Tough day at work, yeah got in a fight, a butterfly bandage right up next to the right eye. Trouble with the big man? And I say you know the columnist for that rag? Oh god, ahaha, not — that’s right, I say, the film critic and how’s that going to look, taken down by the film critic? And she says … she says nothing, can’t get a word through her laughter and I’m all: This support I’m getting from you is tanfastic, means a lot, patting my heart to indicate where exactly it gets me. Sorry, suh-huh-ha-sorry, she says, it’s just that, ha ha, oh god, just, I mean, remember he reviewed that one movie about the, what, the high-school movie and said like its outrageous use of insipid stereotypes just practically tearing the hair from his head, the alarming imperialist attitudes, and I say I know, the worst, the absolute worst and all I can say is he caught me unawares, clocked me sideways when I wasn’t looking, got me good with the Blockbuster award he got off a eBay. So what ne [laughter] what next, sweetheart? And I say is my typewriter good n oiled and she says don’t ask me, ask your phantom maid and I say I’m writing a letter to the internet, we’ll see what he does with that—

Vollmann: “I’m an American, and I’m proud of the fact that I can keep guns in my house, I can listen to the radio, I can have whiskey and pork in the kitchen, I can have pornography, I can read Mein Kampf.”

—and we hold each other and weep, weep for the probably fictionalized days when writers could at least manufacture a mythos that had some heft, that garnered some respect, no matter how weighted down with apathy or loathing, punching at keys with bloodied knuckles, laughing shrilly through rotting teeth, building shotgun shacks from the splinters of imploded marriages, beating the dirt over the old man’s grave and howling out words beyond language — and then transcribing them onto paper! Ha ha, she says, OK I’m turning on the television set, and my tears dry up, leaving salt trails that I will exfoliate the next morning with a medicated apricot scrub.