“Yup,” Tommy says.

Preach shut the door in his face.

He turned to us and said, “Vote.”

Dave was the first to say yes, which came as no surprise.

“He doesn’t know dick,” I pointed out.

“We don’t know dick either,” Dave reminded me.

“We don’t know dick about this guy,” I kept at it.

“We don’t get paid dick by anybody,” Tim reminded everybody.

Preach turned and opened the door and Tommy was still standing out there, in the cold.

“Until we make cake, you don’t get paid,” Preacher told him.

“Deal,” Tommy said.

And that was how we hired Tommy Mancosa.

It wasn’t Tommy but Preach who took me in hand.

Tom had found us some gig in Michigan City and he and the other guys were out with their posters and staple guns, papering the city with band shit, this Tommy’s new thing. We’d never had posters before Tom.

I’d slept in the cab. I was cold, pissed I’d had to sleep in the cab and in no mood to wander around Michigan City, putting up posters.

And Preach was fucking some chick in the bed over the top of the cab.

When I heard he was done and took the time Preach took before he rolled her out—because even if it was a one shot, Preacher was not a slam-bam man—I got out of the cab and went to the camper at the back.

He was standing at the little stove, frying bacon.

I barely climbed in when he asked, eyes on the bacon, “You gay?”

“No, I’m not fuckin’ gay,” I told him, backed to pissed but now pissed because, you know, it was the eighties. You didn’t ask a man shit like that in the eighties and ever get a yes or make the man you asked pissed as shit.

Even so, I’m not gay.

That was when Preach looked at me. “Why don’t you get laid then, brother?”

“Look at me,” I told him.

He was looking at me, so he just repeated his question.

“Pizza face,” I said.

He had a fork in his hand, lifted it my way, and said, “That’s the last time I hear shit like that from you.”

That was it.

He made us bacon and eggs and we ate them at the table where he’d been bleeding a few weeks before.

That was Preacher McCade too.

He knew he was a good-lookin’ guy with a good body. Straight up, he was full of himself. Totally vain.

It was confidence, sure.

But it was also vanity.

[Laughs]

Sayin’ that, he could have been ugly as fuck, and he would have thought he was the shit.

That was just how he was. That was just how he thought everyone should be.