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Show Anting Alone Page 2i2 "Not good enough. Only pure glycerine will blunt the cutting edge of this foul wine you made me drink. Take me to Mini Mart, and maybe on the way I'll tell you about" - Sam glanced over one shoulder, then the other - "certain things." He grabbed a wet cocktail napkin and wrote, with his red theme-correcting pen, THIS FUCKING PLACE MIGHT BE BUGED. He misspelled that last word just to see them wince. And, of course, on the way to Mini Mart he didn't say a word. He let a few farts. His stomach was feeling awful. Sam guessed that his metabolism was finally recoiling from all the infected nose-blood he'd been swallowing for the past several weeks. His stomach felt like bent aluminum siding. The diesel-flavored evening air was too much for him as he stepped out of the car. He stood on the pavement, his head still inside the Volvo, and he vomited several steaming quarts of sour middle-class professorial wine and half-digested blood clots. Even in his paroxysm Sam was composing the following flip utterance somewhere in the back of his brain: If you ever wondered where this school and others like it got the idea of specifying Royal Purple as their official color, just park your Volvo under a mulberry tree full of waxwings, or get puked on by me. Sam took care to distribute the Royal Purple equitably among the necks and shirts and faces and hair of the various members of his graduate studies committee. "Oh, Edwine! You swine!" screamed one or all of them. The car squealed |