It was signed by some asshole. I didn’t read his name. I rolled a piece of paper into the machine and wrote my own letter. It said:

You, sir, are an ignorant man. How the fuck do you know it won’t sell if you don’t try to sell it? And do you think I can just shit another one on five minutes’ notice? I worked on this cocksucker for two years. You got any idea what that takes out of a man? You like to play God with all of us out here, is that it? You kept my manuscript for three months and didn’t even send it around. Here I was thinking the whole time that maybe somebody was thinking about buying it. I wish I had you down here. I’d whip your ass. I’d stomp a mud hole in your ass and walk it dry. You turd head. I hope you lose your job. You’re not worth a fuck at it anyway. I hope your wife gives you the clap. I wish I had your job and you had mine. How’d you like to paint a few houses while it’s a hundred degrees? I can tell you it’s not any fun. I hope you get run over by a taxi cab on your way home. And then die after about a month of agonizing pain.

I rolled the letter up and read it. I thought it was pretty good. It expressed my feelings exactly. It made me feel a whole lot better. I read it twice and then I took it out of the machine and tore it up and threw it away. Then I started working on my story.

At four a.m. I was still working on it. I liked working in the middle of the night. There wasn’t any noise anywhere. You didn’t have to think about anything but what you had right in front of you.

I finished the story, read it, then addressed an envelope and stuck a few stamps on it and put the story inside it and carried it out the door, down the driveway to the mailbox. I knew it would go off for a while and then probably come back with a marvelous note on the rejection slip.

I was knocking, had been knocking for years, but it was taking a long time for them to let me in.

I went back inside, turned off the lights, and went to bed. Alone.

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