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Show Acting Alone Page 4Q1 He wanted to get a little sleep. A man his age needs a little sleep, rest between phases, a rested mind being less susceptible to the vile imaginings of rumors. But his other, larger boy-associate hated worse than the very fires of the inferno to be ignored. So the Elder depressed the orange button that activated the hotline from his temporary home here in the Broadmoor Hotel to the Holly Sugar offices, and let the youngster void more of his beloved vituperation. The Elder was about to tune Sammy out and bow his head in prayer once again, when the screams got particularly loud and grating over the Taiwan-made speaker. Sammy began to express his customary midnight doubts about his being able to carry out his end of the deal. "How the fuck can I go into these personal things?" came the scream. It was rip-out-Sammy's-guts time again. Elder Cicerone murmured in wonderment up at the dark, ornamental canopy over his bed, "How you artists must suffer!" Another immoderate flux of coprolalia. Never in his adult life in the Western portion of these United States had Elder Cicerone ever been obliged to put up with so much verbal abuse over such a short period of time. But he only had to consider the alternatives. This Hunter Thompson character, by all intelligence reports, had inflicted upon himself some fairly extensive brain damage and was, at any rate, a man of such gargantuan appetites that he would likely eat and drink and inject and smoke and supposit the Elder out of hotel and office-suite in a matter of days, with nothing intelligible on paper to show for it. That Tom Robbins creature pushed the words around well enough but was ultimately, in the deepest reaches of his shallow soul, cute. And cuteness wasn't called for here. Poison-tipped fangs were called |