He was glum. Glum enough that I thought it might not hurt to suddenly discover the last inch of Pinch in the bottle I’d squirreled in the cupboard and hadn’t wanted to mention until he turned out to be worth the expenditure of threatened resources as well as the pantomime it would take to keep him from catching on to my lying, outlaw ways.
Like I say though, Boy is a cultured sucker and a pretty fair drama critic to boot, which is to say not only that my half-assed playlet didn’t interrupt let alone suspend his disbelief as I — “Gee Whiz!”— discovered —“whadda ya know”— the bottle, but also that he didn’t seem to think twice about what a stingy shit I was as long as I produced the hootch.
And, I suspect, the talk. For we had found each other when we each most needed nothing less than to talk to another man. I was thinking of this as I poured out the scotch into unequal tumblers, keeping an extra quarter inch for me in the cloudy plastic quasi cut-glass and a lesser portion for this welfare socialist in the Flintstones jelly glass.