Word: abbotts
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...Abbott asked Adan the direction to the men's room and was told it was for the help only. Abbott calmly asked if he could use it anyway. Adan told him it was against health rules; if opened to the public, it would not remain clean. Could this have touched the consuming rage Abbott had written about? He quietly asked Adan to step outside to "talk this over." The younger man agreed. Around the dark street corner, a knife appeared. Adan was stabbed in the chest, in almost exactly the way that Abbott had described in his book...
...Adan staggered toward the restaurant, Abbott ran in and told his two friends, "Come on." Minutes after they left, the police arrived. No charges have been filed, but Abbott is wanted for questioning in the murder. Federal authorities have a warrant out to arrest him as a fugitive, should he leave New York State...
...What happened?" asked Scott Meredith, who is both Mailer's and Abbott's literary agent. "Every conversation I had with Jack, we talked about the future. Everything was ahead of him." John Dockendorff, director of the halfway house, was "absolutely baffled how Jack got the knife and how he hid it." Abbott had been "cooperative" and had even appeared for one of the attendance checks after the murder, before vanishing into the streets...
Others glimpsed the handwriting on the prison walls. Erroll McDonald, Abbott's editor at Random House and one of his guides in the complexities of free life -how to order from a menu, where to buy toothpaste-noticed the ex-convict's tendency to "interpret indifference as rudeness." Novelist Jerzy Kosinski, who had had his own correspondence with Abbott since 1973, said, "Looking at him, I had the feeling there could be uncontrollable anger one moment and a very easy embrace the next." Finally, anyone who read his work noticed, as Kosinski did, that "he wrote in such...
Kosinski faults himself and Abbott's other literary friends. "We pretended he had always been a writer. It was a fraud. It was like the '60s, when we embraced the Black Panthers in that moment of radical chic without understanding their experience." There is another analogy from the 1960s, when Conservative Writer William F. Buckley Jr. championed the cause of a literarily gifted convicted killer, Edgar Smith, and helped set him at liberty to attempt murder again. Years later, Buckley acknowledged in an article how easily conned and naive he had been. Mailer, whose writings attest...