The wop’s old lady squealed. (I looked over and saw that Denny wasn’t looking.) With ten hands on her, and her own pressing the shoulders around her, she was being lifted up to the bar, where, looking bewildered, she got her footing, frowned down, and ran her hand through her pale hair; she kept looking around sharply and brushing at it, as if she was calculating hard but couldn’t come up with the right sum.

“Okay! Okay, now,” the wop hollered. “Who wants to gimme five bucks for a crack at my old lady, huh?”

“I’ll give you six,” I heard Hogg shout. But I think he was just trying to egg things on. It worked.

“I got ten right here—!”

“Don’t give her to that motherfucker for ten, man!”

“Fifteen! Fifteen, right here!”

“For a piece like that—?”

“For a piece like that, twenty, goddamn it!”

Her calculations began to fall apart; she frowned, once tried to smile, but just looked stoned. And her hand had come down from her hair to the shoulder of her purple dress and rubbed there.

“You know what I think, Ray—?” That was Hogg again. Him and the bartender were ambling around the crowding bikers. “I think I ain’t never met a normal, I mean normal, man who wasn’t crazy! Loon crazy, take ’em off and put ’em away crazy, which is what they would do if there wasn’t so many of them. Every normal man—I mean sexually normal man, now—I ever met figures the whole thing runs between two points: What he wants, and what he thinks should be. Every thought in his head is directed to fixing a rulestraight line between them, and he calls that line: What Is.”

“Come on, now …” the bartender said.

“Naw, Ray. I mean it.” Hogg swung his hands around, huge and grubby, to make his point. “I mean it, now: I think about things like that. And thinkin’ about it, I think I got it figured out. That’s what a normal man thinks is reality. On the other hand, every faggot or panty-sucker, or whip jockey, or SM freak, or baby-fucker, or even a motherfucker like me, we know—” and his hands came down like he was pushing something away: “We know, man, that there is what we want, there is what should be, and there is what is: and don’t none of them got anything to do with each other unless—”

The bartender was shaking his head.

“—unless we make it,” Hogg went on anyway. “And the only way you can get from one to the other is to know that, don’t you see? Ray? And they don’t know that, so that makes ’em crazy—”

“You talkin’ about normal men,” Ray said. “What about normal women, say?” He nodded toward the counter.

Somebody yelled:

“I’ll give you thirty, man. Right now, thirty—”

And somebody else: