By the time Tiny got to work he was so confused and sick and sick at heart he hardly knew where he was. He punched in at one minute before seven and grabbed a fresh pair of cotton gloves and headed back to the press department. He wanted to walk down by the assembly line and see if he could see the little fat woman but he didn’t have time. He went over and turned on his machine and the whistle blew. He decided he’d ask the little fat woman if she wanted to eat lunch in his car with him and maybe they could talk about some of his problems. Maybe he could talk to her and ask her advice. And maybe he could give her another ride home that evening. Maybe his life could work out all right after all. He hoped it could. Things had been bad for a long time, and he was ready for them to get better. Maybe this new relationship with this little fat woman was the light at the end of the tunnel, where happiness was possible, and life didn’t have to be something you merely had to endure until the day you died.

Thinking about these things, Tiny put a piece of metal in, leaned on his button, and then noticed that he had not been careful where he placed his hand.

A Birthday Party

I’d turned forty and it was weighing pretty heavy on me. I was in a bar again, as usual, and I was thinking about my daddy again, as usual, and what all he had gone through, and wishing he was sitting on the bar stool next to me, when in reality he was dead and gone and asleep with the worms since April 19, 1968, and I had just ordered a Crown and Coke that had just arrived and I was looking at the large breasts of a red-haired girl who was sitting next to me and I realized that I was slightly drunk and didn’t really gave a damn what happened next. The world had turned around on me and I had been published and all the years I had struggled through were a forgotten memory that sometimes rose up in my head and reminded me.

The price had been high and now I was being constantly assaulted by young writers who offered things if I would read their stories. They offered money, homes in Florida, plane tickets for Denver, hotel rooms in New Orleans, and blowjobs. I didn’t want to have anything to do with them. I knew that their stories would break my heart not because they were so good but because they were so bad and I would have to be the one to tell them they ought to probably cut their throats instead of trying to be fiction writers but I knew they wouldn’t listen to me.