then I figured second that the tape was bad, that I had insulted you with the tape or that I had insulted you with some criticism of your tape, that I had TOUCHED SOME SPOT ON YOU AND THAT YOU WERE PISSED. the reason this type of thought-trend mangles me is through the experience that it has happened very often. so the brain cells say—“oh, there it goes, it has happened again.” there were you with your head cracked like an ostrich egg with a sledgehammer and I am sitting around sticking false needles into my hairy ass ego. even in a long three page letter to Greg the Dan I explained how this so often happens to ME in this world. poor pure ivory me. like it even went on when I was a kid in school.

“WIPE THAT SHIT SNEER FROM YOUR FACE AND GO STAND IN THE HALL! DAMN RIGHT, AND FOR AN HOUR, NO LESS, NO MORE, YOU WILL STAND IN THE HALL!”

I never knew what those teachers were talking about. really. to me my face just felt a little blank. I was not much interested in what was being said most of the time, but who was? to be sent out into the hall because of something about my face made me feel monstrous, inferior, spat upon. excluded, and STUPID STUPID STUPID. and I would get up and walk out into the hall and all the faces would turn, all those good acceptable faces and they would watch me talk to the door, open the door, close the door and stand in the hall. that hall was always very dark and empty. and it didn’t feel good. no, no. and it kept happening, through grade school, high school, those couple of years in college. of course, by college I had toughened up and when they layed on me I layed back and they soon found it was better to ignore me than have me slice them open with 5 or 6 words. but even in high school I was not ready. I remember once getting passing grades in this class, English, I think, and on the last day of class, in the middle of something else, the teacher, a female suddenly leaped up from her seat behind the desk and pointed at me and with tears on her face, actually sobbing and in some kind of rage, she said, “Henry, I am going to FLUNK you!” (Henry is my first name, I use Charles my middle name when I try to write but that is another long story I might explain sometime.) and after class, after the others had left and I asked her what the reason was for flunking me, she wouldn’t give a reason just that sobbing as if I had INSULTED her. I don’t think it was love because I was a rather ugly fuck with a blank personality, and I still don’t get it. I mean, these things keep happening and I am puzzled. I don’t even want to talk about it anymore, only to say the letter to Dan never got mailed because there is a new newspaper starting here in town—OPEN CITY PRESS—and the editor wanted something of mine to print, essay, letter, so forth, and since I don’t keep carbons I just handed him 2 or 3 letters I had written.