didn't threaten to cut their tongues out when they try.

### Sonny's Comments

About jail, Sonny said, 'Time served in a county jail is called "sweet time." Compared to state prisons where you do "hard time."'

He had a clear memory of one of Evelyn's visits. 'I was on my bunk reading a biography of William Golding one Sunday when she came in and grabbed the book out of my hand and, seeing what it was, demonstrated the athleticism that came down to her from her father by doing a graceful imitation of a Kareem skyhook and sinking it in the toilet without touching the rim. A swish.

'She bore a grudge,' Sonny explained, 'not so much against Golding as against the wrongheaded view she was convinced most teachers held about _Lord of the Flies_.

'When Mr. Orpington assigned the novel to us in the eighth grade, Evelyn stood up and announced, "I read it on the crapper a few minutes ago in the time it took me to smoke a cigarette and it's not the worst piece of schlock ever written by a Nobel-prizewinner. I was pleased to note in the foreword that Bill calls himself a monster and he makes the point in interviews that his novel is not simply critical of the savagery of little boys absent adult supervision; it speaks to the horror that is humanity.

'"But," she went on, "too many of his colleagues – Bill was a school teacher, for those not in the know – in their desperation to think well of themselves, neglect to factor into the boys' bad conduct the spiritual mutilation they underwent for years at the hands of the British educational system before they ended up on that desert island in the most improbable sort of way, and, well, frankly I fault Billyboy for not putting enough emphasis on it.

'"Call me cynical – call me anything but a dull gull – but I think Golding had a feeling his novel would become an anthem for oppression when he was writing it, and I _know_ this guy," she jerked a thumb at our teacher, "is one of the singers of that anthem."

'Our teacher tried to get a word in then, but Evelyn cut him off with a wave of her hand.

'"Because that's how every stupid lying conduit for orthodoxy reads _Lord of the Flies_.

'"To sum up,' she sashayed up the aisle to the front of the room and addressed us as if we were her students, "it's not Golding I despise. It's pompous spit-and-polish authoritarians like you-know-who here who once asked me if I had enough gum for the rest of the class and when I said 'Why, yes, as a matter of fact I do, Sparky,' he still wouldn't let me pass it around so we could all enjoy a chew; it's these half-truth-tellers who are so quick admit that kids are beasts by nature and need to be tamed but won't follow through on that logic and admit that so are teachers and so are the rich people who own us and use teachers as tools and use our schools as factories for social control; it's these defenders and promoters of the plow-horse mentality I despise. It's these master-pleasing Igors who read _Lord of the Flies_ and find in it an excuse for their acceptance of the harness and a justification for their demand that _we_ accept it too that I despise. It's these bold lackeys who ease their shame over their obedience by celebrating their obedience that I despise."

'Our teacher broke out in a bellow at that point and ordered Evelyn up to the principal's office.

'Pausing at the door, she turned to deliver a parting shot, saying that she was disappointed not in us but in herself for failing to incite us to kill Mr. Orpington. Adding that if Golding were there to see her being sent to the headmaster to be caned, he'd acknowledge the inevitability of such injustice with a rueful expression of resignation that the defects of society can be traced back to the defects in human nature. But, in saying it, he'd know he was easing his own self-disgust over his submission to the powerful people he didn't dare to defy, and he'd feel crummy about it.

"'But _this guy_ doesn't!" she said, tossing her copy of the novel at Mr. Orpington's head.'

As I got up to fix him another drink, Sonny added, 'She liked Golding's _The Inheritors_ better. Less open to misinterpretation.'

Asked if the principal really caned her, Sonny said, 'Our assistant principal Coach Spain was in charge of paddling and he paddled a few kids, most of them friends of Evelyn's, but he didn't dare paddle Evelyn. Not after she assured him that her daddy was a decorated military officer, a combat veteran of World War Two and a professional killer by trade and at heart, and she was the apple of his eye.'

### Round 15

Anyhoo, I may be getting a little tipsy here, boys... Which is the _refined_ Southern woman's mating call, extrapolating from Lewis Grizzard's famous 'I'm soooooo drunk' insight. Put down that camera a minute, shish-kaBob. No, don't turn it off. Sy likes to watch.

...Buck, baby, Buck! I said _Buck_! BuckBuckBuckBuckBuckBuckBuck! EEEEEEEEEEEE- _YES_!!!

...And back to business. Before I forget, Big Stuff, here's a thousand dollars for a job satisfactorily performed. And, Sy, if you're interested in my views on sexual harassment in the workplace, I think it's reflective of a social structure that absolutely depends on feasting and fawning to stay afloat. And those who piously denounce the misuse of power to get underlings in the sack, you better piously denounce every other aspect of your slavish lives, otherwise that sort of inconsistently applied piety fits the definition of scapegoating perfectly and you end up looking ridiculous.

Seriously, I feel some compassion for the bullied as well as some censure for bullies. The problem is you can count on slaves to overdo those attitudes whenever it's safe to overdo them, and thus salve their egos and feel far too noble in light of the endless ignominy their lives are filled with. I remember giving essentially that same there's-a-little-Georgie-Porgie-in-us-all speech to Steve Jobs one night when he got spiritual on me and balked at my request for a good fuck in appreciation for a hefty investment in his company. Apparently he didn't like being treated like a piece of meat and prattled on about the social-consciousness-expanding promise of computers, quoting Bob Dylan at one point, of all things. 'Strip!' I tersely silenced the bullshit artist.

And _now_ back to business.

Due to overcrowding, Sonny served only three months on his year's sentence. I assumed they needed the space for the sudden influx of black lawbreakers who were insisting on exercising their right to vote even after failing the literacy test by faltering in the oral recitation of the ABCs backwards beginning with the letter Q. But my lawyer said it was common practice for the criminal justice industry to overfill the jails and release convicts early as a scare tactic aimed at securing more law-and-order funding.

On the surface it appeared Sonny had caught a nice break with his early release, but there was a catch. When he checked in with his parole officer, he learned that his release was contingent on his agreeing to go back to school. Either that or he must leave the state of Florida for the full term of his probation which was five years.

The stipulation was illegal and technically unenforceable under the strict letter of the law, but our lawyer said that if Sonny chose not to abide by it, the police might harass him in a number of petty ways, and, going by past experience in similar cases, they would happily do just that.

Apparently, backed by the powerful Chimes family, Sonny's folks had conspired with the DA to help restore their son to his senses and this was their idea of how to do it.

But Sonny, who was immersed in his literary endeavors and wanted to stay focused on them, said, 'Thanks, y'all, but I'll just go on and serve out the full term of my sentence if that's okay.'

It was not okay.

'No dice,' said the DA. 'It's back to school or beat it. Hit the books or hit the bricks, buster.'

As further inducement, Deputy Ross, the cop who was in love with Sonny, showed up the next morning to pull Sonny's hair and say he was looking forward to hunting Sonny down and pulling his hair every morning, making that his day's first order of business.

And so Sonny, after pondering his situation long and hard for the better part of a minute and a half, reached the conclusion that there were lots of other newspapers around the country to deliver besides the one he'd been fired from, and he returned to his original plan of being a career paperboy and a Nobel-prize-winning novelist on the side. It had been a mistake, he told me, to get side-tracked with my pot-growing scheme.

I tried to talk him out of it, but nothing I could say or do would change his mind. He just didn't adore me enough anymore.

That's the trouble with the male of the species, Sy. Come puberty, young bucks lose their innocence and start asserting their independence. It's goodbye to the moony pre-orgasmic allure of well-rounded female flesh and hello to the gruff testosterone-ridden, chest-beating habits of cavemen. No longer under the purely spiritual spell of my fabulous fanny, you boys feel the animal need to subdue my fanny and make it yours. And if you can't subdue my fanny, you flee my fanny to pursue other more subduable fannies.

In the grip of this hormonal madness, Freddy deserted me to become a soldierboy and go marching off to war after finishing boot camp, and now the resurrected Paperboy hit the road like some Greek exile of old in search of another paper route somewhere outside the state of Florida.

His family wished him only ill. He further confirmed his pariah status by flouting their good intentions. His oldest sister Maggie, a psyche nurse in Atlanta, was so indignant over his ingratitude that she warned him never to show his face in Georgia or she'd have him committed, adding that she knew the doctors who would sign the papers.

Which meant, for all intents and purposes, that poor Sonny, with his bindle and portable typewriter occupying the passenger seat of his hand-painted Baby Blue Rambler, set out on his lonely journey _un_ wanted in two states.

I loped alongside his car as he backed down my drive, urging him through the open window to shave his head and hide in my attic and finish his novel, a la Anne Frank. With my Disney dough I was in a position to privately publish it for the standard 80 percent of the jacket price after marketing expenses. I already had some blurbs prepared which I shared with him: "If you want to know how people deal with their rage and shame over serving the high and mighty, blast The Bible! Shit on Shakespeare! Fuck _Finnegans Wake_! Read _Paragraph-15_!" Another went: "1949 was a good year for literature! Faulkner won the Nobel Prize, Orwell found a publisher for _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ , and Sonny, author of _Paragragh-15_ , was born!"

I promised to get Winny to run the ads in his family's newspapers and interview Sonny on his family's TV stations, but in fact the Fond Owner, who was keeping pace with us on the other side of the Rambler, was staunchly in the stay-home-and-go-back-to-school camp, and he looked up at me over the roof of the car at that moment and said, 'Huh?'

Winny still refused to see anything of value in Sonny's brave, funny, wickedly honest novel-in-progress.

'It's too cartoonish,' was the nimble little fraud's latest criticism, essentially stealing my one reservation.

Of course the cartoonishness Winny objected to was the good kind, the Looney Tunes kind, the wildly irreverent Bugs Bunny and the flailingly frustrated Daffy Duck kind. The cartoonishness I objected to was the sweet respectable treacle of uplifting sitcoms like _Leave it to Beaver_ that Sonny was so fond of.

While a champion of the comic delivery in general, I maintained that Sonny's novel would benefit from some solid touches of savagery here and there as he went about achieving his primary objective of holding up ambitious managerial maniacs to ridicule. I longed to see a few proud-slave larynxes happily crushed, a pile or two of proud-slave guts casually spilt, some blunt-force trauma breezily delivered to the skulls of proud slaves under an echoing backdrop of maniacal laughter...that sort of thing would have added immeasurably to my enjoyment. Bludgeon your targets in good Swiftian style till the League for Decency screams for your head on a salver was my earnest counsel.

But Sonny thought satire was a genre best served sugar-coated and smothered in chocolate sauce with a cherry on top.

Still, in spite of our differences, the three Ps of good satire were present and accounted for in his work: pungency, poignancy and playfulness. If a bit too playful for my taste, it was still a promising piece of moral outage transformed into comic art, which is how Philip Roth, the author of the wonderfully splenetic _Our Gang_ , defined satire.

I took the time, as is my custom, to explain each of those three Ps to Winny at some length, and as soon as I finished, he cocked his head to one side and said, 'Huh?'

'It's the stingiest of see-through lies,' I told him, 'to pretend it's Sonny's comic delivery that bothers you. It's not the broad humor you object to, it's the horror! It's what his work reveals about the nasty ways slaves deal with their slavish lives that you find offensive!'

To which pitiless analysis, Winny winced with a bafflement so intense that I thought he was having a seizure, and he said, 'Huh?'

'It's too polemical,' was his next paltering objection.

'More piffle,' I scoffed, 'from someone who admires writers who safely limit their explorations to the oh-so-inexplicable angst of alienation and loneliness and unrequited affection!'

To which Winny again said, 'Huh?'

As Sonny continued backing down my drive, trying not to run over my foot, I offered better and better terms on the book deal, upping his share of the proceeds to 24.5 percent by the time he reached the street and mumbled a sad so long and motored off into the horizon, honoring his agreement with the District Attorney.

'KEEP WORKING ON _PARAGRAPH-15_ , PAPERBOY!' I hollered after him. 'PAY NO NEVERMIND TO WINNY! IF IT WEREN'T FOR POOR LITERARY JUDGMENT, HE'D HAVE NO LITERARY JUDGMENT AT ALL!'

Those were my parting words and, on hearing them, Winny turned to me and blinked and said, 'Huh?'

For three years we heard nothing from our old friend. Not a word. Many's the sweet reverie I would have during his absence trying to picture what he might be up to. I liked imagining him doing something heroic, like joining Greenpeace and dying looking like a human pincushion pierced by a hundred harpoons fired from a fleet of Japanese whalers, all sporting wispy Hiro Hito mustaches. Or refusing a blindfold before being executed by a firing squad for trying to take over the Bolivian government with a squad of twelve Marxist guerillas, four of whom were government informants. Periodically Winny expressed the fond hope that Sonny would come home in a more reasonable state of mind, having put his adolescent rebelliousness behind him.

About the time Sonny left for parts unknown, Freddy was getting his orders for Vietnam. I was in a position by then to offer him sanctuary. One of the first things I did with my Mouseketeer money was invest in a hotel in the resort town of Gaspe, Quebec, which I turned into a seaside getaway for draft-dodgers whose families were affluent enough to afford a place where their sons could sit out the war in relative comfort, enjoying the companionship of other draft-dodging sons of equally affluent families, in a combination vacation-refuge setting. My staff included a college professor who taught French set up continuing-education classes in Acadian and Quebecois culture; also an activities director who arranged lobster-fishing expeditions in the summer and ski-trips in the winter and dances on the weekends; also Thursday bridge nights, and darts and poetry readings at the hotel bar on to-be-specified days.

Before the war was over, the city council of Gaspe would award me six commendations, and the popular mayor said he'd never known a better-behaved group of American visitors than my asylum-seekers.

But Freddy refused to let me install him there for the duration. Boot camp had done its work. The indignities inflicted on him there had filled him with a self-loathing so intense that to kill or be killed was the only way to relieve it, and he proudly proclaimed that he was going to Vietnam to do his bit for democracy.

'Whoopee, you're gonna die!' I told the boob. 'You move like molasses! You're near-sighted! You're simpleminded! Don't do it!'

But there was no saving Private Freddy. The jackass went anyway.

And a month later he came home suffering from that strange ailurophilic delusion which still haunts him to this day. His first fire-fight so traumatized him that he began insisting he was part of the Bob Hope USO troupe and developed a whole stage act in which he played a hep cat named Capriccio who played piano and belted out a medley of songs in imitation of Frank Sinatra. He wasn't half bad either except that his lyrics were a string of syncopated meows which deteriorated into nothing but sobs toward the end of his repertoire until he was blubbering so emotionally to the melody of "I've Got You Under My Skin" that even his meows were unintelligible.

They shipped him stateside in an oversized cat carrier, and his condition was diagnosed as combat fatigue, which the VA shrinks blamed on the inhumanity of the Vietcong and not on the systematic horrors and humiliations Freddy had been subjected to all his life by Americans. Nothing was obvious to me than the homegrown nature of Freddy's loopiness; though I conceded that being shot at by proud Vietnamese slaveboys serving their more or less equally brutal owners was the final straw that broke Freddy's already cracked mind.

When I helpfully explained all that to the VA shrinks, they individually and en masse voiced the same one-word response to my perfectly reasonable take on things. That word was 'Huh?'

'Be honest, boys,' I told them, 'you're not looking to "cure" my brother of his loopiness so much as you're trying to get him to collude in your loopy take on reality.'

Again the doctors said, 'Huh?'

'Your "treatment" of Freddy,' I told them, 'is an unforgivably slimy attempt to justify the much-too-pleased opinion you have of yourselves and exonerate the shameful obedience you give the powerful idiots who are prosecuting this criminal war.'

The doctors said, 'Huh?'

The bastards kept poor bubba locked up for over a year. In the end I had to resort to litigation to get him out of their clutches.

'My kitty cat,' I told the court at Freddy's competency hearing, 'went to war hoping to ease his slave-shame by going all the way and dying for his owners, but he came home a cat instead. For which I count my blessings. At least he lived to regret his mistake. Many weren't so lucky, no thanks to you fuckboys.'

At those plain-spoken words, the courtroom erupted, as each and every hysterical glorifier of everything he secretly despised himself for submitting to, shouted, ' _Huh_?'

Fortunately, I was married to Winny by then and our newspaper had picked correctly in the previous election and endorsed the winning probate judge, so the fix was in, and Freddy came home.

Care to guess who came home next, sugar? No, not Sonny. The Charmboy! The Supreme Wheedler. The Chinch Bug in Human Form. Good Old Rodney!

Not long after Freddy's return, PooPoo called to say our high-stepping snitcheroo had been spotted at Pert's Lounge up on County Rd. 41.

The news came as no surprise to me. I'd already had indications he was back...

Exhibit One: A scuffed, down-at-the-heel, wingtipped shoe I found tossed up on my porch one morning. Rodney was a fan of vintage clothing and used to wear his dead father's old wingtip shoes. When teased about it, he happily dubbed himself "The Walkin' Wingtipped Wonder!"

Examining the shoe, it looked to be the right size.

Then there was the late-night call by a Dr. Clit Oris, taken by PooPoo's mother who I'd hired as my live-in housekeeper after my parents were snuffed in the faulty-electrical-outlet tragedy. Savannah told me Dr. Oris, one of Rodney's many nom-de-espiegleries, had offered her a free over-the-phone self-administered gynecological exam.

Another clear and unmistakable clue was the renewed vandalizing of my house by the fraternity pledges across the street.

When Rodney fled the area, I was still engaged in the high-investment, low-return game of restoring my college rental properties, for which efforts I would be awarded the Winter Park gentrification movement's top honor over the heads of far more deserving sweat-equity candidates who didn't have a clue whose campaign coffers they had to line to win such plaudits. Almost every weekend Rodney used to prank me by calling the cops to complain about the parties hosted by the frat houses across the street, always giving my name and address as the caller.

The police would then come and break up the revels and the pledges, believing I was the party-pooper, would exact their revenge via predawn acts of drunken vandalism which included poisoning my hedges, stomping my lawn-art, stealing my porch chairs, breaking my bird baths, slashing my car tires, and ringing my door bell and running away, leaving a burning sack of shit on the threshold.

Since Rodney's departure there'd been a moratorium on such hijinks, a respite which was frankly beginning to bore me to death. But now the pranks had started up again.

'He's baaaaaaaack...' I told Freddy, after instructing the yard crew to clean the human excrement off the head of the outsized cement toad in my koi pond.

I have to say this new crop of pledges impressed me with their inventiveness. Inexpensive battery-powered smoke alarms were just coming on the market at the time, and the boys delivered their best prank to date when they hid one of the devices with a low battery in the bushes outside my bedroom window late at night and picked it up early the next morning before dawn, knowing it would emit a piercing warning beep at 15 minute intervals all night long, keeping me sleepless for several nights until a motivated cop was awarded a personal citation from me for locating it.

Again I said to myself, 'He's baaaaaaaack...'

I knew he couldn't stay away forever. The pressure to torture his mother was just too great. I mean the pleasure he took in torturing Dilsey by phone was a poor substitute for the personal touch.

Also, regardless of Dilsey's reliability when it came to mailing him his disability checks while subsisting on church-charity herself, to keep those checks coming in meant Rodney had to submit to periodic physical exams. Staying gone too long would require finding new doctors to charm the pants off and it was easier to keep fooling the doctors he was already fooling

So, as I say, when I got PooPoo's call telling me the snitch was back in town, it came as no surprise.

Pert's Lounge was one of his old haunts. Formerly Pert and Cliffie's Lounge and Grill, it was among the properties I'd bought that night I did so much wheeling and dealing with my Disney windfall. The timing seemed right. Pert's TB was so bad he couldn't work most days, and Cliffie had fallen under the spell of the Reverend Ronnie Lollar, a champeen serpent rassler and the only surviving founder of the Antioch Pentecostal Church of Risk in the Holy Name of Jesus Our Personal Savior – exactly the sort of superstitious dumdum whose theological flailings Flannery O'Connor made such sport of while remaining blind to the silliness of her own, bless her bones.

