I always feel like a Chevette with a bad tire chasing a Porsche when I try to keep up with Devin at a bar.

Tommy placed two beers in front of Angie and me, poured another shot into Devin’s shot glass.

Angie said, “My father used to come to this bar.”

Devin inhaled the second shot sometime while I blinked. “Why’d he stop?”

“He died.”

Devin nodded. “That’d do it, sure.” He started on his second pint. “Your old man, Kenzie, the hero fireman, he come to places like this?”

I shook my head. “He drank at Vaughn’s on Dot Avenue. Only place he went. Used to say, A man who ain’t faithful to his bar ain’t much better than a woman.’“

“A real prince, his father,” Angie said.

“Never met the man,” Devin said. “Saw that picture though. Two kids from a burning tenth floor.” He whistled and drank the rest of his second pint. “Tell you what, Kenzie you got half the balls your old man had, you might live through this.”

A burst of laughter blew across from the other side of the bar. Roy was pointing at the screen, saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger” doing a little drunken dance on his knees. Soon, they’d start telling AIDS jokes, really bust a gut.

I thought about what Devin said. “Your concern is touching,” I told him.

He grimaced, his eyebrows furrowed, the third pint washing down his throat. He put it down, wiped his mouth with a cocktail napkin. He said, “Tommy,” and waved his arm like a third-base coach sending the runner home. Tommy came down with two more pints and poured him another shot. Devin held up his hand, downed the shot, and Tommy poured another one. Devin nodded, and he left.

Devin turned on the stool, looked at me. “Concern?” he said. He chuckled, a graveyard chuckle. “Tell you what concern changes nothing. I’m concerned that this city’s going to rip itself apart this summer. Won’t stop it from happening. I’m concerned too many kids are dying too young over sneakers and hats and five bucks worth of Grade Z cocaine. Guess what though? They’re still dying. I’m concerned that shitheads like that” he jerked a thumb down the bar ”are actually allowed to reproduce and raise new shitheads just as stupid as they are, but it doesn’t stop them from mating like rabbits.” He threw back the shot, and I had the feeling I’d be driving him home. He was favoring the right elbow on the bar over the left, taking deeper drags on his cigarette. “I’m forty-three years old,” he said and Angie sighed quietly. “I’m forty-three,” he repeated, “and I got a gun and a badge and I go into gang zones every night and pretend I’m actually doing something, and my concern doesn’t change the fact that I’m not. I slam sledgehammers into doors in projects that smell of things you couldn’t even begin to identify. I go through doors and people shoot at me and children cry and mothers scream and someone gets busted or someone gets killed. And then, then I go home to my shitty little apartment and eat microwave food and sleep until I have to get up and do it again. This,” he said, “is my life.”