I've been living with this story, breathing it, eating it, and sleeping with it for two months, and I am just inches away from fitting the whole puzzle together . . . Okay, let's get back to this afternoon. Finally, our drinks arrived and Dallas Montana, a master storyteller and accomplished bull-shit artist, poured himself a glass of Bud, guzzled it down, poured another one, then sat back in his seat, let out a large sigh, then proceeded to spill his guts, which I'd been warned should be taken with a grain of salt, and maybe a little pepper, too, but for which I was desperate to pull a few grains of truth. "I don't mean to insult your intelligence or anything," he began, "but THE MEDIA has reminded us again and AGAIN how ignorant our children are and that 80 fucking percent of them couldn't tell the difference between Toledo and Cairo if you gave them a globe. But giving them a globe is illegal now, since by seeing the whole world as one unit, anybody with half a brain could figure out it had to have been made by God, since the only thing mankind had managed to build were a few puny structures which could be lowered to rubble in an instant with the tiniest of shifts of the earth's plates, or built 40 million dollar space ships so fragile that a defective gasket could cause them to blow to smithereens."

"But God", he continued, "is not allowed to be even mentioned in any state institution, especially the schools, where the students were occupied with more practical matters, such as the need to put on surgical gloves before ramming their fist up their partner's ass to prevent him from giving you AIDS if he starts bleeding." "Anyway," he continued after polishing off another glass of draft, "I know I'm getting off the topic, but that's how fucking ridiculous this world has gotten in the last few years. You may ask why I sound so damned cynical. Well, you'd be fucking cynical too if you had to live your life getting blamed for every problem from urban deterioration to the lack of women writers represented in 17th century British literature. Damn, can I help it if I was born a dirty, low down, white middle-class male? Actually, this past year is the first one in several years that I have risen far enough above the poverty line to be considered "middle class." And besides that, I'm not really white! I swear they must have switched babies with some Puerto Rican lady in the hospital. Either that or the family joke that I was found under a rock was true. I can't wait until I make my first million so I can tell all those fuckers that I'm not white and I'm not middle-class so leave me the hell alone!" He took another long drink fom his glass, then squinted up at me to make sure I was still paying attention, then smashed the butt of his cigarette into the already full ashtray . I nodded my head, smiled, and grunted as if to say, "yes, I'm listening sir, please continue your fascinating tale." What I really wanted to say was something more like "Hurry up, asshole, I'm about to puke from all that stale smoke you keep blowing my way, my bladder is about to explode, and I'm not sure how long the batteries in my tape are going to last, so will you hurry the fuck up and get to the point?!?"

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