Having publicly renounced her sinful ways, Cliffie had gone back to selling duck eggs which is how she used to make her living before she turned fourteen and Pert seduced her and she refused to let Pert seduce her again until he married her, a not uncommon ploy that matrimonially inclined females resort to. But she was now redeemed from all that sort of low behavior.

I found Pert not quite ready to sell, but I was able to buy Cliffie's end, and the next day, when property values quadrupled everywhere within a fifty-mile radius of future Disney World, she felt abused, and rightly so. There's been nothing like it to my knowledge in the history of real-estate manipulation since the early railroad days. I mean even Nick Saban had to win five championships before my Tuscaloosa properties quadrupled in value and my contributions to the UA Athletic Department began to pay off in a really big way.

When Cliffie accused me of taking advantage of her, I adhered to the standard formula of offering an apology and a promise to comp her a not ungenerous number of drinks to drown her sorrows (which she declined, being born-again). Beyond that, I was quietly pleased when she took me to court, where my role was that of a fair-minded capitalist suffering unwarranted abuse, and I milked the contretemps for all the free publicity the press drummed up, which doubled the bar's profits that week.

A few months later, Pert died intestate, and the bar was entirely mine.

So, driving up to _my_ bar, I was looking forward to getting pleasantly buzzed with Rodney before PooPoo knocked the Charmboy's movie-star-quality teeth out.

That was our plan. To knock Rodney's teeth out. It's what we decided. Rodney's teeth were his best feature. You had to see them to appreciate them. So perfect it was hard to believe they weren't false, and PooPoo and I felt that knocking them out would constitute a fair and fitting punishment.

When I walked in, there he was, dancing up a storm with Lily, the most attractive black lady on the "Colored" side.

Jim Crow was still in the grudging process of federal dismantlement at that time and Pert, being one of the more enlightened tavern owners of the era, avoided damaging his bottom line by installing two doors near the middle of his establishment, one for whites and one for blacks, but unmarked. Between the doors, a double-sided bar ran the width of the room and divided the structure in half. The liquor on display could be accessed from either side, and with the same roof over all, the arrangement, while not quite separate and not quite equal either, at least gave a nod in the direction of compliance to mandated desegregation, and Pert was heralded as a modern genius of business.

That's certainly how I saw him. On the subject of making money, his philosophy was 'neither a fanatic nor a militant be.'

He worked his clientele on both sides impartially, emitting understanding oohs and aahs of sympathy when listening to the lamentations of white supremacists as they bewailed the loss of their traditional unquestioned hegemony over the darker races; then turned and offered the same heartfelt noises of sympathy to the recriminations of the African-Americans' who bewailed centuries of hard treatment at the hands of the Pert's predecessors.

I thought a diplomat of Pert's talents ought to be in politics and I offered to buy him a state congressional seat in the next election, but his TB was raging out of control by then, and he thanked me kindly and died a few weeks later, poor man.

Of course only whites were allowed to cross the color-line, and it came as no surprise to find Rodney taking full advantage of that one-sided laxity by spinning Lily around the dance floor, enjoying making everyone on both sides feel as tense and resentful as possible, including the black lady herself, or, if not her, then certainly her boyfriend.

Seeing me, he betrayed not a flinch of apprehension, only a boisterous show of surprise and a cloying eagerness to get the reunion going.

'Evvy!' he gushed – a name he knew I hated – and he embraced me like a long-lost sweetheart until I pushed him away and called for a pitcher of draft from PeeWee, my six-foot-nine barkeep.

For the next hour Rodney regaled me with an animated travelogue of his time on the lam,

beginning with how he saw the need to get out of town the second he heard about the bust.

'For fear –' he started to say.

'Of being ratted out by Misty?' I said.

'Who? No. I worried Boise might say something – you know he never really warmed up to me – and they might hold me as a material witness –'

'And compel you to testify against me in open court,' I said.

'Yes!'

'So you left for my sake, lest they break you.'

'Exactly!' he gushed, pleased by my ready grasp of the situation. 'It was _my_ weakness I worried about!'

I pulled from my purse the 20 or so postcards he'd mailed to me from various stops along his journey and fanned them out across the bar. Under the stimulus of the visual aids, he reviewed his itinerary.

'I set my course for Colorado,' he pointed to the snowy peaks of Aspen.

'After picking up the shake from Winny's old well house,' I said.

He threw his arms wide in a what-else-would-you-have-me-do? gesture. 'I figured better me than let the police get their hands on it!'

I pictured him driving out of town with a happy whoop and a holler, flashing that brilliant smile of his.

'But those 12 boxes of shake didn't cover a fraction of my expenses during my time in exile,' he grimaced piteously, 'not being the sticky buds I left to y'all.'

'The police confiscated all that,' I reminded him, signaling to PeeWee for a bump, and mentioning that there were actually 19 boxes of shake.

'Really? Well, I loaded them in such a hurry,' he apologized for the miscount. 'But you can't imagine how soon it all ran out,' he sighed, knocking back his shot, 'forcing me to take on any number of menial jobs.'

'Aw,' I mocked sympathy over his tribulations, which he pretended to take seriously.

'It might have turned a more self-respecting man bitter!' he said with brio. 'But you know how I look on all such suffering as _research_! Raw material for my country-and-western ditties!'

I'd heard his songs, and while the genre was not my cup of tea, his sounded no worse than a lot of what gets played on the radio or on the juke box in my bar, located in the white's-only half.

To keep body and soul together, he said he worked as an usher in a funeral parlor outside of Baton Rouge, and later sold mystery-meat tacos out of a van in Corpus Christie, then did some eye-candy work lounging around a chiromancer's place of business, shirtless, beside the interstate on the outskirts of Lubbock, Texas. Until he finally made his way to Aspen where his Uncle Dart was selling "mastodon" ivory jewelry on commission.

There, the two of them worked the town together until they had a falling out and Rodney ran off with his uncle's sample case and was picked up a week later in an upscale neighborhood on the west shore of Lake Tahoe – ' _Ponderosa_ land!' he boasted – and was fined for door-to-door peddling.

Before and after that, there'd been some "route-work" stealing nickels and dimes from vending machines in Oklahoma City, which he assured me looked mighty pretty. With the approach of the holidays, he'd contributed some jingles for a mail-order Christmas-cactus business in Albuquerque – whose customers learned to their dismay that they'd bought photographs of cacti, not the actual living plants.

Eventually he made his way to L.A. and met the actor Rod Steiger eating alfresco at a tony Hollywood restaurant where Rodney was busing tables. By representing himself as an authentic hillbilly with impeccable folk-art credentials (he showed Rod his MOTHER tattoo), he sold the actor an "antique" quilt made yesterday by a Glendale woman who had an army of East L.A. Hispanic abuelas using a warehouse full of old clothes stolen from Salvation Army drop-boxes to cut and hand-stitch her priceless "heirlooms" with just the right dearth of cotton batting to suggest a century of use.

Bored of the L.A. scene, he hitched his way to San Francisco – with a brief stop-over in the desert to drop acid with the Manson family and exchange notes with Charlie on surefire ways to foment an apocalyptic race war. In S.F. the Haight-Ashbury love-in had degenerated to such a degree that it was too seedy even for the likes of Rodney, and, after rolling a few gays for the money needed to get on the road again, he headed for Idaho where for a time he skinned prairie dogs on a "chinchilla" ranch near of the capital city of Boise, a name I noticed he had no trouble speaking for the second time.

'Huh?' said Rodney when I told him why I was surprised he had no trouble speaking it.

'Killed? No! This is the first I'm hearing of it!'

'Your mother didn't tell you?'

'No. You know how protective Mama is! My draft notice was the only bad news she gave me. And I immediately did the only sensible thing I could do and joined the Navy lickety-split and got myself dishonorably discharged two hours into boot camp – before I was even issued a uniform or got my hair cut! – by getting caught in a compromising position with my dick in the mouth of the company fag!'

Assuring me that the fellow sailor-in-training had paid him 20 dollars for the pleasure of sucking him off, not the other way around, he concluded, 'And now I'm back home again to let Mama put a few pounds on my lean frame!'

Downing another shot, he mentioned in passing that he was somewhat strapped at the moment. A statement which, in conjunction with his earlier statement about hightailing it out of town for fear of ratting me out sounded to my ear like a none-too-nuanced request for hush-money.

But when I asked if that's what he meant, he said, 'No no! No no no! Of course not!'

After a pause, he added, 'Although some small expression of appreciation for all the trouble I went to to keep you safe might be in order, given my reduced circumstances? I mean, if you could find it in your heart...what with the statute of limitations still in effect is all I'm saying,' he beseeched, looking deeply ashamed to have even brought it up.

I assured him that he'd done the prudent thing by getting out of town when he did, adding that we'd find some way for him to make good on those "12" liquor boxes of stolen shake (I went heavy on the sarcasm when I said 12 or he would have suspected he was being set up).

After another drink, the time seemed right to casually lure him out to the predetermined spot where the mayhem was set to take place.

Sending PeeWee to the storeroom to fetch an unwatered fifth of Jack, I suggested we ride out to our old stomping grounds and continue the reunion there.

'I was about to suggest it myself!' said Rodney, insisting that we take his tricked-out pickup. 'She's just been fitted with a new flywheel by a crack mechanic who used to work on the NASCAR circuit and he _swears_ he's got that starter motor shimmed right!' said Rodney to ease any concerns I might have about getting stranded out in the boonies.

Taking the back roads we did some visiting down memory lane, the Charmboy filling any lulls in the conversation with a-capella verses from his newest songs, and by the time we reached the site of his treachery, we were already working on the last half of the bottle.

He parked and switched off the ignition. In the distance we could hear the muffled rumble and beep of heavy machinery transforming the fetid backwater into Walt's sparkling theme park. The day-crews and the night-crews were already vying for the bigger share of that bonus waved under their noses like Ahab's gold doubloon for coming in on time and under budget.

"Hmm,' said Rodney, cupping a hand to his ear, 'I wonder what all that noise is yonder? giving me to understand by his overdone innocence that he knew I'd sold the swamp for a bundle and his silence wasn't going to come cheap.

I instinctively went on the offensive.

'Signing over your truck as payment for the loss of income I suffered would be a nice gesture on your part,' I said as he rummaged behind the seat for his guitar and a blanket.

'For the stolen shake!' he nodded, minimizing his crime. 'Of course! That's only fair!' And after spreading a blanket for me – saying he preferred the outdoors over the musty shack where PooPoo was hiding and over whose floor we merrily spook of spilling Rodney's pearly whites – he found pen and paper in the glove compartment and wrote out a bill of sale and signed it on the spot.

Getting comfortable, we passed the whisky and Rodney dithered on about his happy- carefree life and his sad-lonely life. He sang a mix of skip-to-my-lou hobo songs alternating with homesick-though-I-ain't-got-no-home songs, leaving no emotion unworked or heartstring unplucked, which is the charmboy's way.

At one point the subject of Sonny came up and I gave a summary of his cousin's troubles since he left. When I got to the part about his confiscated typewriter, Rodney leaped up and crowed: 'Sweet Son-o! The only prisoner in the history of the Citrus County Correctional System to be cited for packing an unregistered typewriter!'

The drunker we got, the more he waxed philosophical, first on the sweet unpredictability of life and then on the sad certainty of the terrible end we all ultimately face. He brought my attention to a butterfly that had landed on a nearby black-eyed Susan and was opening and closing its wings as if waving goodbye.

He then observed the kudzu that had practically overgrown the old Sugar Shack, and likened the sunset, cerise at one level with lavender above it, to a parfait dessert, 'heavenly prepared...'

What's holding up PooPoo? I wondered as my softer emotions were being given this merciless going-over that I really could have done without. Surely he'd heard us drive up...

Gazing blissfully in the direction of the trestle bridge spanning the Kissimmee River in the distance, Rodney smooched on, confessing that the only person he ever came close to killing outright (as opposed to those he "accidentally" killed) was a piss-pantsed drunk lying in the gutter beside the Tastee-Freeze back when he was a teenager. 'He probably put me in mind of my own future,' he sighed.

I began to think he had a premonition that he was about to suffer and was making a penance of sorts, perhaps in hopes of getting out in front of the imposed penance coming to him.

No matter what happens, it's always critically important to operators like Rodney to feel they're the ones calling the shots every step of the way.

Polishing off the last of the whiskey, he pulled out a baggy of resiny roaches and broke them open and rolled a joint and fired it up. Passing it to me, he said with a burst of playful enthusiasm: 'Tell about the high life, Evvy!' he gushed, 'Tell how it's gonna be, living off the labor of others! Don't leave out a thing! Tell me about the Plantation we're going to have! And the rabbits! Tell about the rabbits I get to take care of! Start with the rabbits! ' he begged, doing the role of Lenny Small in Steinbeck's _Of Mice and Men_ , a novel I first recommended to him when we were kids and he'd been recommending back to me ever since.

And then Rodney fell silent. Never to speak again.

Because that's when PooPoo sprang from bushes – at last – and surprised me by putting Boise's big rusty feather-edged willow knife to its first unauthorized use ever by slicing Rodney's neck clean through with a single savage swipe.

If you'd been there, Sy, you'd have seen by my gag-reflex that I did _not_ see it coming. Our agreement was to knock Rodney's teeth out. Not murder. Even as I was retching, I shot a stern look of reproach at PooPoo for his unbusinesslike behavior.

Killing Rodney was a flagrant violation of what we shook on, which appalled me almost as much as the sight of Rodney's disarticulated head rolling across the blanket.

My eyes continued to flash anger at PooPoo for breaking our deal, until his eyes met mine and I saw in his the sinister glint of unfinished business, and I quickly changed the look in mine.

'It took you long enough!' I huffed.

And, reaching out for Rodney's ponytail, I grabbed his severed head and round-housed it like a I was spiking a football in the end zone, bringing his head down with a resounding whang on the bumper of my newly acquired candy-apple-red 1953 Ford Jubilee edition pickup with a 350 Chevy engine, rolled Tijuana upholstery, wide butyl tires, and a starter motor that ate flywheels for breakfast.

'Almost millionaires!' I snarled, standing there with the Charmboy's head swinging from my hand like an aspergillum, dripping blood instead of holy water. 'Sonny went to fuckin' jail! Freddy went to goddamn Vietnam! Boise was fuckin' _murdered_! And we're out 900,000 fuckin' dollars on account of this snitch-ass bastard!'

Inwardly, I chafed over PooPoo's breach of contract, and would for some time to come, but under the circumstances, prudence dictated masking my indignation and showing a united front on the subject Rodney's decapitation.

In that same spirit of appeasement I would later sign over Rodney's truck to PooPoo, willing to forgo my half of the commission on account of that impossible-to-align starter motor that ground flywheel teeth down to size of the knurls on a quarter every few weeks. Not even a NASCAR grease monkey could shim that starter motor correctly, and the truck never got out of warranty before PooPoo's buyers returned it, eventually forcing him to drive the headache up to Tennessee and unload it at auction.

But before that, as further reassurance of my loyalty, I helped dispose of the evidence. When PooPoo dragged Rodney's corpse down to the waterline, not far from where the chief deputy had shot Boise in the knee, I followed with the Charmboy's head. And when Poo flung Rodney's remains in the muck, I chucked the severed in head in after.

As far I know, Sy, that's the last anyone saw or heard from Rodney.

I would later ask myself if maybe I should have expected (or maybe did half-expect) this Grim Reaper stuff all along. I mean even as I was recoiling from the sight of all that blood spurting rhythmically from Rodney's neck, I seem to recall thinking that I should have known PooPoo wasn't going to be satisfied with rendering Rodney toothless. It was a retribution that only seemed proportional to me after my Disney money eased the sting of his betrayal. And PooPoo had lost a brother, besides getting none of that money.

In my defense, PooPoo had never killed anyone before to my knowledge. His thing was knocking people's teeth out. That was the man's special purview. In addition to running a pawnshop and a used-car business, PooPoo was a shylock of the payday-loan variety. In which capacity, he did his own collecting and for that purpose carried a tarnished set of brass knuckles in his back pocket which he showed to late-payers and did not hesitate to use on the chronically late. It was a standing joke in Eatonville that the local denture-maker's business was thriving thanks to PooPoo, who took a cut.

But with Rodney's murder, my eyes were certainly open to the violence he was capable of. And frankly, Sy, I wouldn't be sharing this story with you, even this far removed from the time of the crime, if poor Poo hadn't succumbed to cancer a few years ago. Requiescat in Pace.

I've had occasion to visit Walt's famous theme park a few times since its completion, and by my rough reckoning Rodney's bones lie somewhere under the portion designated The Australian Outback. Over him, people sit in the padded pouches of big plastic likenesses of kangaroos which hop up and down over the Charmboy's final resting place, inducing a series of groin-titillating frissons of weightlessness to long lines of paying customers. As a fitting tribute to a fallen friend and one-time comrade in crime, I dubbed the ride "Rodney's Ride."

This is mere speculation, mind you, but my business instincts tell me that in draining the swamp, when Walt's workers came across his headless carcass, they looked the other way in the interest of avoiding cost overruns and loss of bonuses linked to completion dates that would result from idling a crew while the police roped off a crime scene and painstakingly investigated an obvious murder. His corpse was soon buried under six feet of earth as truck after truck dumped its load of fill to bring the building site up to grade.

And there you have the story of how the ride called Rodney got its name.

Call me psychic, Sy-Fy, but I'm getting a mental picture right now of your eager young ADAs scribbling down the words "kangaroo ride" with a mind to instituting a search for Rodney's leftovers. All I can say is good luck with that, boys, after all these years, based on my shaky sense of geography and the distinct possibility that he ended up as gator food. Assuming you get a permit to dig, I anticipate by the time you're done, you'll have turned Walt's obsessively tidy dream factory into something resembling God's Little Acre or Frenchman's Bend or the battlefield at Verdun circa 1918 – holes dotting the landscape as far as the eye can see.

One final thought on the poor Charmboy, if I may wax sentimental for a sec. You've seen executions, Sy. They're gruesome. Decollation is possibly the hardest to witness, apart from lapidation, I would think. And Rodney's beheading is a scene that replays itself periodically in my dreams. I watch in horror as his lopped-off head rolls across that blanket, and when it stops, it looks up at me. And, in my dream, it winks!

### Sonny's Comments

When I asked Sonny about the Ride called Rodney, he said, 'I've heard the story. It could be true. I wasn't there.'

About Rodney's wink, he seemed to offer more corroboration, 'Evelyn made the point that whether Rodney was bullying someone weaker or groveling to someone stronger, he never for a moment entertained the slightest doubt that he was running the show and controlling everyone around him.

'Evelyn used to say, "I could put a loaded gun to the Charmboy's head and just before I pulled the trigger, his last act on earth would be to wink at any witnesses present to show everyone that blowing his brains out was entirely his idea and I was merely following his instructions, doing exactly what he'd maneuvered me into doing all along."'

### Round 16

Most upsetting, seeing my little canary bird rendered headless like that right before my eyes. But then life is full of tragedy to be borne philosophically if we mean to carry on, and by dinnertime I'd shaken off the worst of the jitters.

Knowing how thrilled Rodney would have been by the sight of a bloody decapitation had he seen it inflicted on someone else helped to cushion the blow a little. The Charmboy did love a Roman holiday. Nothing gave the kid more joy when he was alive than the spectacle of someone else's mortal suffering. And the more mortal suffering the merrier.

The next to come home was Sonny. After three years without a word, the prodigal Son-o returned. My heart soared when I took his call and heard his voice. Only to nosedive when he said that he was taking the DA's deal and patching things up with his family and going back to school.

