I knew they all hated me.  He’s a wise guy, they said.  A smart guy.  I did all the work, sold all the advertisements, kept the circulation going, and what did they do?  They wrote copy, that’s all.  Copy.  And always more than I could handle.  I knew ‘em too.  Like putty in my hands.  Oh, some of ‘em were tough for a while.  Then they came clean.  They told me what they were.  The driveling sons of queers.  I had ‘em all, right where I wanted ‘em.  They satisfied my needs.  They filled out my agenda.  Still, I knew they hated my guts.  Sitting at their desks, writing long sentences.  It gave me fits, I tell you.

 

I’d call ‘em in, one at a time.  I’d size ‘em up, in front of my desk.  I know what you are, I’d say.  Don’t you forget it.  You’re what you really are inside, you know that?  You’re a bag of shit, a sick psychopathic little motherfucking shitbag.  Now get out of here.  I told them all the same thing.  Sucking jujubes, dribbling on my shirt.  Colorful.

 

I needed a girlfriend.  I’d had one, somewhere.  They called the picture on my desk Harvey, I heard them.  And got things out of dictionaries, atlases, gazetteers. To embarrass me.  The last sonofabitch who tried that with me, I peed in his desk drawer.  I left my smell in his area.  It’s still there.  Forever, probably.  Scrub scrub scrub, my smell.  Forever.

 

My father told me about ‘em, when I was kneehigh to a katydid.  Keep ‘em in line, he said.  Kill a few, just to keep your hand in.  They’ll thank you for it.  Fuck the little wankers, my mother said.  Eat your butter beans.  I loved my parents. I used to watch them making love on Saturday afternoons. My mother held a bright orange feather duster in one hand while my red-faced father humped away in an old blanket like Sitting Bull.  She would pull out a feather, and hold it between her fingers, blowing softly on it.  Then another.  As she released them, the feathers would settle on the bed.  Agh, he would roar finally, and caper like a Nubian goat.  Agh.  And my mother would put the feather duster away.  I would see it all.  Sometimes on a holiday weekend I would get the kids to pay a nickel each, for an education they wouldn’t forget.  Later at the guild I would remember those Saturday afternoons in my parents’ bedroom, hiding with a mob, a small throng, behind a chaise lounge or a loveseat.  We compared notes at the guild. We swapped techniques.  Electroshock therapy was good. Methods of garnishment did not go undiscussed: how to arrange beatings, slander, libel - the usual garbage of a professional life whose real motive, in the end, was to give pleasure to the great reading public, at nominal cost.  And where was the sin in that?  Art to the prevailing community standard, and the beauties of the English language, that was me all over.  It’s a bloody business, let me tell you.  Tears have been shed.  And sweat.  You have to keep ‘em in check, or they’ll be all over you, spilling ink on you.  I loved my job.  I always had the last word.  Invariably.  Someday we’d extrapolate their genes, put ‘em all on computers.  We’d flick a few buttons.  We’d have ‘em.  They’d be all ours.  And all that’s theirs alone, ours, ours alone.

 

They are tame.  For the most part.  Vegetarians.  No smells.   Just mine from my office and another desk drawer.  Wafting on cross currents.  Girls were my specialty.  When I was through with them they were rank.  Xarnia, Queen of Evilspace.  I got a kick out of it, I must admit.  Ha ha.  Sometimes the boys would coddle me, and bite someone.  But mostly they kept to themselves.  I would deal very harshly with uprisings. I did not spare the rod.  I whacked them very hard.  Look, I said, what do you think you’re trying to pull, you geezer?  You think you’re T.S. fucking Eliot?   Kiss my little toe.  Don’t get your filthy drool on my pedicure. Get out.  But think about it.  Think about kissing my pedicure. 

 

Get out.

 

Or I would say, You know what you are?  A mutineer.  I run this ship, this is my ship.  You’re walking the plank, mister.  You’re  keelhauled.  You’re kissing the scavenger’s daughter.  The girls I beat unmercifully.

 

So I was unprepared for the sonofabitch, standing at my  desk, looking at me, saying, Get up you swine.  Me, a swine?  I, who love you so, who nurture your career, give you a place to  hang your hat and park your ass. I, a swine?  Whatever the Hellchrist do you mean?  In his hand he held the diarrhea he’d put in my inbox. I’d cleaned it up for him, made it presentable unto the world, a vast world full of gentlemen and ladies full of breeding and distinction, people who knew me and my style, people with certain expectations I was expected to fulfill.  And I did fulfill them.   You made a monkey out of me, he said.  You swine.  Then he bopped me right on the kisser.  I woke up in my chair.  It was dark.   I was alone, looking at the picture of the girl they called Harvey.  I was going to be sick, all over myself. I knew it.