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Show Acting Alone Page 39 new Me in Kampf onto paper and onto Mini Mart shelves all across the national consciousness, stacked right next to the Skoal plug tobacco. And Sam knew that he, himself, hadn't the literary skills (yet) to sneak in words and phrases of his own that would show the book out to be the genocidal tract it was. So, in this case, Poe's Imp accidentally did the good thing for a change, and got Sgt. Spikey to bash Sam's face in savagely, implicitly calling off the ghostwriting proposal before Sam had even had a chance to broach the subject. What happened was that Sam accidentally let Sgt. Spikey hear him say that America was the Whore of Babylon. They'd all gone indoors to drink Lipton Instant and watch the news, Sam feeling cocksure that he'd landed himself the most lucrative deal of his life and feeling highly excited and, as usual, verbal. Fatally verbal. And, by pure chance, there'd been a series of TV ads featuring large-mouthed, skinny, husky-voiced women, all leering knowingly out of the box straight at Sam as he sat on the couch trying not to tip over Mae Bell Wamsutter's coffee table with his knees. Those ads were followed by an interview of Nancy Reagan, Old Vacuum Eyes herself, who seemed, to Sam at least, to be leering at him also. And then, almost as though the Imp of the Perverse had taken control of the television for this one afternoon, to clinch the deal, on came one of those unprecedented TV ads for a new big novel, a blockbuster by some enormously fat lady from some southern part of the globe, one of those artificially-induced airport best-sellers shoved down America's throat at the random whim of cynical editors and advertising executives with obscene promo budgets - Well, Sam just forgot himself. He couldn't help it. He hadn't been |