A lot had happened in the time he'd been away: Freddy was back from Vietnam and out of the VA, though still under the delusion that he was a cat much of the time; PooPoo had murdered Rodney; Disney World – a piece of it anyway – was fixing to have its grand opening. But the biggest change on the home front was that I'd gone and married Winny.

Sonny could scarcely believe his ears when his parents handed him that little news bulletin.

'Yes, the Fond Owner and I are now hitched!' I admitted, going on to explain how it was mostly a business arrangement. In fact it was my business acumen that set the whole thing in motion.

You recall how my negotiating skills got me double the offer on those 80 acres Disney wanted and how I went to work wheeling and dealing all through the night, buying up local property?

Well, Winny Senior had watched me do it. In fact he vouched for me on a number of those after-hour deals for points on the return. He had his own people buying up property for him, but I had the inside scoop on what was about to happen, so I was more than just a stringer. By mentioning our mutual desire for discretion, I coerced his help and awed him both with my nimble exploitation of an opportunity we both capitalized on and my adroit manipulation of him personally.

The man had met beautiful unscrupulous women before, but none as heart-stoppingly gorgeous as I was and none with my cut-throat business sense, and he fell madly in love with me.

How could he resist?

'It takes a wolf to love a wolf,' I told Sonny, 'and getting an eyeful my lupine qualities in full flower, Winny Senior started coming on to me romantically. He began the courtship by sponsoring my candidacy for Florida's Business Woman of the Year, an accolade I won hands-down. And I expressed my gratitude by taking the old letch for a tumble or two. After which his pursuit grew hot and heavy.'

For me it was just fun. I mean I enjoyed playing the sly young vixen to his panting old hound dog, stoking his lust with come-hither looks and the occasional nip-slip before denying him the honey hole more often than not, deftly skipping to one side at the last second just as his slavering jaws were snapping shut.

' _Before_ the Disney deal,' I told Sonny, 'I'd have made him my prime sugardaddy and milked his infatuation by screwing him to a frazzle ten times a day for a price. But once I had the seed money I needed to grow my own fortune, I felt in a position to forgo the more carnal forms of whoring.'

No need to explain further to Sonny who knew I really preferred pleasuring myself. I'm not altogether averse to the clumsy sweaty coupling of shared sex, but I have yet to meet the man who can do me better than I can do myself. No offence, boys.

Also, and this is bound to sound petty, but I never really cared much for Winny Senior's looks. While a cavalier of the old school, devoutly attentive and falling over backwards to please me in every way – sweet as a button in other words – mug-wise he was a Boris Karloff replica, with a face, to be perfectly blunt, like a cadaver.

Still, I had no objection to letting him wine and dine me while I networked with his business connections and turned them into my business connections. I pumped him for stock tips and had a nice giggle tickling his famishing old putz with my fuzzy young peach while listening to him gibber on about how unimportant our age-difference was and how such trivialities as that should pose no obstacle to the course of true love, which goofiness I frankly found a little embarrassing.

The more I toyed with him, the deeper he fell under my spell, showering me with gifts as he heaped curses on his sister Mel who denounced me as unsuitably young to be the recipient of the attentions of a man his age. Until, one balmy night, sick of her harangues on the subject, he caught me by surprise when he fell to one knee and said, 'Let's really give her something to complain about!' And, ring in hand, the old geezer proposed.

'Deeply sensible of the honor,' I tried to let him down easy. 'Not ready to be tied down yet. Have my own show to run.' I offered the usual excuses.

And to prove to him that my objective in playing the uncatchable coquette – or prick-tease – had never been matrimony, I began banging his brains out on a nightly basis.

But he kept right on proposing.

I must have turned him down a dozen times. I think he was under the impression that I was looking for someone younger. But I was actually looking for someone older – and richer. A geriatric bed-ridden oil man with no heirs was the man of my dreams, and Winny Senior was barely fifty, and all indications pointed to a capital worth of only a hundred million, twice that at best, which was a lot of money in those days, I grant you, but I was convinced I could surpass him in a couple of years. I'd already proved I could make three million in single night. Ya gotta love the hubris of youth...

It was only after the happy news reached my ear that my middle-age suitor had been diagnosed with aggressive early-onset Alzheimer's – a condition otherwise known as "impending-court-mandated-loss-of-all-proprietary-rights-and-privileges-due-to-senility" – that I accepted his next proposal with a change of heart so sudden that his sister Melody called it obscene.

'And here,' I told her with a pixie grin, 'I thought it was my exhausting sexual acrobatics that led him to forget my name at the end of our merry romps.'

Of course the whole Chimes clan, top to bottom, automatically closed ranks – for the sake of the "famoney" – and had my betrothed – he of the ebbing brain-power – declared non-compos-mentis.

No surprise there. It's what I would have done.

What did surprise me – for a couple of seconds anyway – was Junior's wish to take his father's place. I suppose, what with Big Daddy contesting the incompetency ruling, there was an outside chance that with my help he might win, and if that were to happen, Winny Junior knew that I'd not only make him call me Mother, I'd be in a position to cut him off without a dime.

A prospect that so terrified him – subconsciously, I mean, because Winny has never been fully conscious of anything in his life – that _fils_ , mirroring what _pere_ had done before him, took a knee and begged for my hand.

'Aw, what the hell,' I said, knowing I could easily control little WinWin even without the help of dementia, and I accepted him and testified against his father at the competency trial.

'How could I pass up the chance,' I told Sonny, 'to put our old schoolmate through the wringer for a lifetime with my breezy dominatrix ways?'

The irony of marrying the person I'd plotted for years to kidnap and hold for ransom did not escape Sonny, but he didn't say anything. Not even after I publicly thanked him in front of Winny and Aunt Mel for discouraging all those kidnapping plots of mine when we were kids and refusing to be my accomplice, culminating my words of gratitude with the tag-line: 'Winny may well owe his life to your unwavering pessimism, particularly over the most promising of my plans which called for killing the Fond Owner right off the bat!'

Sonny had no comment, but Winny and Aunt Mel both croaked, 'Huh?'

Evidently, what they say about girls marrying their fathers is true, Sy. I mean while the social status of my father differed widely from that of my groom, they definitely shared the same hysterical ignorance of reality and clung to the same ditzy lie that slaves are happy and that slave-life is a thing to be admired and devoutly wished for.

At our wedding reception, I explained all of that to the guests in my usual playful way: 'To those of you who may be curious as to what my little orange blossom sees in me besides the obvious (here I juggled my boobs), it's this: Compensating for the windswept wasteland that is his conscious mind, Instinct whispered in his ear one day: "There's so much suffering and horror in the world that you never want to know about, it's to your advantage to team up with this unsparingly honest woman of business who possesses a firm grasp of the complexities of reality and a razor-sharp understanding of her own self-interest so that you can go on enjoying life with the same in unruffled sense of ease you're grown accustomed to, and continue appreciating literature at the same _Mother Goose_ level of arrested development you still gurgle over, while your smarter, stronger, handsomer half takes the field to do battle against the unpleasantness of life as most people live it."'

That is a direct quote, the very words that went out over the P.A. system in the eponymous Chimes Natatorium on the Rollins campus shortly after Winny and I pledged our troths before the multitudes. I may have said "the soul-mutilating viciousness of life as most people live it" instead of "unpleasantness" but otherwise it's verbatim.

And, finishing my speech, I planted a sloppy one on the mouth of my more delicately nurtured half while ostentatiously reaching around and grabbing two handfuls of his nether cheeks to general laughter, a few naughty hoots, and a gasp of indignation from Aunt Melody who later told me that my unseemly conduct mortified her.

'Lighten up, Auntie M.!' I told her, 'I'm just so excited to be marrying into the Chimes family fortune, it's a wonder I didn't pull down his trousers and consummate the nuptials right there on top of the wedding cake!'

Whereupon, impervious to my wit which I considered self-deprecating since Winny bears an ominous resemblance to his father, Melody called me a vulgar ill-bred hussy.

The merry sparkle instantly vanished from my eyes, to be replaced by an icy insouciance. I was tempted to inform her that her brother was a much better lay than her nephew, but I settled for calling her a silly biddy whose passion for genealogy didn't hold a patch to Darwin's for integrity since she stopped short of tracing her lineage back to the lower primates, despite the unmistakable similarity between her beaky wide-eyed countenance and that of a ring-tailed lemur. Stung by the insult, she turned with a flounce and walked away, and we've been on distinctly less-than-amiable terms ever since.

Understandably, since apart from her small monthly stipend plus a couple of annuities for her two favorite charities – the Daughters of the Confederacy and the Margaret Mitchell Fan Club – the bulk of the family fortune came directly into my capable hands to do with as I please, as quick as the court rendered its verdict against her jilted brother, who she was more responsible than anyone for my jilting.

It was my comic courtroom narrative of his memory lapses that ensured the ruling went against him. Like the time he mistakenly shot me the bird when he meant to give me the OK sign, or the time he couldn't find his car in the parking lot of our motel when it was parked right in front of our room, or when, after banging me in his home's cramped laundry room, he lit a post-coital cigarette and couldn't for the life of him figure out why the smoke alarm suddenly went off.

The poor thing quickly deteriorated after being installed in a nursing home, becoming such a blithering old coot in such short order that I nicknamed him G.K. Chesterton, an appellation he was not at all offended by as he had always admired Chesterton, and he grew to admire him more and more as his mental function diminished.

With that literary reference (which I shared with Winny before sharing it with Sonny and to which Winny said, 'Huh?'), I was done catching Sonny up on events at home, and it was his turn to recount the ordeal of his time in exile.

He said he had delivered a succession of newspapers all around the country, first in Columbus, Mississippi, then Austin, Texas, and one in Vallejo, California – not far from San Francisco.

Like Rodney, he had visited the Haight-Ashbury district, curious for a taste of the peace-and-love culture, but arrived too late. It was a mob-scene of desolation by the late 60s, overrun by hucksters – the tour-bus trade and mainstream journalists foremost among them. The pot-induced passivity that had blossomed briefly and mollified the slave-rage of the early hippies had faded. The flower children had been picked clean and replaced by throngs of profiteering scammers looking to squeeze all they could get from a popular tourist attraction.

The Paperboy witnessed a stabbing on his visit...not the stabbing per se, but the aftermath of it.

'At the bottom of Haight Street,' Sonny said, 'a little black guy, high as a kite, called me over to show me something he was holding behind his back.'

Sonny looked and it was a long thin jackknife or maybe a folded-up straight razor, Sonny wasn't sure.

"I just cut a dude with it, man!" the man boasted, grinning.

As Sonny was edging away, the man explained why: "I asked the dude for a light, man, and he ruffled my cigarette!"

Not wanting to ruffle him further, Sonny nodded genially and went on his way.

He hadn't gone more than a few steps when he noticed a cluster of uniformed cops in the Park across the street, and sure enough when he went to investigate, they were surrounding a man who'd been knifed. The victim lay on the ground and the cops were huddled around him like a rugby scrum, keeping gawkers at bay.

Though hesitant to get involved, Sonny's conscience whispered, 'It's your civic duty to say something...' So he tapped one of the big cops on the shoulder.

"BACK UP!" the cop turned and screamed in his face.

"Uh, officer..." he tried tapping a second cop on the shoulder.

"BACK UP!" the second cop turned and screamed in his face.

"I THINK I MAY KNOW WHO DID IT!" he shouted back.

The officers turned and listened to his story; then put him in the back of their squad car. Experienced manhunters, they asked on which side of street the encounter took place and they drove up a parallel street and cut over and drove slowly down Haight Street as Sonny looked out the window for the knifer.

The sidewalk was packed with people, but after a minute or so Sonny spotted him.

Apparently the goofball was taking the grand tour, showing off his knife and sharing his story with everyone he could buttonhole as he made his way up the sidewalk, having his moment in the sun. He didn't even have the presence of mind to ditch the knife when he saw the cops come to a screeching stop and jump from the car. They practically had to take it out of his hand before slamming him to the sidewalk.

Sonny remembers experiencing a minor panic-attack when he was left alone in the squad car and discovered there were no door handles.

By the time the cops got through cuffing and searching the little guy as roughly as they dared to on a street packed with tourists with cameras, the scene was swarming with police cars. They put the little guy in the back of one and drove him to the station for booking and drove Sonny to the station in the car he was trapped in to take his statement.

The station, according to Sonny, looked like a repurposed high-school gymnasium. A big open place with long wooden benches and little offices around the walls and a high ceiling.

The cops told him to take a seat on a bench outside the chief's office, or whoever the head guy was at that hour. While sitting there, Sonny remembered a long line of hookers was ushered in and filed past him, cracking gum and looking bored as hell, just like you see in the movies.

Then _boom!_ the door to the chief's office banged open and the skinny knifer came flying out with the beefy chief right behind him, slapping and kicking the little guy who was screaming, "I TOLD YOU I DONE IT, MAN! WHAT WRONG WIT YOU, MAN!" over and over while the chief repeatedly knocked him to the floor. They went up and down the length of the sprawling station – the chief raining blows on his prisoner until he fell and then kicking him till he got back up again.

Finally the chief picked the knifer up bodily and slam-dunked him into a waist-high wire trash-receptacle, and bellowed, "I TOLD YOU NOT TO CALL ME _MAN_!"

'The whole thing made me regret doing my civic duty,' said Sonny, finishing his Gentle City by the Bay story with a sigh.

At the various newspapers he delivered, the circulation managers kept firing him or forcing him to quit for trying to do the other carriers a bit of good, until he went East and settled at _The Norwalk News_ in Connecticut, where lower management was good to its carriers, and he thought he'd found a home. He married a school bus driver named Jill and they lived happily for a time in a garage apartment owned by a sweet Italian-American couple who ran a Mom and Pop grocery store, and may or may not have had some connection to the Mafia because when the old man died, a hundred black limos followed his flower-bedecked hearse to the cemetery.

Sonny's wife Jill was not a particularly good bus driver, Sonny recalled. When applying for her license she pulled her bus into the small DMV parking lot and blocked five cars instead of parking on the street. Then, after somehow getting her license, she drove back to the yard and proceeded to scrape off both the left and right front-fender-mounted mirrors, losing the right one first, then pulling up and taking off the left one on her next attempt at backing into her slot.

But she skated by on her good looks. The owner of the bus franchise was a state senator who instructed all his drivers in the event of an accident to swear they were pulled over on the side of the road and stopped. That was probably the best policy with Jill. At Christmas their bonus was a fifth of cheap bourbon for those who drove both mornings and afternoons and a cheaper bottle of vodka for those who drove only one shift, like Jill. Somehow she got the bourbon.

Throughout his banishment, Sonny worked tirelessly at his novel, sending out the most promising chapters to agents and publishers, which boomeranged right back to him. For three years he worked and reworked his story, honing its rhythm and flow, polishing its syntax and pace, mixing and remixing its blend of horror and hilarity, improving its diction and delivery, its poetry and wisdom, its surface fun and deeper substance, and trying very hard to make it took like he wasn't trying at all. The old stitching and unstitching thing Yeats talked about. Until he had eleven chapters that he was almost satisfied with. And for his troubles he'd garnered a collection of 400 rejection slips from various New York publishers and agents.

But he kept on. Disheartened but unbroken, he stayed the course, familiar with the heartache of other struggling authors who had suffered similar neglect at the hands of the book industry, which even successful writers privately admit is staffed by some of the biggest literary boneheads who ever breathed.

Sonny took heart knowing that Kerouac did seven years of rewrites of _On the Road_ before it was published. And Faulkner and Proust had to self-publish their early stuff. And Salinger's _Catcher in the Rye_ was called crazy by the first publisher he sent it to. And Orwell's _Animal Farm_ was turned down a dozen times before it was picked up by small Eastern European house.

Most of his rejections were in the form of impersonal unsigned slips informing him: "We regret your submission does not meet our current needs..." But the rare ones that included a handwritten line of encouragement made him feel even worse. 'Like a first-time comedian on the _Johnny Carson Show_ who doesn't do well enough to be called over to talk with Johnny after his routine,' is how Sonny described the let-down.

Bloodied but unbowed, he persevered.

Until his wife finally got fed up with being married to an impecunious paperboy-slash-unpublished novelist who drove a hand-painted Baby Blue Rambler and left him for a medical claims adjuster with two years of college.

That's when the wandering wastrel lost heart and came home with his tail between his legs.

But not before going on a month-long drunk, bemoaning the treachery of his wife who left him for the bigger-better deal. In the course of that bender, Sonny was (a) fired from his paper route; (b) evicted from his garage apartment and finally (c) got depressed enough to burn the only copy of his manuscript while camping out in the bowery one cold night.

'You dick!' I said when I heard (c).

Sonny's novel had been my biggest concern when he left. Those sweet reveries in which I pictured him dying nobly doing good works all began with him first finishing his wonderfully courageous novel, which had no equal when it came to revealing the ignominious ways people deal with their suffering.

When I heard that he'd burned it, I was livid.

'And now you've come home, raring to serve your owners! Well, serve away, buddy! Because I'm one of them now!' I gave his pity-party the raspberry.

And I've been giving him the raspberry ever since.

Noting that he'd dropped a few pounds, I scornfully advanced the theory: "Down to your fleeing-from-a-fight-weight, are you?'

A kinder gentler soul might have consoled him with Gray's Country Churchyard Elegy line that "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen." Instead I told Sonny, 'You suffered a failure of nerve, you wuss! You gave up too easy! You sold out! I _hate_ you!'

He tried mitigating his surrender by telling me that after so much rejection, he figured maybe _Paragraph-15_ was just too downbeat, too hard on Suthron folk in particular.

' _Mealymouth_!' I said, drawing his attention to the premiere Southern litterateurs like Faulkner and Williams and Caldwell and O'Connor and Carson and Welty, who wrote about primitive bohunks and flighty flibbertigibbets, knowing that smug middlebrow Yankees would read their stories for the satisfaction of feeling superior to such backwoods grotesques. Only after they were successful did they grumble that they were exposing not just Southern primitives but people everywhere, and, no matter how true, their grumblings rang as fulsome as the grumblings of famous Hollywood actresses complaining about having their tits exploited when they were starting out. The point being, ' _They did what they had to do to get a-read!_ ' I told Sonny.

Sonny studied his feet like he was modeling Abject Silence for an art class, while I continued to lay into him.

'How _could_ you! How could you _consign to ashes_ such a wise and beautiful narrator? The apotheosis of both Aphrodite and Athena combined, whose spirit positively _reeked_ of charisma!

'Go back to it! I'll publish it if you'll just finish it! Even if nobody reads it,' I said, 'at least you'll be in a position to plunk it down in front of anyone who questions your credentials as a novelist and say, "There!" And then reach out and take the hand of any drooler who fails to admire its honesty and courage and insight, and say in a gentle pitying tone, "You poor subliterary slob, allow me give you a reading list..."

And if you die unread, it will be a noble death. I'll bury you under a 'simmon tree. And your epitaph will read: "He had fun fighting the fight he was meant to fight, telling on the stupid lying cowardly ways people deal with their humiliations most of the time. He won't be missed."

But Sonny didn't do it. He never tried to recover his lost treasure.

Instead, the mouse-turned-lion-turned-mouse again was welcomed back into the fold of his loving family.

He had no trouble passing his GED (Sonny dropped out of high school a year short of graduation if you recall); then went on to take his degree in journalism at Rollins in just two years, thereby relinquishing his dream of becoming the first person in his family _not_ to graduate from college.

Of course no one was more pleased to see him renounce his wayward ways and revert to respectability than Winny. The Fond One's position on Sonny's literary efforts mirrored Sonny's own. His novel simply wasn't good enough to be published, and he congratulated Sonny for acknowledging that fact. 'The truth is a hard thing to face,' DimWin philosophized glibly.

