Some of the men at the White Elephant were drunks and alcoholics, some stopped in for a beer or two after work, and others didn’t drink at all and simply went for the company. Of these three my favorite group was the first: the drunks. They were a raucous bunch more willing to put up with the repetitive questions of a kid, loose with their money and their tongues, and there are few greater joys for a child than listening to the curse-laden rants of an adult. And in the areas that went beyond the limits of my father’s own paternal knowledge, the men, as a collective group, filled the holes.

For instance, I remember Ray Scanlon, a mostly deaf man of about seventy who once drunkenly told me what he perceived to be the three keys to a happy life, namely, a comfortable pair of shoes, a tight pussy, and a warm place to shit—it struck me as being rather profound at the time (and to this day I’m still hard-pressed to argue with it). I also remember a tall, scrawny man with buggy-whip arms whom everyone called Denver by virtue of his being from there. He was quiet and mostly brooding, and in direct retaliation for the effete way he looked he once gave an uncharacteristic sermon on winning, passionately looking me in the eye as though banishing past regrets by saying, “If you want to win, Stratton, then always be the aggressor. Always. Get on offense and stay there and don’t you dare let up. Ever.” And then he looked into his beer and not another word was spoken.

And then there was Timmy East, the self-proclaimed “King.” Of what, it never occurred to anybody to ask. He was a compact, energetic man with the gone-craggy face of a successful boxer at the end of a long career. But the King was far from retirement, and though he was one of the more genial people I’ve ever known (and who I still miss today), he always seemed cocked, poised to strike whenever the situation called for it, though I don’t remember this ever happening. He had an uncanny ability to solve crossword puzzles and never missed an opportunity to spout vulgarities that often segued into long-winded monologues about past conquests. And there were a lot of them. Years later, when my own sexual encounters began, it was the King’s lectures I relied on to give me a leg up on the competition, though all I probably did was scar a few poor unsuspecting girls far from ready for such moves as the “standing wheelbarrow” or the “cross-fingered crippler.”