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else. Something with more in it.”
“More what?”
He shook his head. “Haven’t figured that part out yet. But it’s something we know that nobody else ever will. Something in how we see each other, I believe.”
Everyone served, we settled back down for the rest of the tale.
Dennis Savage took a sip of coffee for dramatic emphasis and plunged in. “I got through the door of Weasel’s, and I wasn’t in a great mood but I looked fine. You don’t enter a disco showing your feelings; you show the feelings of the guy you want to get.”
“Or the guy you want to be,” I said.
“Same thing.”
“No,” said Carlo. “It truly isn’t.”
“Before we open
that
can of worms, can I close up
this
one?” said Dennis Savage. “Weasel’s took up the ground floor of one of those long, deep buildings, and I was heading for the room at the back, looking for Tom. I saw him, just as I made the doorway. But I also saw one of his employees—you know that job, where they’re always hustling through the place lugging cases of beer? So here’s this guy heading right for me with a case, a classic android—golden-blond, rippled up, and a face in a million, on the short side but horribly wide-shouldered and tight-waisted.
Horribly
. A colored tattoo on his left biceps—the Tom Driggers touch, of course. This boy is roaring through the room, and as he reaches me, instead of leaving us both maneuvering space, he edges me tightly between his case of beer and the wall—I mean, he’s
pressing
me with this thing! And as he moves on, he calls over his shoulder, ‘Get the fuck out of the way, asshole!’ ”
Dennis Savage immediately turned to me and said, “What would you have done if that had happened to you?”
“The appropriate response—the classy and valiant response—would be to grab him by the hair, jerk him back so that he’d drop his box of beer, and give him a solid kick in the shin. Down he goes, and that would feel great. On the other hand, you would be surrounded by bouncers and bartenders and physicallythrown out of the place, which is one of the least egosyntonic experiences I know of.”
“Exactly.”
“Besides, you’re connected to the owner, right? It’s a little like I’ll Tell Teacher, but you could have gone right to Tom Driggers and said—”
“ ‘Did you see that?’ Of course he hadn’t. Tom misses whatever he can’t use. I told him what happened; I was so mad I was shaking. And he just stood there. He didn’t get it and he didn’t want to, and now I can’t tell you how angry I was. I’m a
customer
in this joint and this guy is an
employee
. He’s supposed to make things
pleasant
, not
assault
me!”
He turned to Carlo. “What would you have done?”
“Well, you’re right about all the staff guys falling on top of you. What you
could
do is offer the culprit guy fifty bucks for a blow job, and go to a stairwell or a back alley, and
then
let him have it. A little no-risk retribution there.”
Dennis Savage nodded, visualizing it. “I felt so . . . diminished. So
helplessly
furious. It was as if
nothing
I did for myself could ever really make a difference—all those evenings at the gym, all the worrying about my haircut and my clothes, the psyching up before a big weekend at the beach. No matter how hard I worked, there was going to be some piece of hot stuff locking me out, and Tom was aligning himself with it. Okay. One side of me knew it was his nature never to admonish an android for anything. But the other side hated him for holding me hostage to his upside-down world in which nothing matters—but
nothing
and
nothing!
—except the clarity of hot. You
hear
me? That’s what it was. I never spoke to Tom again. He sent me flowers. He kept calling, and I kept hanging up. He even wrote me a letter, which was quite an event for him.”
“Did he deal with the episode itself?” I asked.
“No. That would have been to admit that it had occurred.”
Smiling his thorny