'And no one proves that more than you!' I said.

'Huh?' said Winny.

He didn't stop at encouraging his friend's "redemption" with warm words of approval, he bestowed financial aid. Anything Sonny needed to turn his life around, Winny was ready to provide. Which meant that his classes at Rollins were tuition-free, with a job waiting for him in our PR department when he graduated.

In divvying up our marital responsibilities after the wedding, I took charge of the overall empire and brooked no interference concerning our bottom line, but I gave Winny control of our media outlets. In the hard-ball world of business, my say was final. But manufacturing accepted opinion was not my forte, and I was happy to let Winny, who excels in that sort of slop, hold sway over the mental-fog machine that is journalism in return for staying out of my way while I focused on the heavy lifting.

Thus did Sonny officially transfer his allegiance from me to Winny.

And, in doing so, he made me mad enough to spit.

' _You're Winny's Paperboy all over again!_ ' I did spit.

'With benefits,' Sonny said in an attempt at humor.

I lifted my upper lip.

One of the many ways I expressed my disgust for him over the years

As kids he'd given me a friendship bracelet in trade for services rendered. I dug it out and showed it to him. I wanted him to see that I hadn't pawned the item; hadn't taken cash from PooPoo for it. I'd kept it in my dead mother's old jewel box all that time as a treasured memento. Now I threw it on the floor and stomped on it.

I can see, looking back, that I was too hard on him. I should have accepted that Sonny had had his fling at heroically defying the forces of Plantation Earth and had lost. There was no point in using my favorite weapon – brutal honesty – to flay a dead horse.

But I did it anyway.

'No big deal,' I sneered. 'You've been backing down from fights all your life. Why stop now?'

At the graduation dinner Winny hosted in his honor, I said to the assembled company, 'Thomas Hardy once wrote, "Literature is the written expression of revolt against accepted things." By that definition,' I drew my conclusion, 'Winny is death to literature, and now' I added, with a disappointed look at Sonny, 'so are you.'

Winny, not surprisingly, said, 'Huh?'

But when Sonny ventriloquized that identical monosyllable, it broke my heart. Hearing Sonny's 'Huh?' made me want to pick up a machine gun and mow down the whole fucking room.

Sonny's 'Huh?' was the signal that his defection was complete. He was Winny's soulless dummy now, utterly.

Until that moment, what I'd always admired about Sonny was his honesty. Though we disagreed on the best way of dealing with our humiliations, Sonny had never up to now denied the extent of our humiliations or the stupid lying cowardly ways we deal with them.

But with that 'Huh?' he effectively joined the ranks of the hysterically stupid. He was in league now with the Fond Owner. Sonny was a Proud Slave. It was the folie a deux thing all over again.

With that 'Huh?' Sonny entered what I call his David Brooks period.

Renouncing his former dissident spirit, he would from that moment on direct every speck of his mental physical and spiritual energy into justifying his obedience to his masters.

To coin a phrase, Sonny sold out.

The hell of it was, seeing just how good he was at it!

Tapping into some hidden talent for defending an unfair social arrangement, he wheedled ever so convincingly in favor of the need for individual compromise in order to avoid social chaos. He admitted to a modicum of unfairness in the way restraints are applied along class lines, but he excused it on the grounds that some owners are worse than others and to avoid the very worst we sometimes have to opt for the lesser of two evils.

With a deft dialectical hand, he made himself agreeable to parochial middlebrows everywhere. Teachers, preachers, managers, military officers, candle-stick makers – in a word, newspaper readers – they all admired his work. Sonny spoke to them. He spoke for them. His tone was as unrelentingly uplifting as Ken Burns'. He did not judge their slave-shame. Or recognize it. Or their misplaced slave-rage. He did not judge or recognize that either. Self- _un_ awareness was his guide.

I won't lie, Sy. I wanted to bite the little sweetie-pie's throat out. And I went a little crazy in my desire to making him suffer. Knowing he was subject to spells of vertigo that had afflicted him since childhood, I took to staggering like a kid coming off a merry-go-round any time I was in his company, reminding him with a woozy slurring of my speech that our planet spins on its axis at supersonic speed and hurdles around the sun at 67 thousand miles an hour, thirty times the muzzle velocity of a round fired from an M-16 on full automatic.

Or I might break into song at the sight of him:

" _All I need are my comp-an-ies!_

Stuffed by suits paid to serve just me!

To

hear

them

cry

oui!

oui!

_O, iii-sn't it just lov-er-ly!_ "

sang the ebullient belle of the ball.

### Sonny's Comments

Sonny said, 'She didn't really compare me to David Brooks. At least not then. David Brooks was still in grade school when I graduated college.

'Not long ago,' Sonny recalled, 'I had the pleasure of meeting David who was nervy enough to attend one of Evelyn's dinner parties. She did not treat him kindly. When he lauded the qualities of grace and elegance, she informed him that people who have no compunction about lying, cheating, stealing and committing mass-murder are some of the most gracious and elegant people she ever met. And when he lauded a mother's love, Evelyn assured him she was a firm believer in never eating your children before they've been well tenderized and then braised to keep the juices in before thorough cooking them to prevent mad-kid disease. And when he talked of "relational skills," she said, "Otherwise known as going along to get along." And when he talked of his admiration for Orwell who famously said "never use a long word when a short one will do," she said, "Well spoken, O Transpartisan Aspirations" – a phrase David had used in a recent column. And when he conceded her point and said that sometimes the rhythm or number of syllables or the sound – the assonance or consonance – of a word or group of words does make the longer word the better fit in a sentence, she sneered, "well back-pedaled, Dave."

'She never let up. When David discussed the difference between guilt versus shame – which he defined as "right and wrong" versus "inclusion and exclusion" – and tied it to the way our electronic media emphasizes the latter, Evelyn grunted and said, "It's called peer pressure, sweetie. And it's been around since forever; you only object to it when it brings to mind _your_ shame over _your_ servitude." And when David talked of the culturally degrading results of bad manners, she talked of the spiritual degrading effects of kowtowing with impeccable manners to the owners of an unfair society. And when he told a story about the "slow, gradual fusing of roots in the ground," she drawled, "Caaa-rap."

'I remember the depth of her disappointment the next morning when the famous columnist was _not_ found dead on the floor of his room, the victim of a stroke, a fate suffered by Eugene Carman, a character in _Spoon River Anthology_ who worked for Thomas Rhodes and had the misfortune to experience an honest glimpse of himself that led him (according to Evelyn) to shout at his reflection in the mirror, 'You cowardly dog! You rotten pauper! You Rhodes' slave!' until he fell on the floor in a heap with "a broken a vein in his head."

'To all appearances her famous guest had slept soundly, got up, showered and shaved; ate a hearty breakfast; turned down his hostess's offer of a mimosa; bade her a fond farewell and went on his merry, successful way.

'"I find that kind of strength inspirational," I told the Empress as I slurped my mimosa.

'"How nice," she said, pinching my arm painfully. Then she told me to take Fungus, her aptly named new kitten, to the vet to be treated for ringworm at ten o'clock. She wanted me to do it, she said, because she didn't trust her summer protégé, who was, as she expressed it, 'just another eager scholarship suck-up of impressive erudition whose paradoxical aim is self-ignorance over how fucking owned he is."

'So you did my job for a while,' I smiled at Sonny.

'And applied Lamisil to my problem areas,' he smiled back sadly.

On his abandoned novel, Sonny said, 'I remember telling Evelyn that maybe if I'd got my work into the hands of an established novelist, he might have helped me find a publisher. And she threw back her head and guffawed a la Marlene Dietrich, "Darlink! Writers are the most fiercely territorial animals on earth! Sometimes they run in packs, like hyenas, but they're still voraciously territorial! They're more territorial than professional athletes! Hell, they're worse than aging comedians who grow to resent not just the competition but the audience they do so many pratfalls to please! Maybe junior-ranked tennis players are slightly nastier than writers, but it would be a close call!"'

### Round 17

Even at the accelerated pace Sonny pursued his degree, the treacherous worm and spineless contemptible cowardly custard – to borrow Aunt Dahlia's description of her nephew Bertie in the second-best of the Jeeves novels which Winny was unable to identify (it's _Right Ho, Jeeves_ ) – Sonny was simultaneously able to get his feet wet at the paper by serving as one of Winny's many factotums (or is it factota?).

He wrote the odd movie or book review; covered the annual Independence Day barbecue cook-off; interviewed the grateful survivors of car accidents and tornados who invariably thanked God for sparing their special skins while righteously dispatching the more sinful. The usual goop that cubs have been trained on since the days of Ben Franklin. The routine grunt work which Winny, who has never answered to a boss a day in his life, likes to call with a perfectly straight face, 'paying your dues.'

I like to call it, 'demonstrating the talent valued more than any other by the people who own you: the talent for sucking up.' And when I call it that, Winny looks wracked with confusion and says, 'Huh?'

Whatever you like to call it, Sonny enjoyed those sweet human-interest assignments more than the position he landed immediately upon graduation when Winny sent him to cover the state legislature.

The senior newsmen passed over for that coveted "hard-news" job all knew perfectly well what Sonny was about to find out: namely, that "covering" that august deliberative body was in reality a winking code word for "covering up" the back-room deals which sit at the very heart of politics. The sweetheart swindles that might negatively impact our economic interests if given the kind of honest coverage we make every effort to ensure they never get.

Our political reporters are trained to focus on the sensational aspects of legislators' lives as a distraction to the everyday practice of influence-peddling that successful politicians are paid to transact and successful journalists are paid to understate for a living.

Homophobic congressmen caught engaging in gay sex in rest-area bathrooms, evangelical judges with a penchant for pawing underage girls, the presidential smoking of stogies marinated in the vaginas of congressional aides, the pay-offs pols make to call-girls and porn stars with whom they've had one-night stands, the brazen hypocrisy of elected officials who praise family values in their speeches while privately beating their mistresses, drug addiction, mental illness, brawling on the senate floor, insufficient anti-communist sentiment on anyone's part, public chicken-fucking – front-page fodder all. The ubiquitous quid pro quo of campaign-funding, lobbying, and editorial endorsements, the rawest sort of vote-selling get minimal ink, with the rare exception that makes the rule.

Which reminds me, Sy, this morning I had a call from Mustafa, my top Middle-East lobbyist. He's in Syria today making sure Assad buys the chemicals he needs to make his poison gas from my affiliates in Germany and Britain, not the Koch brothers' plants in Latvia and Argentina. I bring it up only because dictators are so much easier to deal with than elected officials. With dictators we're not constantly throwing money away buying _every_ candidate with a chance of winning an open seat and worrying about backing the wrong man with the bigger donation, which can be dicey in a close election.

As far as Sonny goes, it was his first close-up whiff of the world of politics and he shrank at the stench.

'You're telling me to play down the corruption and chicanery festering at the very heart of state politics!' he complained.

'Exactly!' his senior editor told him, pleased with his ready grasp of the essentials of his job and giving him a hearty slap on the back.

When told to scrap a story about a scoundrel we favored in the last election who was caught with his hand in the slush-fund jar and whose sticky fingers might damage our reputation by extension, the Paperboy sulked.

'Why so glum?' his senior editor asked.

Without descending to the usual pious cant about holding our lawmakers to a higher standard, Sonny expressed the opinion that it might be nice to hold them the _same_ standard, just for the sake of consistency. And for the half-minute it took him to lay out his position with unassailable logic, his senior editor thoughtfully stroked his chin. And as soon as Sonny finished laying out his position with unassailable logic, his senior editor stopped stroking his chin and cocked his head to one side and said, 'Huh?'

Brutal honesty was my policy whenever the Paperboy unburdened himself to me. I frankly told him that distortion, misdirection, truth-fractionalizing, artful dodging, quibbling, euchring, data-manipulation, whole-cloth fabrication, docility in the face of government disinformation, strategic side-stepping, tactical clouding of clear distinctions, alternative-truth-manufacturing, out-of-context-fact focusing, enhanced nuancing, pettifogging, obfuscation, patriotic bias, slant, favoritism, fudging, lying by omission, misemphasis (that was the big one), inconsistent application of moral indignation, plus outright lying his big fat ass off in the service of the powerful people who control society and ultimately sign his paycheck would get easier over time as he learned to play the game.

When Sonny whined that he didn't want to become as irredeemably corrupt as the politicians he was mis-covering, I reached across the bed and took his hand and gazed into his anguished eyes with motherly concern for the better part of five seconds before apprising him that he was employing entirely the wrong terminology, and as a professional journalist he really ought to know better.

'Corruption is bought and sold, muffin,' I straightened him out. 'Which means politicians are eminently redeemable, according to the first definition of the word _redeemable_.'

Intuit from that carefree bit of badinage, sugar, the unsoftening of my rancor over the mistake Sonny had made in seeking Winny's patronage over mine.

Six months later, he didn't do his job mis-covering the State House so well that he was bumped up to our Washington bureau. This, despite his personal misgivings that he was cut out to be a political reporter. The Paperboy believed his talents might be better suited to the smile-more stories. Travel gush, art veneration, celebrity interviews, hyperkinetic pop-music analysis. Mellifluous obituaries. Anything of a lifestyles nature. Happy-slave fluff. That drama-critic position he'd been offered a few years ago – might that still be on the table?

Too late, said Winny; all those stickier forms of PR were covered.

Desperation nevertheless drove Sonny to try his hand at a humorous column on spec, hoping he might have a hidden flair for the kind of breezy Erma Bombeckian/Lewis Grizzardian cynical-seeming, sentimental flummery that helps to ease our suffering by wryly trivializing it.

He didn't.

So he packed his bags and trudged off to Washington at double the salary.

It was height of the Watergate Scandal, and when the Paperboy arrived on Capitol Hill, he did not do his job with such admirable inefficiency that Winny couldn't have been more pleased.

The far greater crime disclosed in the hearings outraged Sonny at first. The secret bombing of Cambodia caused Sonny's conscience to reflexively assert itself and he huffed, 'Words fail me!'

'Attaboy!' his senior editor goosed him approvingly.

Our new Washington correspondent soon settled down to mis-cover the proceedings with exactly the lack of due diligence expected of him, narrowing his scope to focus on the farcical break-in of the DNC Headquarters, just as the senators on the committee did at tedious length.

I doubt you're old enough to remember, Sy, but it was a difficult period in our nation's history. The culmination of more than a decade of proliferating unrest over Jim Crow and Vietnam. Deteriorating social conditions were making me nervous about our country's security. And by our country's security I mean of course my economic hegemony. Winny and I let it be known to our newsboys to stress the value of individual sacrifice as a counter-narrative to the attention being drawn to our nation's broad systemic inequities by protesters equipped with bullhorns.

Which is why when G. Gordon Liddy went to prison, bragging about how America needed tough guys like him to deal with Russia's tough guys, he got tons of press coverage, but the solid gold Zippo lighter I presented to him as a lighthearted token of my gratitude for his service to me got no mention at all.

G.G. was famous for demonstrating the fanatical depth of his loyalty to his owners by holding his palm over the flame of his lighter until his flesh sizzled. I was definitely wowed watching him do it. It was just the sort of macho act of self-loathing aimed at easing his shame over his subservience that my poor dad was hysterically stupid enough to have _hoo_ -rahed if he'd been alive to see it.

Sonny's first week in Washington was tough, in part because he was reading the autobiography of Bertrand Russell at the time and was convinced that the nastiness of a society that had re-elected the Richard Nixon in a landslide over McGovern could not be honestly addressed by the punctilious "even-handed" reporting of "pure" facts without any interpretation. In a short-lived reaffirmation of his fourth-estate pledge, he decided to report the whole ugly truth in-depth and unflinchingly. Over the phone he told me that by removing the blinders and holding nothing back he might help to create, and I quote, 'if not a just world then at least a slightly less unjust world.'

Those were his actual words.

To which I said, 'Good luck with that, angel-baby.'

And I flew up to Washington to give him a straddling he wouldn't soon forget and apprise him that he was in for a lifetime of heartbreak.

Next stop Vietnam.

Not to take away any credit away from Sonny's repeated success as a blind and toothless public watchdog, I like to think I was instrumental in fast-tracking his career. Because for all the dishonor and disgrace he brought on himself when it came to keeping tabs on our elected officials at both the state and national levels, getting Sonny as far away as possible from me played a more than a marginal part in why Winny elevated the wide-eyed ingénue who was barely a year or two out of college to a coveted slot as war correspondent and shipped him halfway around the world to report on the last year of the Vietnam debacle.

...War Correspondent. The title stirs thoughts of journalistic glory in the minds of all our media stallions who fight tooth and hoof for the position. Giving the honor to Sonny produced no end of ill-will among the more experienced thoroughbreds in our stables. But advancement, as Iago stamped and snorted, goes by preferment.

My part in Sonny's meteoric rise – or fall; meteors do in fact fall, don't they? – had to do with my penchant for broadcasting the fact that Sonny was my demon lover. I used to make a habit of breaking in on Winny's Saturday get-togethers with his old college friendlies who now worked for him in various executive capacities. They would gather on weekends to reminisce about the old scull-racing days – all those gleaming oars moving as one – and I'd do my best to liven up their meetings with my off-color remarks which generally took the form of dropping hints that I couldn't keep my hands off the Paperboy.

For example, exhausted and disheveled and still reeking of cheap booze after a hard night of juke-jointing, I'd blow into the hubby's study uninvited, fix myself a drink, and announce to Winny and his claque of underlings, 'Hello, Starbrights! The Earth says hello!' Adding, 'I tell you what, boys, I've sucked some mighty big cocks in my time but the Paperboy's has the biggest I've ever wrapped these lips around!'

Or, over dinner at the Governor's mansion, biting down on a baguette, I might opine between chews, 'Geez-Louise, look at the gargantuan length of this thing! It's damn near as long as Sonny's cock!'

Thus, in my inimitable way, my contribution to the Paperboy's high-flying career was not insubstantial, as the hubbly-bubbly couldn't wait to get him out of town as soon as he graduated college, to stifle my accounts of us going at it like tigers in heat, and then out of the state when Tallahassee proved to be too close to curtail my visits, and finally clean out of the country, all the way to Indochina, where Sonny arrived as green as the Mekong Delta prior to defoliation.

"In country," the Paperboy's first order of business was to put on another burst of integrity and swear to observe and report the news with an empirical eye, putting down in clear, easy-to-understand prose the terrible suffering and dying going all around him, playing no favorites and maintaining a high-minded disregard for the wishes of the powerful people who controlled his career and the careers of his immediate superiors.

Alas, with his first filing, the suckling babe was informed by his senior editor that he was falling down on the job, the keeping of which required him to stab out both his eyes and abandon anything resembling virtue if he meant to continue writing for a mainstream newspaper instead of going back to delivering one.

At the mention of delivering papers, Sonny knew that his editor had been talking to Winny and, in a pained voice, he called to ask me about it. 'No, babydumpling,' I happily set him straight, 'he's been talking with me. If we'd run your story,' I explained, 'the government would have closed down our Saigon bureau.'

The offending lead in his rookie dispatch ran: "More and more it would appear that the chickens are sensibly opting to go home to roost."

Field reporters don't caption their stories as a rule, but Sonny was expecting the headline over his piece about the American-trained ARVN forces who were defecting in unprecedented numbers to be something witty like: "Fowl Running Afoul of Expectations" or "Fowl Tired of Being Fair Game." He was taken aback when it read: "Foul Play Met with Irresistible Force." And under his by-line was a travesty of the story he'd written, the rewrite emphasizing how steadfastly the South Vietnamese Army was battling the ruthless invaders from the North.

In casually discussing the changes, his senior editor was kind enough to give Sonny, in addition to the reminder of the level of probity expected of him, a crash course in geopolitics at no extra charge.

