I mistakenly killed a man some years ago. I do not mean that I killed him by mistake, since I killed him intentionally.
I mean that it was a mistake to kill him. I slit his throat with a serrated hunting knife I then always carried. It was in front
of a Chinese laundry on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I thought he had called me “little dago boy,” though in fact,
as others later attested, he had called out, “Hey, little day-glo boy,” in playful reference to the bright color of my shirt.