That’s fine. I’m ready.

I am Bigfoot. The Bigfoot. You’ve been hearing about me for some time now, seeing artists’ renderings, and perhaps a phoney photograph or two. I should say right here that an artist’s rendering is one thing, but some trumped-up photograph is entirely another. The one that really makes me sick purports to show me standing in a stream in Northern California. Let me tell you something: Bigfoot never gets his feet wet. And I’ve only been to Northern California once, long enough to check out Redding and Eureka, both too quiet for the kind of guy I am.

Anyway, all week long, people (the people I contacted) have been wondering why I finally have gone public. A couple thought it was because I was angry at that last headline, remember: “Jackie O. Slays Bigfoot.” No, I’m not angry. You can’t go around and correct everybody who slanders you. (Hey, I’m not dead, and I only saw Jacquelin Onassis once, at about four hundred yards. She was on a horse.) And as for libel, what should I do, go up to Rockefeller Center and hire a lawyer? Please. Spare me. You can quote me on this: Bigfoot is not interested in legal action.

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“Then, why?” they say. “Why climb out of the woods and go through all the trouble of ‘meeting the press,’ so to speak? (Well, first of all, I don’t live in the woods year round, which is a popular misconception of my life-style. Sure, I like the woods, but I need action too. I’ve had some of my happiest times in the median of the Baltimore Belt-route, the orchards of Arizona and Florida, and I spent nearly five years in the corn country just outside St. Louis. So, it’s not just the woods, okay?)

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Why I came forward at this time concerns the truest thing I ever read about myself in the papers. The headline read “Bigfoot Stole My Wife,” and it was right on the money. But beneath it was the real story: “Anguished Husband’s Cry.” Now I read the article, every word. Twice. It was poorly written, but it was all true. I stole the guy’s wife. She wasn’t the first and she wasn’t the last. But when I went back and read that “anguished husband,” it got me a little. I’ve been, as you probably have read, in all fifty states and eleven foreign countries. (I have never been to Tibet, in case you’re wondering. That is some other guy, maybe the same one who was crossing the stream in Northern California.) And, in each place I’ve been, there’s a woman. Come on, who is surprised by that? I don’t always steal them, in fact, I never steal them, but I do call them away, and they come with me. I know my powers and I use my powers. And when I call a woman, she comes.

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So, here I am. It’s kind of a confession, I guess; kind of a warning. I’ve been around; I’ve been all over the world (except Tibet! I don’t know if that guy is interested in women or not.) And I’ve seen thousands of women standing at their kitchen windows, their stare in the mid-afternoon goes a thousand miles; I’ve seen thousands of women, dressed to the nines, strolling the cosmetic counters in Saks and I. Magnin, wondering why their lives aren’t like movies; thousands of women shuffling in the soft twilight of malls, headed for the Orange Julius stand, not really there, just biding time until things get lovely.

And things get lovely when I call. I cannot count them all, I cannot list the things these women are doing while their husbands are out there in another world, but one by one I’m meeting them on my terms. I am Bigfoot. I am not from Tibet. I go from village to town to city to village. At present, I am watching your wife. That’s why I am here tonight. To tell you, fairly, man to man, I suppose, I am watching your wife and I know for a fact, that when I call, she’ll come.