'Who the _FUCK_ do you think you are, _FUCKNUT_? You think the _FUCKING_ world's a _FUCKING_ gondola ride down the _FUCKING_ streets of _FUCKING_ Venice! Life's a _FUCKING_ team sport! Pick a _FUCKING_ side, _YOU FUCKING MAMA'S BOY_!'

And so, as in Washington and Tallahassee, Sonny was destined to learn again in Vietnam that his job was to serve his owners by misrepresenting the truth. He was there to show indignation over our enemy's bloody atrocities and put a good face on our motives for the unfortunate necessity of killing millions of Vietnamese peasants in the name of stemming the tide of Communist aggression and spreading – to quote from his official mission statement – the light of democracy around the world.

The way I put it to him was less oblique: 'Rooty-toot, you're there to protect my wealth and power. What the hell else did you think you were sent there to do?'

Crestfallen, the poor dear called back an hour later, having loaded up on liquid courage in the interim, to say he was thinking of quitting. I'd never heard Sonny really drunk before, and frankly I liked the sound of it. A desire to hear more of it may have played a part in why I tried to lift his crest a bit and keep him on the job.

'Sugar,' I told him, 'you're only doing what every reporter for every major newspaper does ninety-nine percent of the time. The other one percent of the time – one story in a hundred – we give you free rein to tell the horrifying truth. You know what they say about the truth, hon: It's a rare commodity. And we like to keep it that way.'

Sonny took cold comfort from my effort to soothe, even after I added, with a shrug, that a newspaper is only a company like any other company, and if you want to go on working for a company, you have to take care not to displease that company's owners. And the quickest way to find out how far your right to free speech is protected is to exercise that right and displease a company's owners by threatening our projected annual fiscal growth.

The worst of it for Sonny was that, on looking around, he saw that the foreign press and even a few domestic freelancers writing for progressive, low-circulation magazines were telling a different, truer story, despite (actually because of) how little money they were getting paid.

Sonny envied their courage, if not their paychecks, and he used to seek out these higher-principled colleagues at the bars and drink with them and pick up the tab as a penance and laugh at their wisecracks about the big-money bias he was paid to deliver. Among them was a young know-it-all named Christopher Hitchens whose thorough contempt for the Paperboy, behind his convivial razzing, was unmistakable.

Thus – I use that word thus a lot don't I? – did poor Sonny's eroding self-esteem erode even further as, confronted with a clear alternative to selling out, he found himself unwilling to take the cut in pay. He tried to justify his pusillanimity on the grounds that he'd given heroism a shot with his novel _Paragraph-15_ , but things hadn't worked out so well. In one of our phone calls he argued that status-quo writers like him with enough talent to make a living selling their cautiously crafted half-truths were a dime a dozen, but the number of dissident writers capable of making a living telling the full harrowing truth was one in a million.

His argument led me to buy a controlling interest in one of the egghead magazines Hitchens wrote for, just for the fun of it, and have the publisher pull the reins on the little Limey in the politest possible way and get him to tone down his moral outrage a bit. When I laughingly told Sonny what I'd done, he expressed horror and got drunk again.

Booze began playing a bigger and bigger role in his life. Beefeaters over frozen cubes of Perrier was his choice of solace. An anodyne he required in ever-increasing infusions and ever-stronger doses over the course of his year in Vietnam. Until by the time he was air-lifted out of Saigon at the last minute, the self-medicating Paperboy was more or less permanently tipsy.

With the fall of South Vietnam – due, as Sonny shamefully misrepresented in his final report, to the bloodthirsty skullduggery of the late Ho Chi Minh's high command, who Sonny privately viewed as no more and possibly less power-hungry than the French Colonialists and no more and possibly less indifferent to human life than our country's crusaders for democracy – he was posted to Central America, to be our boy in Managua and San Salvador, and whatever the capital of Honduras is. Also Guatemala and Panama Cities.

By then the poor lamb had been nicked enough times by the shears to have no illusions about what it meant to write for a mainstream U.S. paper. He'd been brimming over with integrity when he was sent to fill his first assignment, determined to do good as well as make good on the opportunity he'd been given. Ditto his subsequent two assignments. But by the time he left for Central America you could see he wasn't exactly aflutter with ethical fire. He could barely summon up a feeble smile over the CARE package I handed him at the boarding gate, containing a tube of Tinactin, a bottle of quinine, a can of insect repellent, a box of mosquito netting and a snakebite kit.

I was heartless. I went right on cutting him no slack. You know how long my memory is, Sy. And how sensitive I am to being thwarted. Inwardly, I looked with quiet sorrow on my old friend's disintegration, but outwardly I was bent on rubbing his nose in the mistake he'd made – and was continuing to make – by not seeing things my way and becoming rich like me.

Picture a mewing kitten up a tree and its exasperated owner hurling stones at it in a muddled strategy aimed half at coaxing it down and half at punishing it for being up there in the first place. That kitten was Sonny, and I was his exasperated owner.

My regular Sunday morning calls were nothing more than spiteful exercises in making him miserable. I'd begin by asking if he'd changed his mind and was ready to hitch his wagon to my star. And when his response remained a froward restatement of not wanting to perpetuate the problem, I felt free to lay into the ass and give him what for.

Between you and me, Sy – and the five jade dragon-headed dildos, one dating back to the third century, that I had Sonny buy for me from various back-channel dealers of protected Vietnamese national artifacts so I could show them to Winny and his college chums as examples of the kind of salacious presents Sonny was addicted to sending me – I found life as a rich owner exceedingly dull. My halcyon days were the ones spent striving to have my revenge on society by becoming rich. And the cruel taunts I unleashed on Sonny, in addition to being payback for his rebuke to my way of handling life's horrors, were a way of varying the monotony of my owner-status once I'd achieved it.

'So how goes the capitulation, Paperboy?' I inquired in my jolliest voice as soon as he said hello.

His longstanding sobriquet – Paperboy – was the least offensive thing I called him.

'How's my upper _servant_ doing on this steamy shame-choked summer's day? I do miss your smiling face, _houseboy_. Winny agrees that there's not a more _faithful retainer_ to be found anywhere in our stable of foreign correspondents, nor on our domestic staff for that matter. Not Manny the head gardener, not Luster the chauffeur, not Klaus your senior editor, reliable as they all are. As hired help goes, sweetie, you're the cat's meow of cat's paws!'

It was no use trying to duck my calls. I'd get nasty with the major-domo at the Saigon Sheraton. 'This is an emergency, _le plus bas garcon_!' I lashed the head lackey in haute Francais. 'Go at once and tell the quiet American _gate-papier_ in room blahblah to pick up his phone!'

'And whom may I say is calling, Madame?' drawled the unctuous manager.

'Your _chatelaine_ (in translation: "owner"), you rascally vocal emulator of your owners! Get moving, you silly-ducking _crapuleux crapule_ (in translation: "slave") before I buy your flea-bag hotel and can your skinny ass!

After being installed in Central America, poor Son-o tried again without much hope to report both sides of the class conflict without prejudice. It was a last-ditch effort to keep alive the illusion of following an honorable profession. But this fresh stab at honesty was as doomed as his previous attempts.

In his first report he accurately described Nicaragua as a "country the size of Georgia under the thumb of a brutal military dictator who depends on our Congress to support him with millions in financial aid, mostly in the form of massive amounts of free ordnance..."

It quickly earned him another educational call from his senior editor, who followed him there from Vietnam.

'Hey, _SHITFACE_! Who the _FUCK_ do you think you are, Christopher _FUCKING_ Hitchens!? Thanks to _COMMIE FUCKS_ like him, the American public is questioning whether we're the _FUCKING_ good guys anymore! And there you go taping a " _FUCK ME IN THE ASS!_ " sign on America's backside! Henceforth, "moral equivalence" is the new watchword! You hear me, _SHITFORBRAINS_?

Sonny tried to argue. 'I'm not trying to sweep either side's misbehavior under the rug by directing _all_ of my indignation at one side's greater misbehavior. And I take your point that we're all victims as well as agents of abuse, faults on both sides so to speak. Still, to my mind, our side's conduct in this fight is so much worse than our opponent's that to flout something that obvious is to flaunt our moral turpitude.'

'Repeat after me,' said his senior editor: ' _MORAL EQUIVALENCE_ is the new goddamn watchword! _YOU CUNT_!'

Sonny almost got himself fired for his second report, in which, despite being warned, he insufficiently nuanced his honesty with the analogy: "In this small country roughly the size of North Carolina under a totalitarian government headed by General Somoza, the real level of police brutality toward the mestizo population is to the reported level of police brutality as the real level of police brutality toward blacks in any real-life town in North Carolina is to the comic contretemps Sheriff Andy and his sidekick Barney deal with every week in the fictional town of Mayberry, where there's apparently not only a Sundown Law but also a no-blacks-on-the-set-anytime-of-the-day-or-night ordinance in effect."

Sonny was proud of that line which never made it into our papers. His senior editor kindly explained why not.

'Hey, _SUBVERSIVE-BOY_! Hey Howard _FUCKING_ Zinn! Are you on a mission to shatter people's last ounce of faith in _YOUR NATIVE COUNTRY_!? Get over your _SANCTIFIED SNOT-NOSED SELF_! You either hold the government line and never offer the barest suggestion that there might be a morally superior side in this shitstorm down here unless it's _OUR SIDE_ , or you're _FUCKING_ fired! _GOT_ it, _WATERWALKER_? That's _OFFICIAL_!"

'But isht true,' Sonny slurred in defense of his story.

'Boohoohoo, _dickbrain_!' his senior editor mocked in a softer voice, becoming almost gentle (for Klaus) when he realized Sonny was drunk. "I'll give you this, _puss-puss_ , most of the little mama's darlings I have to deal with are only half as wishy-washy as your sorry ass! They serve God and Country and obey Winsome Chimes with an enthusiasm you'll _never_ have! So take heart, pisspants, if your object is _not_ to be like Dan fucking Rather, _congratulations_! You're not Dan fucking Rather! _And you never will be! You're twice the pansy Dan is_!'

Thus it came to pass that in Central America, as in Vietnam and Washington and Tallahassee before that, the Paperboy bowed to economic exigencies, and relied more and more on booze for comfort.

With the assassination of Archbishop Romero in El Salvador, his already ailing soul just seemed to collapse in on itself and, after misreporting the truth about the murder, stating for the record, as required, that the Archbishop's killers were unknown and could have been extremists from either the far left or the far right, he became a seldom-bathing nominally-functional utterly-self-loathing alky.

And he would remain so over the next two gin-fogged decades, serving us in one demeaning assignment after another, as Winny, acting out of what he hysterically believed to be the most generous of motives, and I, acting out of undisguised meanness, sent our old friend to mis-cover every sweltering hot spot on the planet. Indonesia, Panama, Somalia, Lebanon, Tanzania, Sudan, Rwanda, Iraq.

In charitable mood, I remember we varied the fun once by posting Sonny to Valdez, Alaska, to cover the oil spill up there and the lengthy clean-up operation to follow. It was the late-eighties and Sonny sobbed with relief at the opportunity to escape the tropical heat. But no sooner did his chronic crotch-rot clear up than it was replaced by the itch of chilblains. Everyone back home had good laugh hearing him bemoan the exchange of ailments. I laughed loudest of all.

I never forgot his betrayal or let him forget his function. Checking in of a Sunday morning I got in the habit of cordially inquiring into the stability of my foreign investments in whatever far-flung tertiary part of the world he was sent to safeguard with his "fair and balanced" reports. And before hanging up, I never failed to sign off with instructions to give my warmest regards to whichever far-right caudillo resembling a Christmas tree in his ludicrously bemedaled uniform Sonny was being paid to prostitute his literary talents in the service of by soft-soaping his atrocities next to the atrocities of the armies opposing him.

What made things especially hard on Sonny was that he actually cared about the poor uneducated indigenous peasants who were being slaughtered by the poor uneducated indigenous soldiers who we armed and trained and paid to do our dirty work. He literally wept for one and all.

I tried to buck him up. 'Quit blubbing about life's horrors!' I told him. 'Are you a man or a candied yam? Get some revenge! Get rich! Then shit on the floor and call for a proud slave to get down on his hands and knees and lick it up!'

I spoke not without a touch of irony because in my saucy way, Sy, I have some pity for the millions of people around the world who have died for me and killed for me in the past, and for the millions more who are going to die for me and kill for me in the future to ensure that I will never suffer the terrible degradations of my former upper-middle-class life ever again.

By the mid-eighties I was already assembling my merry band of business disciples – the adoring acolytes who attend my annual _Le Diner_ in Orlando every February – and a more ravenous muster of vultures you'd be hard-pressed to find this side of Vlad Putin's cadre of Russian oligarchs. Though it was outside my usual method of matriculating disciples, I made an exception with Sonny and offered him membership in my clan.

But he refused. Thumbed his nose at me again, mulishly repeating that line about perpetuating the problem.

There was simply no reaching him. If you remember, he was ten when I first told him the score; fifteen when I rubbed that warm pistol up against his face, and seventeen when I made my deal with Disney and offered him a cool million to be my friend and spiritual wingman and fellow parvenu! Now I was offering him a fucking _billion!_ and he _still_ wouldn't stoop to handling life's humiliations my way! Imagine how that made me feel. Not good, baby. Not good at all.

Out of spite, I took to telling him the exact amounts of my capital earnings, country by country, thanks to the hordes of campesinos I exploited all around the world. I let him know to the penny how many cents per hour my banana pickers and sugarcane reapers in Guatemala were hacking their lives away for. My guano miners in Colombia, I added with a sigh of regret for how the world works, were making only half that. I tossed in the information that my semi-skilled cadre of Brazilian dozer-operators clear-cutting timber for my beef farms in the Amazon garnered the top spot at 18 cents an hour. Alas, my Panama-hat makers who once held the world's record for low wages were now starving and jobless after they had the temerity to organize, forcing me to close down my factories in Panama and transfer the Panama-hat-making operation to Malaysia, in the same way I moved my freeze-dried chili industry from Chili to Nepal thirty years later. It's called the art of the deal.

'Thanks to the profitability of penury, hunger and conflict,' I told Sonny in a tone of mock sorrow, 'my foreign dividends are multiplying nicely on all fronts.'

I went on to express admiration to the Cold War hysteria which marked the era and which was every global investor's personal cash cow. I owe a debt of gratitude I can never repay to whoever the genius was who came up with the useful and ubiquitously cited bogy known as the domino-theory which kept Congress sending boatloads of U.S. currency to the various strongmen around the world who gladly murdered the least of their countrymen in their eagerness to do our bidding.

And of course, never far from these perfect petal-lips of mine when thanking the various tools who served me so well, was a great big 'muchas gracias' to our reliable Crotch-Rot Muchacho, as the Paperboy came to be known around the upper floors of the Chimes Media Building.

_Such_ a bitch!

After the Valdez assignment, Sonny returned to Central America long enough to marry the first woman to ease his suffering, a handsome Honduran woman named Lorena who would divorce him six years later out of disgust over his self-destructive boozing.

Barely a month into his marriage, we air-freighted him as an imbedded correspondent to Riyadh on a military cargo plane to cover Desert Storm, and a few months later we shipped home again after he'd done his part to minimize the horror and shame of the "shooting-fish-in-a-barrel" rout of Iraq's military forces retreating from Kuwait. At that point his disillusionment was complete. His last hope for humanity obliterated; his alcoholism out of control.

Back in Honduras, he began suffering a series of violent falls – three spills in a single night during one particularly sloppy New Year's Eve jag. His wife discovered the stumblebum concussed and comatose in the bathtub the next morning, his hair matted with dried blood. She thought he was dead and ran out into the street bawling.

He'd fallen backwards that time, but a year later, he tumbled forwards and ruptured an eyeball against the front steps of their little suburban tract-home. His injury required surgery, and the cringe-inducing eye-patch he had to wear (I had our photographer send me a photo) resembled a miniature colander stuffed with gauze.

Work-wise, the demoralized sot was by this time doing little more than picking up the embassy press releases and lowering the level of bombast a notch or two by altering a few words before faxing them to the bureau office; then repairing to the bars to ease his snowballing shame by getting thoroughly wasted.

In the past he'd been known to append the occasional irreverent postscript for his own personal amusement and to give his senior editor something to grouse about, like a recommendation to drop money instead of bombs on Iraq, given the price tag of the war. Or, earlier, after the assassination of Archbishop Romero, he had the chops to write, "Death-squad leader Roberto D'Aubuission, seen eating at a Chinese restaurant last night, broke open his fortune cookie at the end of the meal and laughed uproariously. It read: 'People find it difficult to resist your persuasive ways!'"

But there was no more of that cocky spirit left in Sonny after Riyadh; he came home a broken, helpless, hopeless, falling-down drunk.

Lorena put up with it for as long as she could, nursing him back to health as he went on falling and sprawling. Until, after rupturing his eyeball the first time, he did an encore four years later, rerupturing the same eyeball and breaking his clavicle into the bargain that time, and she'd had enough. It's one thing for an attractive woman to never get mounted because booze has "benumbed the sinews" of her husband's "best delights," but making a full-time nurse of her was too much, and she called it quits, consulted an attorney, changed the locks, and ended the marriage.

If you recall, Sonny's first divorce had been a wake-up call, to his way of thinking anyway. He got drunk, burned his novel and then came home and got respectable.

Well, divorce number two brought him to his knees. Literally. He became a knee-walking dipso whose liquor consumption stayed at the suicidal level for over a year. He quit caring about his job; stopped changing so much as word of the government press handouts and had his assistant Carlos fax the bum fodder in as is. He refused my Sunday calls, and if his senior editor hadn't been fine with the unaltered bumf he submitted, he would have ignored his calls too.

His heroic bender put me in mind of some of my dad's better efforts. Month after month, my admiration for him steadily grew alongside my concern, until compassion – that debilitating emotion I spent my whole life fighting against – finally prompted me to fly down to Tegucigalpa to see the aging rummy and try to get him back on his feet. Which just goes to show what a softie I can be at times.

I marched into his hotel room after bribing the concierge to unlock the door and studied the bloated bearded face of my old friend and lover for a moment with a mixture of esteem and pity before I began backhanding him into consciousness. His puffy eyes, when they finally opened, were beyond glassy. Even after a few more restorative slaps, his expression still hovered somewhere between where-am-I? and please-put-me-out-of-misery. He looked like the star attraction of an award-winning SPCA commercial: a fear-palsied cur experiencing his first touch of human kindness prior to being put down after his filmed rescue was turned to good fund-raising use.

I fixed him a drink while he mumbled something about his crotch-rot being back with a vengeance and begging off any sexual intimacy (which was never offered) on those grounds.

I voiced a concern that he might have an STD.

'The possup-hil-ity,' he hiccupped, 'is a remote one. No sex out of wedlock in seven years. No sex _in_ wedlock in two.'

Lorena told me four, but I let it go. Sonny would never tell me an outright lie, but he was in no shape to know what the truth was after being blotto for so long.

When I suggested that bathing occasionally might improve both his crotch-rot and his chances of getting laid, he nodded but opted for another drink instead.

'So, Smelly,' I put my standard question to him, 'are you finally ready to join me in getting rich?'

I was all set to hear his usual reservation about perpetuating the problem, but instead he finished his drink and slurred in a distrait sort of way, 'You know the closer you get to the equator, the faster you spin. Hu-here (he hiccupped again) we're spinning at nearly top spu-eed, o-most uh thousun miles uh hour.'

As if to prove it, his eyes rolled up into his head and he toppled over sideways off his chair.

Carlos, Sonny's able-bodied assistant, a former professional soccer player, explained while uxoriously helping me back on with my stockings after I gave him a vigorous workout, that Sonny was drinking a full two liters of gin a day as a regular thing, more on special occasions.

