Well, like I said, I left Cumberland almost a year ago on a Greyhound bus with a small bag of potato chips, eight dollars, and a dream. I stretched out and took two seats until somewhere outside Gatlinburg, when I was forced to surrender one of them to a woman by the name of Mrs. Patricia Toni. Mrs. Toni was headed to Encino, California.

“What’s in Encino?” I asked, trying to be a good neighbor.

It turned out that Mrs. Toni’s daughter was in Encino, in a hospital suffering from exhaustion. I don’t know much about exhaustion, but I imagine it must be very tiring, so I said, “Oh, that’s terrible.” And she unfolded her newspaper and said, “You’re darn right it’s terrible.”

At every stop along the way Mrs. Toni would buy the local newspaper and discuss the stories about crime and murder.

“Listen here where it says this man walked into a gas station and shot four people. Didn’t even get gas or rob the place Just opened fire and killed four people. That’s a low deed in my opinion. I think that’s really terrible. If I was on that jury I’d convict him so fast it would make his head spin. I wouldn’t waste time eating up the taxpayers’ money. I’d just fire up the gas chamber and move on to the next case. The son of a bitch. It says here where he shot a five-year-old boy right through the neck. Bullet went in one side and out the other. I think that’s terrible, don’t you?”

Well, I didn’t know the gunman. For all I know he might have had a pretty good reason to do what he did, but to make things easier I agreed and said I thought it was terrible.

“You’re darn right it’s terrible. Right through the neck. The neck is a very sensitive area. Everyone knows that. This is just terrible. I thought it was terrible the other day when that crack-pot in Little Rock stabbed his mother’s collie to death. Stabbed it seventeen times, a beautiful collie named Moxie. The mother cried and cried. Seventeen times he stabbed that dog. Once or twice would have done the job, but he did it seventeen times and I think that’s terrible. Don’t you?”