Revenge: a dish best served scampi-style

Don't screw with Ellison... or his friends:

It was early 1977, and my friend Mel was getting ready to move away.

Mel was one of the first friends I made when I moved to Sweat City in 1974, there to begin my career at the Great Corporate Salt Mine. He, like I, worked in Baytown, at a research facility set in the fringes of a monstrous oil refinery and chemical plant. He, like I, was a Jew from the Northeast, adrift in this land of Texans.

[...]

But put all this aside for the moment. Mel lived in an apartment complex in what was then considered West Houston - a hellacious commute to Baytown, in fact even more hellacious than my own. And it was the fashion, back in those days, to have Asshole Neighbors.....