Even semi-heavy drinkers like us, Sy, might wonder how someone could stay boozed-up to that extent and still do his job. But then Sonny's job didn't really _require_ doing anything, if you don't count lying. As a print journalist, he didn't even have to fake gravitas for the camera for a few minutes a day, the way our photogenic TV boys have to do as they read from a prompter. All Sonny had to do was phone in those government-friendly handouts; then spend the rest of the day drinking and scratching his balls and collecting his monthly stipend. He could have consumed three liters a day and done as much. And according to Carlos, some days he did.

'Go back to writing _Paragraph-15_!' was my next suggestion. 'Finish that amazingly courageous novel you burned all those years ago before reconciling with your family and spending the rest of your life in a spiraling downward vortex of shame.

'It'll give you something to do between drinks,' I added, looking over his home-library and spotting a hoary copy of Goldwater's _The Conscience of a Conservative_.

'Have your politics taken a turn to the right,' I asked, 'or are you simply decoying any NSA men who might come snooping?'

Instead of answering, Sonny held out his glass for another drink and asked, 'Wha's gold on the anatomical (sic) shart: A-zhee? No, isht A-yoo.'

There was a scrap of paper sandwiched in the Goldwater book and I plucked it out. On it were some words in Sonny's handwriting, written back when he was sober enough to still write legibly. It was a personal mantra or pledge of some sort, titled, "The Conscience of a Decent Human Being." It read:

"A decent human being struggles not to fight down.

"A decent human being struggles not to please more powerful people by exploiting less powerful people.

"A decent human being struggles not to be harder on the welfare cheat than he is on the rich man living off his investment income."

I picked up a pen and added, "A decent human being struggles not to be George Will."

My visit was unavailing. When I suggested that Sonny go back to writing his novel, there was some disingenuousness involved because I knew he hadn't enough years left to tackle a tour de force of the magnitude of _Paragraph-15_. Such a masterwork as that was forever out of his reach at his age. Completing a novel that lived up to the dissident promise of the four chapters I read when he was an adolescent felon full of buck and beans would require a minimum of 40 years. A good hundred thousand pages of dross must be produced in the fight to distill his quibbling down to 300 brave honest pages of the quality of those chapters. And Sonny, approaching 50 now, was a dispirited drunk.

Still, there might be time to do a lesser book: his version of _This Boy's Life_ or _All Over But the Shoutin'_. A not undistinguished, indignation-stirring, if intellectually tepid, advertisement for the advantages of a good college education. A modest book of that relatively compliant kind might still be within his grasp. So I wasn't being completely disingenuous when I tried to rally him to go back to writing fiction. He appeared to have all the stimuli needed to write a story titled, "A Dirty, Ill-Lighted Room of One's Own."

The last thing I remember about my visit was the longing look in his eye when he watched as I brought my drink up to my mouth. His glass was dry and when I stopped short and let my lower lip droop in pendulous mockery of his, he looked away, embarrassed. Then he began moving his lower jaw from side to side as if popping his ears aboard an ascending airliner, or possibly giving his impression of the singer Johnny Mathis, right before he blacked out again.

### Sonny's Comments

I asked Sonny if he was hung like Evelyn said he was, and he said, 'She was just having some fun. My only significant protuberances are my nose and my knees. Evelyn once judged my measurements to be 40-40- and 40, and said my shape had all the eye-popping appeal of a bag of flour.

When asked about Evelyn's Sunday morning calls, Sonny said, 'She called at all hours, day and night, no matter what the day of week, whenever the mood struck her.

'If she was watching a _Jeopardy_ rerun at noon on a Thursday and the category was literary characters, she'd call to boast about the ones she knew. "Abra in this John Steinbeck novel...What is _East of Eden_? A caddish comte named Rudolphe in this famous nineteenth century French novel...What is _Madame Bovary_? A watermelon fucker in this Cormac McCarthy novel. What is _Suttree_? The family name of the idiot in a Faulkner novel who romanced a cow, took it for long walks, got down on his hands and knees and ate fodder with it, brought it flowers and even saved it from a fire once before having sexual relations with it...What is Snopes?"'

On the topic of _Jeopardy_ , Sonny chuckled when I asked if she did back then what she does today, which is look for that one question per show – and there's almost always one; two if it's a celebrity episode – that all the contestants miss but she gets right. Then she triumphs in her superiority with a high-pitched war-cry, no matter how many questions she's missed that the others got right.

When asked about Big Media, Sonny agreed with Evelyn when she said they were no worse than other company men. He added that he deserved the mock Hitchens made of him.

As for the mock Evelyn made of him, he said, 'Over Christmas, if things were relatively calm on the international front, I'd get to come home and see the folks and play Santa to my sisters' kids.

'And at the end of those visits, Evelyn would see me off at the airport where she'd thank me for being such a hard-working drone and assure me in her taunting way that Winsome felt likewise. "Yes, Paperboy, when it comes to choosing someone to shuffle off to the worst war-torn underdeveloped countries around the world to sympathetically mis-cover the ongoing systematic slaughter of thousands of unruly peasants from the aggrieved standpoint of their owners whose patience has been taxed to the breaking point by the ingratitude of their disgruntled subjects, we have the utmost confidence in you!" And giving me a bluff whack across the back or a chuck under the chin, she said brightly, "Good old Sonny!" we tell ourselves. "He's the right man for the job!"

When asked about his eye injuries (there's a disconcerting cast to his right one still), Sonny sighed and said, 'there were times I wanted to fall down and rupture both eyeballs at once and become as blind as Homer and write my dispatches with Godlike detachment, as if the horrors of human affairs were of no more importance than the struggles of ants or amoeba, which from a cosmic perspective I suppose they aren't.'

When asked about Evelyn's admiration for Christopher Hitchens, Sonny said, 'She admired his combative spirit. His friends called him Hitch because he hated being called Chris. Being a militant atheist, I gather "Chris" was too close to "Christian." But Evelyn couldn't call him Hitch because her father, who she despised, shared the same nickname. So she called him Paladin.

'Sometimes she called him Shane or Cheyenne or the Rifleman or Maverick – one of the Hollywood cowboy heroes from the 50s, but mostly Paladin. For a while she called him the Count of Monte Cristo, which Hitch also seemed okay with.'

Staying in the Hitchens vein, Sonny remembered a time when Evelyn, after reading a piece he wrote called "Why Women Aren't Funny" in which he parenthetically asked if anyone really thought Dorothy Parker was funny, she texted him, "Vide, 'Mrs. Hofstadter on Josephine Street.'" And he texted back an apology.

Staying in the Hitchens vein some more, Sonny recalled that in the Yugoslavian civil war and the post 9-11 era, when liberals were horrified by his unexpected turn towards hawkishness and took it for a sign that he'd gone soft on his capitalist owners, Evelyn sweetly thanked him for his newfound love of her and pledged her wholehearted devotion to waging war on the easy-to-beat-up, non-nuclear nations, "...because I'm heavily invested in munitions factories, as you know, darling, and stand ready and eager to make new trading partners in all the backwaters we occupy, whose natives I can screw over till the cows come home under the cloak of civilizing those lousy superstitious heathens who worship rocks from heaven yet have the temerity to doubt the perfectly rational oxymoron of a virgin birth."

'Whereupon, "Paladin" (she showed me the text) texted back not to worry because he still despised her as much as ever and the only thing he ever really admired about her was her happy atheism...'

In a somewhat related story, Sonny recalled that 'during a brief stop-over stateside after interviewing a few of the bereaved friends and family of the thousands of civilians we killed with our "smart bombs" during the Iraq war [Number One] with instructions to decently rue the "collateral damage" while not making too much of it, Evelyn accompanied me to the airport to catch a plane for Indonesia to minimize our part in the murder of thousands of East Timorese, and, as much for the delight she took in making a spectacle of herself as for the rip on my beast-of-burden mentality, she hollered over the shoulder of the ticket-taker as I was boarding my flight, "HEY, PAPERBOY! A _HINNY_ IS THE STERILE OFFSPRING OF A FEMALE DONKEY FUCKED BY A MALE HORSE! A _MULE_ IS THE STERILE OFFSPRING OF A FEMALE HORSE FUCKED BY A MALE DONKEY!"'

To which Sonny responded with a limp thumbs-up, knowing, he said, that with the line stalled in front of him to ignore her would only invite more of the same.

### Round 18

Poor Son-o. His suicidal drunk continued unabated for another six months before the old tosspot came up with a way to manage his addiction by limiting himself to one drink per hour from the time he got up in the morning to the time he went to bed at night. He confessed that sticking to the regimen wasn't easy. There were days, weeks, sometimes months when his iron discipline failed him and he fudged on that pace.

With the invasion of Afghanistan, we decided it was time to bring the old cob in from the field and replace him with one of the restless young colts in our ramuda raring for the chance to shine on us for a while.

Sonny was 52 by then and had been in harness for nearly three decades. Since he was staying on his feet for the most part, to pack him off to the knackers and render him into Alpo and Elmer's would have seemed cruel, so we put him to work writing a syndicated opinion column. In which capacity, he continued to serve us with modest distinction for another thirteen years.

His op-ed work was fairly well received. It garnered him a few minor awards. He got to hear his name honorably mentioned at a couple of ceremonies where the big winners were the late great Lewis Grizzard and my favorite editorialist Molly Ivins. When he picked up a plaque for one of his snarkier columns, the woman presenter kindly referred to him as a male Maureen Dowd. But by and large his columns were the usual soothing run-of-the-mill empty concoctions that say nothing of a disturbing nature.

His crotch rot finally cleared up along with his chilblains, and to all appearances the Paperboy looked to be peaceably sailing along toward that final sunset without incident, enjoying his declining years as a harmless, semi-retired, semi-functioning alky, the subject of warmhearted jibes around the water cooler at our flagship paper here in Chimesville.

Apropos his drinking, he would resort to the usual tricks drunks play to control the habit. Like switching brands four or five times a year, hoping that might help. Or drinking two days of hard liquor followed by a day of wine. Or consuming only beer on alternate Tuesdays. Or thinking that clear versus dark rum affects him differently. As far as I know he never got as goofy as Raymond Carver who wrote a story about holding himself to two bottles of champagne a day, but then I'm not privy to all of Sonny's quirks.

My tongue remained as sharp as ever.

'So how's our Best Boy this fine day? What new way of massaging the old slave-rage will you be conjuring up this week, I wonder, stable-mucker?'

I was horrible.

I compared his readers to the sainted townspeople in that awful Billy Bob movie, _Sling Blade_ , which to my mind was much too hard on the bully played by Dwight Yokum, the only character in the movie I sympathized with except for the imbecile's snockered soliloquizing father played by Robert Duval. (B.B. would go on to redeem himself with _Bad Santa_.)

I also continued my running gag of sucking on one finger and batting my eyelashes like the murderess in _The Big Sleep_ while begging Sonny to kill Winny so we could become demon lovers, always with Winny within earshot, which was the whole point.

The truth is, I had no wish to kill the Fond Owner anymore. I mean why should I? As long as he stuck to his assigned role as Adored Philanthropist and Charm-soaked Arbiter of What's Safe and Fashionable in the World of Happy Art and Literature, and stayed out of my way while I worked my special magic and grew the family's wealth to unprecedented levels, I got along fine with the dimwit. And since nothing pleased Winny more or suited him better than speaking to small groups of society ladies at various galleries and colleges in praise of the grateful recipients upon whom we bestow our foundation grants, our life together has been the best of connubial arrangements. For all his reluctance to concede my eminence in the humanities, never for an instant has he doubted my superior fiscal ability.

As kids I admit his stupidity made me want to strangle him multiple times a day. But the years have mellowed me. Gradually – the way time erodes great mountains – my malice towards him dwindled, until I lost all desire to do serious, irreparable harm to the little dummy. And today, except for some sexual pain I impulsively impart to him by mashing my pubic bone against his until he screams for mercy, or the odd daydream I occasionally entertain of putting his testicles in a vise and turning the screw until he admits that Beauty is not the end-all-and-be-all force governing our violently turbulent universe, I'm the perfect wife, the nearest thing to a kindly keeper the helpless thumb-sucker could possibly ask for.

To tell all, Sy, I not only mastered my urge to dig Winny's unseeing eyes out with a spoon in the hope of improving his insight, I actually came to value his defect. I mean once I recognized that no matter how hard our subjects worked to please me I could never share Winny's Proud-slave-ophilia (to give his pathology a name), I began to appreciate what a useful public-relations tool I had in the priceless ass. Because nothing sells the fantasy of our benevolent stewardship over the lives of our longstanding subjects like his complete and utter faith in it.

Left to me, not only would the public relations arm of our empire fail to anesthetize the rabble, violent revolt was a real possibility. You've seen how useless I am in a public venue, Sy.

And, as any student of history can tell you, a ruler's inability to mask contempt for the executive class is a recipe for catastrophe. If past popular uprisings teach us anything, it's that once the upper-middle class deserts its owners, the system will be overrun by progressive politicians responding to the grievances of small farmers and factory workers and other assorted grudging menials of every description just itching to unleash their rage bravely for once in their miserable lives. And whenever I get to orating all the usual homiletic slush in praise of God and country, some imp of the perverse gets in me and I can't seem to stop myself. I go on dithering about tradition and strong family values and my admiration for the hard work and dedication of the little people I own and the elected officials I buy until I invariably overdo the goop and the booboisie begins to catch on that it's being mocked. Never mind that my pious platitudes are, word for word, the same pious platitudes spoken by Tony Robbins and Joel Osteen and Dr. Tex. There's something about my manner – the archness of my smile perhaps or the uncontainable visceral loathing I can't stop emanating for the feasting-fawning ways in which proud slaves handle their humiliations – that gives me away.

As Edmund Wilson wrote of Edith Wharton, there's a Puritan in me that insists on seeing life's ugliness and I have no patience with those who are blind to it. I quoted that highbrow allusion to Winny by the way the moment I came across it because I also share Wharton's antipathy to cultured men who live in dilettantish leisure, something else Wilson noted in the same perceptive essay – and I quoted that insight as well to Winny – and to both quotes, Winny said, 'Huh?'

The point is I learned over the years to avoid all contact with the sturdy sub-owner stock and I grew to appreciate what a stroke of luck it was to have not only Winny around to sweet-talk the multitudes but also a whipping boy like Sonny close-by to take my resentment out on. Which I did. Constantly.

And he took it. Year after year.

Right up till a few weeks ago, when, while grazing out his last days in our paddock for superannuated animals, our Boxer – the sweet gullible workhorse in _Animal Farm_ (Winny got that reference) – surprised everyone by getting a horsefly up his ass, and off he ran, bucking and pitching like never before.

Sonny was reading Kobayashi at the time – not the sinister lawyer in the movie _The Usual Suspects_ , but the young Japanese writer murdered by Tokyo cops in the 1930s for protesting social injustice. Also Ding Ling, the Chinese novelist who was imprisoned first by the Nationalist Party and later by the Communist Party, both times for daring to speak her mind.

The next thing we knew, Sonny was using his columns to confess to a long and ignominious record of servility which he said comprised the whole of his 40-plus-year career as a highly regarded journalist.

As a rule, we permit our media luminaries one defiant column per year, to keep alive the illusion in their minds that they are not completely bereft of independent thought. They are expected in that once-per-annum piece to purge their shame and rage over pleasing us the rest of the year with the usual inoffensive slop they write, and Winny and I get to wallow in our magnanimity for tolerating a measured amount of dissent among the more gifted racehorses in our stables.

Typically, it's a compendium of such snappy pieces that the celebrities of the op-ed world collect in books near the end of their careers in order to puff their bold and untamed spirit. Anthologies which Winny and I publicly endorse and privately look on as a clever tactic for getting the most out of our livestock by granting them a pinch of freedom.

Thus, no alarm bells went off at the first subversive column Sonny submitted in defense of wrongfully terminated whistleblowers. We both smiled at his whimsical claim to eating a big bowlful of asbestos for breakfast every morning until some unpopular truth-teller lost his job at some company somewhere (Johns-Manville, I think it was) for daring to inform the public that eating asbestos was unhealthy. We let that one go to print.

But when he turned right around and submitted a _second_ defiant column, deriding himself as a disgraceful coward for bowing to threats, implicit and explicit, that he'd lose his job as a young foreign correspondent by writing the truth about the Vietnam disaster he was sent to mis-cover early in his career, Winny was stunned in the way that unpleasant truth always stuns my little bonbon.

'What's come over him?' he asked, his face contracted in agony.

We expect self-importance from our columnists as they grow older. By their twilight years, pomposity generally pours from their pens in direct proportion to the accumulated shame they feel over a lifetime of serving us. We are used to that. What we do not expect – or tolerate – is open rebellion. And Winny could not for the life of him figure out what in world got into Sonny. He said as much. In fact he used that exact cliché.

What got into Sonny couldn't have been clearer to me. While dimmed with age, my powers of analysis have not dimmed to Winny's hysterical level of incomprehension.

'Darling,' I explained, 'Sonny's simply having a last fling at doing something brave.'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

'Surely it hasn't escaped your attention that the Paperboy has always wanted to be brave,' I explained further. 'He's out to recapture that elusive feeling of moral courage one last time before he dies. A final hurrah so to speak. Age and a sense of one's mortality have a way of affecting some people that way. Don't worry about it.'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

'As a rule, Dozy-doats,' I endeavored to explain some more, 'slaves tend to go the other way in their declining years and become more conservative, but Sonny's always had that unpredictable je ne sais quoi about him. Believe me, the poor baby's feelings of cowardice have caused him untold suffering his whole life. I know because I'm the one who made sure he was always aware of those feelings.'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

'You remember,' I elucidated further, 'those two letters to the editor he wrote when we were kids? That was the Paperboy's first shot at doing something heroic.'

Winny said 'Huh?'

'And then,' I went on being helpful, 'there was that petition he posted in the carriers' bathroom a few years later? That was shot number two.'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

'And remember the plucky novel he began which you said you hated because it was crude and boorish but you really hated because it was honest and brave, qualities which have never been your literary cup of tea?'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

'Well, that aborted novel was Sonny's third shot at playing Prince Valiant. Frankly I wish he hadn't put it aside. There was some good stuff in there.'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

'But what I'm getting at, peppermint stick, is that these defiant columns are his fourth shot. His insubordinate swansong, I should imagine.'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

' _Fearless Paperboy Fights Against Overwhelming Odds_ ' is the headline I suspect he envisions for this last chapter in his life.

To Sonny I chortled, 'Paperboy is your superhero name again!'

I was thrilled to see him showing some spunk again and went a little goofy celebrating. I mean, it's not like we had anything to fear from his columns. Even if we'd published them, few people would have read them and fewer still would have liked them. Goodness, Sy, if people valued truth I'd be a hundred times richer than I am. And Winny would be eating out of dumpsters.

But they don't, so I could afford to enjoy the sight of Sonny rearing up on his hind legs one last time. A workplace shooting spree was only thing that would have pleased me better, I told him, going Cole Porter on his ass and jitterbugging him around the room, singing as many of the words to "Let's Fall in Love" as I could remember.

" _Argentines without means do it!_

_They say in Boston even beans do it!_ "

He wrote eight of them in all, eight of the breeziest expressions of self-loathing ever committed to paper by a respected journalist, detailing his shame over a long and distinguished career, claiming his only saving grace was that on some level he always despised himself – if not openly and vociferously, then at least deeply and more or less consciously, except when completely sodden with drink.

By the flippant use of self-deprecation, he was able to keep the woebegone note at bay without entirely trivializing his suffering. He called his columns lucubrations. Pointing to his age, his secure pension, the absence of any youthful get-ahead ambition, he echoed his mother's sarcasm from many years ago by calling himself "oh so brave" for finally coming forward and admitting that his professional integrity was a hollow sham.

