I might not have recognized Benny either, if I hadn’t had him on my mind so much lately. I was looking for a print shop I’d once liked, and there he was, standing outside a gay bar on Davis. He looked like shit. He was skinnier than ever, his face pitted and caved-in. His shoes were two sizes too big and he wore a garnet hoodie under a letterman jacket with a rearing horse on the back. He was digging for a cigarette butt in the sand of an outdoor ashtray.

When he saw me, though, his face brightened, and in his eyes I could see the little kid I had known practically since I had known myself.

“Daryl?” he said. “Whoa, man. What the hell?”

“Benny,” I said. We hugged. I didn’t care about his dirty clothes or the fetid smell that came off him. I was just glad he was finally there in front of me.

“What are you doing here?” he said, as if this corner were a private world he inhabited. Or as if his life were so distant from mine that the very fact of shared space and time was impossible.

“Just walking around,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about you, man.”

“Yeah?” he said, and for a moment a flicker of suspicion crossed his face. He’d never been able to hide anything, and his eyes seemed almost misshapen from the years of uncontrolled emoting. I could tell he was prepared to bolt, to deny, to lash out. But then the moment passed. Even he could figure out I had no ulterior motives in mind.

“You want to get some coffee?” I said. Across the street beckoned a characterless coffee shop with plate glass windows and fluorescent lights. Benny agreed.

We went inside and ordered drinks and muffins and took seats at the yellow plastic table in the window. Like anyone who had lived in town more than a few years, we talked mostly about all the changes happening.

Benny had many insights into our shared civic life. He wasn’t stupid, after all. He might have been undisciplined, self-deluding, manipulative, and unreliable, but he had never been stupid. He read the newspaper. He gleaned things from TV. He had well-developed theories about almost everything, if you got him at the right time.

He said the housing market was going to crash. “Mark my words, man,” he said. “Next year. It’s over.”

“You think so?” I said. The upward progress of real estate values was an article of faith to most people at the time, something unstoppable, inevitable. But Benny and I had always been pessimists together. We took any opportunity to doubt, and the more fatal the doubt, the better. I was glad that much had stayed the same.