In one column, he called himself a flunky who knew exactly how much truth a journalist is allowed to blab without doing permanent damage to his career, a thing that varies from year to year, depending on which way public opinion swings. 'But I was always careful,' said Sonny, 'to follow its shifts and never put more than a toe over the line.'

In another column he referred to himself as Little Jack Earner, a salary-slave who, as a reward for acquiescing to an oppressively unfair society, took home his plummy Christmas bonus every year and said, "What a good boy am I!"

In the column Sonny liked best, he cited the Czech writer Milan Kundera who called attention to the flailing "need one has to parade one's misery..." Then he quoted Noam Chomsky: "...confessions of guilt can be...a technique for evading what must be done. It is even possible to achieve a feeling of satisfaction by contemplating one's evil nature..." 'That's what I'm doing!' Sonny flaunted the futility of his confessional orgy: 'Pleasuring myself!'

In the column I liked best, he said, "Words have consequences, and the sweet inoffensive words I wrote destroyed me." He recalled his happy days as a lowly paper carrier and rued his decision to become a journalist, noting: 'it was a far far better thing I did delivering the newspaper because writing for one is a thoroughly dishonorable occupation...'

When I told Winny how much I admired the depth of Sonny's self-flagellating art, His Fondness said, 'Huh?'

Somewhere around column four, Winny made the trek down the hall to his old friend's office and felt his forehead and advised him to get a grip. But Sonny said he had a hundred more such pieces in him, a whole mother-lode of horrors he'd witnessed and cravenly misconstrued or misemphasized and euphemized or kept completely quiet about for over three decades as a field reporter, and had proceeded to sit on for another decade and a half as a trusted editorialist, which he now meant to unburden himself of.

Of course we only printed the first one. I backed Winny's decision to print none of the rest. After all, any indictment of the PR arm of our empire impugns by association the rest of our empire.

Still, I couldn't help being tickled when Winny tenderly reached out to silence him and his old friend told him to fuck off.

Well, Sonny wasn't quite so eloquent as that, but he turned a deaf ear and went right on composing those belated monuments to his dastardly career at the rate of one per week, knowing they would never see the light of day.

'Did I do something,' Winny whimpered, 'to wrong the man? We've known each other our whole lives and I've been reviewing our history together,' he appealed to the rest of his loyal staff, sounding pitiably harassed, 'and it seems to me I've done everything I could think of to help and encourage Sonny throughout our long and valued friendship every step of the way.

'Is he okay mentally, do you think?' he asked me, dripping solicitude. 'Has the alcohol finally taken its toll? He just seems like such a miserable person of late...'

I stood by Winny's decision not to print the columns, but I also told Sonny he might get some limited exposure by blogging them on the internet, the way cranks do, or affirming their perishable nature by tweeting the best lines in them, or maybe make a book of them and get around Winny's efforts to keep them off the market by seeking a foreign publisher, or as a last resort put the compilation on Kindle where there was little risk of anyone reading it, but at least it would be there for posterity to appreciate. Or not.

In column eight, using no names (and calling himself a compound coward for protecting his source in this case), Sonny attested to hearing 'the following disclosures from a knowing investor,' and went on to describe a frank conversation I'd had with him a few years ago about the crash of the derivatives market, in which I had my usual fun rubbing his nose in his servitude by explaining how, without lifting a finger, I'd made a thousand times his life's earnings with one phone call by getting out of the boom market at exactly the right time and using the billions I made to make billions more by selling short in anticipation of the bust.

With that column, I agreed with Winny that it was time to invite our old neighbor and classmate and longtime employee and recent whistleblower to the house for drinks and can his hyperpious ass.

With the indulgence of the court, Sy, I'll just quickly recount the scene that took place the morning we made up our minds to dismiss the troublesome Paperboy.

'It's sad,' mourned my hysterical hubbly-bubbly over his Spartan breakfast of toast and coffee.

'It is that, Fuzzy Wuzzy,' I nodded, enjoying my bacon and eggs and biscuits with buttermilk gravy.

'Why can't he just be happy?' keened my unsweetened-yogurt-eating mate.

I stopped stirring up the peaches at the bottom of my bowl long enough to reach across the rustic table that Boise had hand-crafted half a century ago before the police gunned him down, and took my darling's uncallused manicured fingers in mind and cooed, 'Sometimes slaves just refuse to put on a happy face, sugarnuts.'

'It's all so yesterday's news,' winced the Fond One, a firm believer in the healing powers of historical (as well as hysterical) amnesia. 'Why rehash it?'

'Why indeed?' I said, mirroring his air of weary distaste. 'What's a few million murdered gooks and spics and ragheads? The ingrate might at least have had the decency to spare our domestic victims.'

Winny said, 'Huh?'

The Paperboy showed up around nine. The spider Winny met him at the door in person – never a good sign – and ushered him back to his study where he bade Sonny have a seat and fixed him a drink and proceeded with all the grace in his patrician genes to make his fly comfortable.

In keeping with the protocol WinWin likes to follow when sacking an employee with every sign of civility, small-talk ensued, and my husband's drawl was never more liquid or his politesse more cloying as Sonny sat there and let the unction of his host's preliminary chitchat flow over him like treacle.

On display on my husband's desk, formerly his father's desk (originally his great-great-grandfather's desk), was a heavy Civil War era pistol, once the personal sidearm of General Winsome Chimes. You've seen it, hon. In fact, it's being held in the evidence room right now, and while we're on the subject, Winny's first cogent words after he woke up in the hospital and remembered his name and what planet he hailed from, was a request to have the gun returned when the police are done with it.

He was in diapers when his father had the icon enshrined in a glass case, and for longer than anyone can remember it's always been there on his desk opposite the General's gray dress cap, another treasured memento; the two artifacts arranged on either side of a framed and glassed daguerreotype of the General's regimental command.

While not under glass, the hat gets a dry-cleaning every few years and is protected against insect infestation with naphtha. I like to sit on it when the mood strikes me, so it also gets reblocked periodically. I sat on it now as Winny spun out his sticky web of reassuring goop in preparation to pounce on his poor patsy.

The boys were in wingchairs flanking the fireplace, over which hung the General's sword, another symbol of Winny's illustrious heritage. Sonny downed his drink in a few gulps, and Winny got up to make him another, burbling the while about the recent pattern of summer rain – not too much and not too little – and how beneficial it was to our grateful farmers.

I interrupted, as I often do, to mention that the inventory of the late General's warriorly accoutrements – not currently on display but reposing neatly folded in a trunk in the attic – included a pair of red stammel long johns which I meant to have framed and mounted one day.

Winny rolled his eyes indulgently, as he always does when I make that attempt at levity.

As regards the General's pistol: for some reason beyond my delicate distaff sensibilities, it's always been kept loaded. A precaution against the threat of pillaging Yankees breaking into the house again? I don't know for certain, and neither does Winny. It's just something his father did, so he carries on the tradition.

And as I squatted on the General's headdress, half-listening to Winny stretch out the pleasure of giving Sonny the ax, I began absentmindedly fiddling with the latch to the glass case housing the antique pistol. If memory serves, Winny was telling one of his favorite anecdotes about buying a dozen ears of corn at the Farmer's Market one Saturday from a burly man in bib overalls who told him his corn was so tasty that his customers delayed flossing or using a toothpick after eating it in order to savor the flavor for as long as possible...when, as the story dragged on, a growing sense of boredom led me, first, to undo the latch to the glass case and, then, to open the case and remove the engraved revolver, which I began meditatively turning over in my hands.

If the Soul of Southern Hospitality had only got down to business a little sooner, I'm convinced what followed never would have happened. But Winny could not resist prolonging the luxury of firing a man. It was more fun than slow-roasting a spatchcock on a spit.

'Sonny,' he finally oozed into the crux of the meeting after freshening Sonny's drink a fifth time, 'the reason I asked you here tonight,' he purred, 'is because I've noticed that you've been looking a bit tired of late...and, well, it occurred to me that you could use a rest. Have you given any thought to a nice extended vacation? Possibly a well-earned retirement?'

Sonny tossed down his drink cowboy-style and said nothing.

'At some point, we oldsters,' Winny humbly included himself as he freshened Sonny's drink again, 'have to step aside and make way for the –'

'- next generation of ink-slinging flunkies,' I finished his sentence.

My life-mate smiled and rolled his eyes again at my gaucherie, the implication being I was his lifelong cross to bear.

Sonny tossed down his drink again and this time his host handed him the bottle.

'You know, we're not getting any younger,' His Benevolence oiled on. 'My thinking is, you might be happier taking things easy for a while.'

'Or,' I said helpfully, 'looking for a different vocation – one with fewer constraints than newspaper columnists are burdened with.'

Winny's eyebrows rose agreeably, not discounting the possibility.

'Like delivering papers,' I suggested, 'under the ironclad protection of a signed Independent Carrier's Contract.'

Winny rolled his eyes a third time.

'So you're firing me?' Sonny said, after a long swig straight from the bottle.

'Well, I like to think of it more along the lines of putting you out to pasture,' Winny said in a voice that was verbal unguent.

That's when I got up off the hat and offered Sonny the pistol, butt-first.

He ignored me and put the gin back to his lips and chugged it till it was empty.

While Sonny chugged, Winny expressed the kindly hope that our old friend wasn't contemplating anything rash like turning those "somewhat incendiary columns" into a book-length memoir – an observation intended to carry the demure hint of a punishing legal battle in the offing. In fact, Winny had already issued a "catch and kill" directive to all major U.S. publishing houses should Sonny approach them with such a project.

Sonny set down the depleted bottle of Beefeaters and reached for the gun in my hand.

The idea of shooting Winny was of course all in jest. There's no question about that, I assure you. Everyone present was smiling when Sonny took the pistol from me. I mean this was hardly the first weapon I'd playfully offered Sonny for the purpose of dispatching the obstacle to our becoming demon lovers. Down the fun-filled wedded years, Winny had watched me give Sonny kitchen knives, ice picks, piano wire and rat poison. I made him a present of a bullwhip one Christmas with a note encouraging him to go Indiana Jones on Winny's ass.

'Careful,' Winny reminded him, smiling. 'It's loaded.'

The bloodletting that ensued was, alas, not the result of a single stroke of bad luck but of an unforeseen concatenation of unfortunate circumstances.

First of all, in keeping with the heroic persona Sonny was trying on for size in his last hurrah, he doubtless felt he owed Winny a good scare. Remember, this was not the first time he'd been pink-slipped by the richboy. He'd been fired all those decades ago under Paragraph 15 of the Independent Carrier's Contract for posting that petition in the carriers' bathroom, back when he was eking out a hand-to-mouth existence as a happy paperboy and hopeful novelist, which was all Sonny ever really wanted out of life.

Unlucky factor number two: the trigger mechanism on the century-and-half-old gun was sticky with layers of dried emollients built up over the years – Sonny's lawyers tell me that forensic tests have verified this...

And three, that selfsame trigger had a long pull to begin with.

Add to that, the fact that Sonny had never fired a gun in his life and that he'd just polished off practically a full quart of gin, and I maintain that the court will have no trouble believing that while aiming well to the left of his target, as Sonny claims, he ended up shooting his smiling boss smack-dab in the middle of his forehead.

I'll never forget the roar of the gun and the simultaneous tachismatic pattern of red that disfigured Winny's face before he slumped over dead – I assumed – in his chair.

Going limp with shock, Sonny's mouth fell open and the pistol dropped from his fingers.

'Oh, my,' I said as I moseyed through the cloud of smoke over to the bar to fix myself a highball and wait on Booger, my bodyguard, to come investigate the report.

When he showed up, I casually instructed him to drive Sonny home in Sonny's car and take a cab back. Then I dialed 911.

To be completely honest, Sy, as I sat drinking my cocktail and looking at what I believed to be Winny's corpse, an odd sense of calm came over me. Waiting on the emergency responders, I found myself pondering the various ways I might play out the drama. I wondered briefly if I possessed the kind of star-power needed to confess to premeditated murder and charm my way out of doing any jail-time.

'Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, think of the years of emotional torment I endured at the hands of my rich husband's condescending ignorance of the world and how it works! Maybe he wasn't directly responsible for the awful sub-owner status of my childhood which did such terrible psychic damage to me as a girl, but his hysterical stupidity on the subject did nothing to heal those wounds! His utter indifference to my early suffering only exacerbated my suffering! Throughout the course of our long and hellish marriage I would literally _beg_ the dumb brick to acknowledge the ugly reality of life for those who are not born rich like him and all he kept saying was 'Huh?' Until the mounting pressure of my rage finally reached such a seething pitch that it deprived me of all reason, and under an irresistible compulsion to restore some semblance of rationality to a world gone mad, I had no choice but to murder the serenely indifferent, utterly blasé, fondest of all unconscious fatheads!'

But I decided not to risk it.

When the cops got there I told them I'd accidentally shot Winny at his own instigation, after he jauntily challenged me, knowing what an excellent shot I am, to shoot the General's hat off his head. We were both drinking and, alas, I'd clearly had one too many and missed my aim.

To sell the story, just before the authorities arrived, I dipped my fingers in Winny's blood and flicked a little on the underside of the hat brim and tossed it on the floor behind his chair.

I was certain, riding with him in the ambulance, that the medics were just going through the motions when they hooked him up to the various I.V.s and heart monitors and what-not. Looking at the amount of gore they cleaned off his forehead, it was clear to me that Winny was one dead duck.

Until he opened his eyes.

Which gave everyone a start.

But even then I was sure he was a goner.

He looked up at me, and I'll never forget the beseeching expression in his eyes. He appeared to begging to know, as his dying wish, the reason why his dear friend Sonny had shot him point-blank in the head.

So I explained it to him. You know me, Sy: I can't resist enlightening the benighted.

I started in about the horror and humiliation of Sonny's middle-class upbringing versus the relatively humiliation-free status of Winny's privileged life. And how, in addition to his terrible childhood, came all those adult years of further subservience. 'Poor Sonny essentially spent his whole life under your thumb, sweetie, first as your sycophantic childhood pal and later as a paid lackey, giving inadequate coverage to the little people around the world who we put to work at pitiful wages and imprison if they complain too much and kill if they complain more than that. All of which eventually filled the Paperboy with such a burning sense of shame and self-loathing that he could no longer tamp it down by the normal expedient of embracing its source and loving his masters...'

Holding nothing back, I did my utmost to bring wisdom to Winny in his last moments – to supply that long overdue moment of clarity he'd been blind to his whole unthinking life and which he now seemed to want so desperately at the end.

'In sum, darling,' I said, fulfilling what I believed to be the deathbed request of the moribund love of my life, 'the Paperboy shot you because you're a fatuous, self-loving, hysterically ignorant simpleton and have been from the cradle on...'

A number of seconds passed in silence – five I'd say, or maybe as many as eight, I'm not exactly sure – during which I observed a strange light appear and slowly fill the eyes of my expiring sweetheart, a light which I took to be the dawning of the man's first undeluded perception of himself, ever.

Then all of a sudden his eyes doubled in size and the unreachable ninny sat bolt upright and cocked his head to one side and barked, ' _HUH?_ '

Well, of course, any hope of saving poor Sonny flew right out the window with that development.

My plans for taking the blame were shot to hell, no pun intended when Winny ruined everything by surviving a gunshot to the head. Apparently not even a bullet could penetrate that knothead's thick skull.

At the hospital, after learning from the doctor that Winny was going to be okay, there was nothing to be gained by refusing to divulge the name of the third person in the room at the time of the shooting. One of the domestic staff had told the police we had a guest, so I named him.

'Cord, C-o-r-d. Nation, N-a-t-i-o-n.' I said to the young officer, who dutifully wrote it down as spelled.

"Cord" would be picked up a few hours later, passed out in his car at a traffic light in West End in front of a shut-down Doc-in-the-Box, his foot on the accelerator and the engine redlining in neutral and fixing to blow. He woke at noon in the drunk tank the next day, sore and bruised, and confessed to everything.

He'd intended, he told me later, to go sailing off the Wallace-Lemay Memorial Bridge into the Black Warrior River. Not just for what he'd done to Winny, but because he'd had all he could take of slave-life. After 65 years, he said he just couldn't stomach any more of himself.

So when Booger drove off in the taxi, he stumbled out to his car but found he didn't have the guts to go through with it without first getting even more crocked, and he wound up – he knows not how – with a dour black hooker with movie-star good-looks at the Moon Winx Motel where he failed to get it up and felt so bad that the hooker might think his impotence was race-related that he gave her all his assets – cash, credit cards complete with pin number, the key to his home and a brief inventory of his meager material possessions worth stealing. He wasn't going to need them anymore, and she was young and strong and he was pretty sure she was going to roll him anyway and maybe hijack his car, which he needed to carry out his plan for killing himself.

Then, with his usual incompetence, he failed to find his way to the launch site, despite very explicit instructions from the now-happy hooker to whom he had confided his intentions.

The police found him headed in the opposite direction from the bridge and yanked him from his car and used him for a tackling dummy for a while, before driving him to the station with many sudden starts and stops for the fun of banging his head into the mesh partition. They then dragged him by the hair to a holding cell and pitched him in like a sack of potatoes.

And there you have it, Sy. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Poor Sonny throws himself on the mercy of the Honorable Judge Sy.

Hmm...Judge Sy. That's got a bit of televisiony ring to it, don't you think?

I'm pleased to report that as of the last night the doctors are optimistic about Winny's progress. He may walk with a slight limp for the rest of his life, but as old as we are, how long can that be? And the volume of drool leaking from the left side of his mouth, while disconcerting, has slowed considerably and will taper off even more with time and therapy, they say. Best of all there's no significant mental impairment to speak of. None that I or any of his closest friends can detect anyway. See what you think Saturday.

Until Saturday, Sy! Winny should be out of the hospital by then. Bud Lime, our former attorney general and newly disgraced senator for accepting the appointment from our disgraced governor he was investigating before the appointment, will be in attendance. And for entertainment, we have George Will! To buck Winny up, I thought I'd get George talking about his review of the movie _Up in the Air_ and the many underappreciated salutary effects of being canned – the character-strengthening benefits of suffering and so on... Then I'll kick the BFF to every Proud Slave around the dinner table a few times to see if he shows the courage of his convictions by thanking me. Seriously, I'd be tempted to implement that plan if I wasn't more than a little worried he'd do just that.

' _It's an owner-or-be-owned world!_

Just as nasty as it can be!

And I know it's not make-believe,

' _Cause George belongs to me!_ '

Good jolly your lolly, Sy! Dang if Sonny's sad story hasn't put me in the mood to dispel some of the gloom around here with a little frolic! I'm instructing my videographer to pull back and keep the camera running while I sign off with few windmills!

And a-one. And a-two. Sayonara, Sy! And a-three...

### Sonny's Notes

When asked about Evelyn's beef against George Will, Sonny said, 'He's Winsome's favorite columnist.' Adding, 'She once deliberately spilled food on him at a Reagan inaugural party after hearing him praise Orwell in what Evelyn considered a brazen misappropriation of intellectual property – Orwell being a democratic socialist who hated Big Government for going too easy on fat cats and too hard on poor people – exactly the reverse of why conservatives hate Big Government.

'For a similar transgression,' Sonny recalled, 'she once keyed Paul Greenberg's car at a Pulitzer ceremony, for serenely overlooking, in Paul's case, Orwell's point at the end of _Animal Farm_ where the greedy communist pigs become not worse than but indistinguishable from the greedy capitalist humans.

When I asked why he didn't walk away from his hated job as soon as he could retire, Sonny shrugged apologetically, as much as to say he wished he had but he wasn't noted for handling life's humiliations particularly well. 'Evelyn said I was stoking my slave-rage,' he offered as a possibility.

Explaining Evelyn's disappointment in him Sonny said, 'Over drinks, she'd stop to study me awhile and say, "I'm trying to decide whether you're even worth killing." Then she'd shrug and say, "Oh, well, at least you're a _sad_ slave."

Asked about his admiration for Noam Chomsky, Sonny said, 'A hard-working champion for truth and reason and social justice. What's not to admire? I don't know that we would agree on how much improvement people are capable of,' he added, 'but I admire him for telling the truth about how much room for improvement there is, and I do think we can do a little better.'

Asked whether he knew his career would end on a disastrous note, Sonny said, 'If you're asking if I expected to be fired for writing those columns, yes.'

Asked if he felt betrayed when Evelyn backed Winsome's decision not to print his columns, he said, 'She has her priorities. It was enough that she was delighted to see me go out in a blaze of glory.'

'You're not talking about the shooting?' I asked.

'No.'

'You're talking about the columns,' I said.

'A blazon of my inglory,' he rephrased.

I asked if the shooting was purely accidental.

Sonny looked indecisive for a moment. More indecisive than usual, I mean – possibly troubled by the word _purely_.

Then he nodded.

### Epilogue

I was pouring Sonny another drink, both of us oblivious to the spluttering outrage of Dr.Tex by now, when Evelyn and her bodyguard got back from the dinner-for-moguls.

"Son-o!" she lit up as she stepped from the elevator in the wake of Booger who still had a hand in his pocket.

She ran to put her old friend in a bear-hug and cover his droopy smile with a big sloppy kiss. "You're sight for sore eyes! Long time no see!'

Several more glad expressions of welcome followed before she noticed Dr. Tex and affected the same exuberance.

"And look who you brought with you! Tex, you old Cowpuncher, you! How the hell are ya?"

Her tone remained genial, but my ear detected the distinct click of epees touching.

"Thanks for returning my favorite sidekick!" she addressed the headshrinker over Sonny's shoulder.

Dr. Tex pointed to the drink I was handing Sonny and drew in a breath, priming the pump to bellow an objection.

Evelyn beat him to the punch. "What an ordeal! Fifteen tables and as many boners growing under me as I wiggled into the laps of the richest disciple at each one! I forgot the name of a lesser Romulus or Remus or two who I generously suckled once upon a time at these wolf-tits of mine but, doing my best Mame impression and with the help of place cards and my assistant Janey speaking to me through an earbud, I don't think I committed any hostess-howlers of any note."

Dr. Tex tried again to speak.

"The trouble I go to to keep this hotel full in the off-season!" she overrode him with a weary sigh of forbearance.

"How –" Dr. Tex managed to get a word in, but only one, before Evelyn said, "Plumb Bob, if you've finished freshening Sonny's drink, I'll have a bergin and water."

Seeing it was Evelyn's intention to join the party, Dr. Tex filled his lungs again with the breath of indignation.

Before he could let it out, Evelyn said, "Hush now, No Points. I had a feeling you'd show up to put the personal touch on your pitch to prolong Sonny's treatment, but the answer is still no. My sweetie's back," she turned to beam at Sonny, "where he belongs and he's here to stay until the next time he shoots my husband in the head."

There had been, I may have forgot to mention, two relapses during Sonny's six weeks at the Dr. Tex House. After both slips, Dr. Tex had called Evelyn to suggest extending his convalescence.

"No, Train Wreck," was Evelyn's response to the first call. "His court-ordered release date is 2-22 and I expect him here safe and sound on that date, as per the negotiated agreement. ...Yes, Neck Brace, I know it's contingent on your signing off on his successful completion of the program, and I have no doubt your signature will be forthcoming."

After hanging up, she breezily informed everyone present, "He'll play ball. He knows how many television stations I own..."

The second time Dr. Tex called, she told him briefly, "Road Rage, you're not going to turn Sonny into a model of sobriety no matter how hard you try, not without the application of enhanced-aversion-therapy techniques, which I absolutely forbid."

After she hung up that time, she expressed some concern about Dr. Tex's motives.

"I wonder if his determination to 'get Sonny's mind right' doesn't reflect some bibulous issues of his own? If he persists in nagging me about it, I'll have to ask him that."

As recently as last night, the day before Sonny's release, he called again to reiterate what a bad idea he thought it was to free Sonny at this critical stage in his recovery.

Evelyn told him, 'Brick Yard, his dry-out time is up tomorrow. Let him go. If he loves you, he will come back.'

There was a pause, from the length of which I gathered her flippancy had not been well-received. This impression was confirmed when I heard her say, '...Quite right, Mega Quake, this is no time for levity, but I never had any illusions that you were going to make a happy slave out of Sonny, and I'm certainly not going to help you try. Frankly, if he feels the only option to proudly embracing his masters is to drink himself to death, I'd rather see him drink himself to death.'

And tonight, in her penthouse, the doctor again opened his mouth to voice his misgivings, but he had to wait on Evelyn who chose that moment to inform him, "Baby Huey, we both agree that staying drunk all day isn't the best way of handling life's horrors and humiliations; I'm just saying there are worse ways."

Dr. Tex leaned in and appeared to be on the verge of delivering a stinging retort when Evelyn again got in ahead of him, "If I've told you once, Meat Grinder, I've told you a hundred times: I couldn't be happier that you failed to turn Sonny into a pep-squad boy who maintains his sobriety by preaching the virtues of abstinence to other drunks."

"If –" Dr. Tex started to say before Evelyn took over.

"And anyway, Triage Unit, as drunks go, Sonny strikes me as a bit of a ho-daddy. I mean he's in his 60s and suffers from no major health problems that I'm aware of.'

Dr. Tex stood there and simmered a moment. Then his lips parted, but words failed him when Evelyn jollied him with a poke to his belly.

"Gully Washer, we've got to get going. I'm taking Bobbypin here, my ace cat-caregiver, to Disney World to go on Rodney's Ride before heading home. We'll drop you at the airport on the way."

If you haven't quite figured it out yet, all the nicknames Evelyn was calling the doctor were the names of famous bulls, past and present, that she'd learned from watching the Rodeo Channel with her bodyguard Booger, who used to be a champion bull-rider before one threw him, gored him, and tossed him around like a rag-doll after he lost consciousness, breaking so many bones it was a miracle he survived.

"By the way, China Shop," she added as we were going down in the elevator, "I would have invited you to the big doin's today, but it's strictly bodyguards as plus-ones, and even they had to stand around like wallflowers. You don't get a place at these tables, hon, unless your assets are in the neighborhood of a hundred billion."

Dr. Tex maintained a stolid silence.

"I know what pride you take in being on a first-name basis with the Forbes 400 set, hon, but these are the _really_ big boys," she taunted. "Your name did come up as possible toastmaster," she added, "but Dennis Miller won the spot.

Dr. Tex wore the disgruntled look of a muzzled schnauzer till we were in the car. Then, as we got underway, he raised a finger, determined to speak his piece.

But before he could, Evelyn raised a finger back at him. "Hold on, Gamma Burst. I owe The Donnie a call..."

Getting the Donnie on the line, she began singing in seductive Marilyn Monroe accents, "Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, Mister Prez-i-dent. Happy birthday to you. ...June, eh? So you're a Gemini? ...Well, many happy returns anyway, Ducklips. By the way, gutsy move, telling Billy O. that Putin isn't the only world leader who's a killer. ...I know you were talking about Obama, numbnuts, but let's face it, you make President Number 12 in my lifetime, starting with Truman, and if there were any justice in this world all 11 of your predecessors would have been tried, convicted, and hanged for crimes against humanity. You'll be joining their ranks soon enough, I have no doubt. All I ask is that you remember to call me before you push that button marked World War Three. ...You're damn right I'm telling you what to do, sweetheart! I didn't funnel a cool billion to the secret CIA Fund, code name: Ivan, Dmitry, Alyosha, to help hack your way into that job for nothing! ...Remember, hotel-boy, you're not the Putin of this country, I am! You have my policy recommendations. Quit winging it, you fool, and follow them!"

She hung up with a throaty chuckle and Dr. Tex cleared his own throat to speak just as Evelyn hollered up to Booger, "We did good thing updating those bunker filtration systems, Boog! The Donnie's been in office a month and already he's making a complete hash of things. What was I thinking? In addition to giving us homegrown oligarchs the upper hand in the global marketplace, I really thought he might dial back the Doomsday Clock by a minute or two because he's so chummy with Putin. Shoot, Boog, what happens when Vlad gets around to challenging the tee-totalin' lout to arm-wrestle for a beer? Our boy doesn't even drink!'

"Could we get back –" Dr. Tex got in half a sentence that time, before Evelyn noticed the snack tray.

"Ah, something to keep up our strength! Looks like Stilton cheese and sliced apples. ...Mmm. Yummy. And the wine," she read the label. "Chateau Branaire-Ducru, 1990. A Dahl-ing little claret, if I'm not mistaken."

"I –" Dr. Tex inserted a single vowel into the conversation before Evelyn's breezy announcement that she felt up for a literary-club discussion. The author under discussion she said was Eudora Welty, and she led with the observations: "I like her P.O. story a lot, but I think she was too hard on the poor dirt farmers in _The Ponder Heart_ and _The Optimist's Daughter_. _The Robber Bridegroom_ is okay as a goof. But her essays are too fecklessly MFA for my indelicate taste. Except for that one 'Must Novelists Crusade?' written in defense of her own social inactivism, in which she argues primly in favor of equanimity over moral indignation in the face of murderous social injustice. I like that one because it reads like an SNL satire – something a very spiritual member of the Jackson Garden Club might say about the distasteful race-riots disfiguring the landscape of her beloved hometown."

"But –" It was Sonny who started to take issue when Evelyn pitched her voice a little higher and overrode him too.

"Yeah, yeah, I get that crusading novelists who identify too closely with strenuously pedantic characters are being inartistic. And nothing sickens me more than authors bucking for canonization who riddle their work with deeply soulful characters. Deliver me from fucking sublimity. But let's not kid ourselves, sugar, all stories have an agenda. Even the subtlest of them are judgmental. Name the least polemic writer you can think of and he's still polemical in a skulking, play-it-safe sort of way. He asks his readers to understand his work to some purpose, however daintily expressed. A bias emerges, a helpful hint – however sensible or insensible or brave or craven it may be – perhaps a warning, something he hopes will comfort or guide us to follow what he thinks is a better way of dealing with life's humiliations, or avoid a looming disaster on the path we're on. Even the least political author who does nothing but swoon over sunsets and trestle bridges is making a political statement. He's throwing his support behind a nonconfrontational absorb-it-all way of dealing with our humiliations."

Sonny lifted his glass an inch as if about to weigh in with another thought, right before Evelyn waved him off again.

"I know how you dote on Welty, sweetie, and I'm sure she'd agree that good fiction doesn't aim at being _completely_ pointless. You know I'm only half-serious when I say that the first rule of MFA writing is 'Say nothing plainly if you can't say nothing at all.' But even Eudora would agree that the message matters _slightly_ more than how it's delivered – I know it would pain her to say so, but she would. Personally, I'd rather be harangued by someone shouting terrible truths at me through a bullhorn than to get sold down the river by someone burbling sweet nothings in my ear."

Sonny had his mouth half-open before Evelyn added, "Naturally you're going to suggest tenderly burbled truths. I'm just saying _what_ a writer has to say constitutes the meat of his voice. The manner in which he delivers it, while important, is still only a device."

Here Evelyn paused to sigh over the unreasonableness of anyone who would insist on disagreeing with her, and, as her pause lengthened, Sonny interpreted the hiatus as a willingness to yield the floor. "I think –" he began.

"My point is," Evelyn continued, "that I have no patience with the sort of recherché writing that obscures harsh reality with a lot of dreamy exaltation of the wonder and mystery and eternal incomprehensibility of life. It's a personality-boy's appeal – a cheap trick offering readers an escape from the day-to-day horror of being played for chumps by their owners."

"But –" Sonny had a last go at self-expression, cut short when Evelyn cupped her hands like a megaphone and screamed in his ear, " _I HATE IT!_ "

Thus ended the literary-club discussion.

"Let me freshen that," said the Empress in a friendlier tone, handing Sonny's glass to me for a refill, his nineteenth by my count.

While he quaffed, she chucked him under the chin and Dr. Tex gamely tried again to hold forth.

"Ut!" Evelyn quickly put a finger to his lips to cut him off. "I'm flirting with Sonny over here..."

At which rebuff, Dr. Tex, thwarted beyond all patience, opened his cell phone and engaged in a little performance art. Reaching his secretary, he instructed her to put a call in to Evelyn Chimes and leave the following voice-mail: "Tell her I feel she has some reactive issues which I might be able to help her with if she'll agree to come on my show and discuss them with me. And if she doesn't accept my offer, then ask her to at least have the common courtesy to tell me why to my face."

When he ended his call, Evelyn turned and gave the doctor her best I-see-through-to-the-damaged-soul-underneath look, the mirror to the look he was giving her, the same look of infinite pity he was famous for giving to the most recalcitrant of the goofy guests on his TV show.

"Now stop that, Methane Factory," Evelyn cooed. "You know I couldn't possibly compete with you in a public forum. You're a born crowd-pleaser. A man of the people. A master at soothing the rage and shame of my subjects. I'll gladly sign a written statement conceding your greater popular charm if you'll sign one saying that your appeal goes straight to the desperation of people looking to feel good about their submission to an unfair social arrangement. You're a street-fighter, Rip Tide. You love a good old-fashioned I'm-nobler-than-thou dust-up. Whereas I readily admit to being ignoble most of the time. And I don't hesitate to call an hysterically stupid drone an hysterically stupid drone.

It was final insult. And the world-famous psychologist sat out the rest of the trip in wordless dudgeon.

At the airport, Booger pulled alongside the doctor's private jet and we watched him exit the limo heavily and head for his plane without so much as a look back.

"Bye, Dirt Devil!" Evelyn trilled after him. "Have a good flight! Don't let your pilot get too tight!

"YO, QUICK DRAW!" she hollered as he clambered up the gangplank. "DON'T GO AWAY MAD, SWAT TEAM! HEY, MAIM GAME, I'M ALL FOR JETTING DOWN TO PERU TOGETHER THIS INSTANT! COME FLY WITH ME, MONGO! DO SOMETHING IMPULSIVE FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE, CRASH-DUMMY! _MY_ JET CAN MAKE IT THERE WITHOUT REFUELING! AND THERE'S A VO-WACIOUS WITTOW ONE-WOMAN BAND WHO MIGHT TOOT YOUR FLUTE FOR YOU IF YOU PLAY YOUR CARDS RIGHT, HABOOB! DON'T BE OBSTINATE, BUNKER BUSTER! HAVE SOME FUN FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE! I'M PRETTY GOOD IN THE SACK, PARAPLEGIA! MY LIVELY INTELLECT AND INTENSE SPIRITUALITY TAKE A BACKSEAT TO MY FIERCE SEXUAL APPETITE ANYDAY! OKAY, BLIND SIDE! HAVE IT YOUR OWN WAY, HAPPY TRAILS! I'LL CALL YOU TOMORROW, PUBLIC ENEMY!"

Dr. Tex entered his plane and his crew drew up the stairs behind him and battened the door and that was the last we saw of him.

Booger proceeded on to Disney World.

Sonny had another drink; Freddy purred with contentment; the blind cat Little Bitchergirl Five looked grumpy.

"Was I too hard on him, Boog?" Evelyn broke a lengthy silence.

A man of few words, Booger shrugged.

"No," Evelyn answered herself. "You saw how he gave me the business, calling me on his cell phone that way! And giving me such a stricken look denoting agony of soul! A grimace so steeped in sorrow for mankind's inherent evil that he might have been auditioning for the title role in The Tommy Lee Jones Story!

"Well, there's room for only one prima donna in this limo, sugar!

"...Of course I wouldn't like to lose him as an earner,' she said after a space. 'When it comes to working the vulnerabilities of affirmation-starved slaves, I'd stack that control-freak's talent for manipulation up against a serial killer's any day."

Entering Disney World through the VIP gate, we drove below ground to our private People Mover – a stretch golf cart with a fringed awning.

Our guide was a perky girl in her late teens.

Evelyn asked what college she went to and what her major was.

Tulane; Modern Lit.

When our girl-guide tried to pet the blind cat Bitchergirl, she was hissed at and Evelyn laughed.

"What's its name?" the girl asked.

"Happy!" Evelyn replied with a husky laugh. "She's blind in both eyes. High blood-pressure. I have one at home who's blind in just the right eye, a victim of human cruelty probably. Eye gouged out a la Edgar Allen Poe. You know 'The Black Cat'? The story of the tell-tale meow? A cat fancier falls on hard times and takes it out on his beloved cat Pluto. Cuts out an eye and is going to kill it when his wife stops him, so he kills her instead. Seals her up in a wall; also the cat without realizing it. When the police come to investigate the wife's disappearance, the cat's muffled meow reveals the murder. Poe's version is a little more convoluted, but that's how he should have written it, and would have if he hadn't been dead broke and out of booze and getting paid by the word.

"However, I didn't name my monocular kitty Pluto," she went on. "I called him Swimmer at first because he used to do this a lot..." Evelyn demonstrated. "Then, as he got older, he stopped doing that so we started calling him Tyger with a _y_ because he's a tabby with a fearful _a_ symmetry. That's a Blake reference, dear. Don't worry about it: my husband, also a lit major, missed it too.

"In which Steinbeck novel," she tossed out a third feline literary allusion, "did the protagonist's dipso friend drink himself to death and then have his face eaten off by feral cats? What is _The Winter of Our Discontent_? My husband didn't get that one either. I have 28 cats in all."

"Oh, my!" our guide feigned interest.

"Your receptiveness is like oil to my tongue, dimples," said Evelyn, gently touching a fingertip to the dent in the girl's nearest cheek. "Let me fill you in on the idiosyncrasies of each and every one of my precious babies."

Our escort looked daunted, and Evelyn chuckled again.

"Now Jack Jackal," said the world's richest person as we headed for Rodney's Ride, "has a door-fixation. He can't stand a closed door. I sometimes call him Jim Morrison of The Doors. Any time a door is opened Jack dashes through it. Only to dash right back out again the next time it's opened. Eventually he learned to open doors himself – from both sides, mind you," Evelyn mimicked moving stubby-toed paws, one on either side of an imaginary doorknob. "I figure it's only a matter of time before I come downstairs to find my whole clowder of kitties seated around the dining table like the pigs in _Animal Farm_ , eating a formal three-course meal prepared by Jack, my clever Anubis, seated at the head of the table.

"And then there's Ashley......"

### The End

### Bob the Cat-caregiver's Final Notes

My overall impression of Evelyn's deposition was that in her lively rib-elbowing, nose-thumbing, knee-slapping way she had a ball using her connection with Judge Sy to guarantee Sonny a light sentence for shooting her husband in the head.

When I told Sonny that, he said I didn't need to tell him that.

As to why I was invited to accompany Evelyn on Rodney's Ride, it came to me while bobbing up and down in the pouch of that giant plastic kangaroo: I was receiving an object lesson in the value of continuing to use false names in these chronicles* in order to preserve my above-ground status.

I was struck by that insight at the exact moment Evelyn mentioned "en passant" that her honored guest the previous year – viz., the last person favored before me with the story of how the ride called Rodney got its name – was a long-time business associate and co-owner of one of her phantom holdings – an extensive, nonexistent cashew plantation in the West African nation of Gabon – who happened to be under indictment for fraud and was in fact scheduled to testify before a congressional subcommittee the very next day.

*See _Evelyn Explains Everything_ for a frolicsome look back at the horrors of Evelyn's pre-Winter Park childhood. Available on Smashwords for 99 cents, and worth every penny.
