The father came out, and we mixed drinks and carried them into the living room and turned on the news. He wore the same black sweater, with a clean, pressed teal-blue golf shirt underneath. He praised the TV anchorman, his weekend sub. “A black guy like him can take it as far as he wants,” he said, and stared at the screen and kept his leg jiggling, even during commercials. I got us some peanuts and watched him watch the news. He yelled, “The Hague,” when the anchor called it “The Hog,” and he laughed and slapped the couch. “Pronunciation, mon frair!” he said, and switched off the show, relaxed and happy, when it ended a minute later. He asked me again exactly what I did for a living, and I told him that my agency did advertising and video production—no big deal, although we’d gotten a new client recently and the account was bigger than everything else combined.

He said, “That’s exciting.”

I said, “Ucchh. They want to shake everything up.” He smiled. I said, “I hate that.”

The client made some computer crap, I told him—I had no idea what. I just produced cable-TV commercials on video, cheap stuff. The other guys handled the business.

He put a big handful of peanuts into his mouth and leaned very close to me and chewed and breathed his bitter old peanut-and-vodka, coffee-stained breath in my face. “It’s tremendous,” he said. “The structure of business is changing forever.”

I said, “Oh, yeah?”

He said, “Universal access to information on the Internet—that blows my mind.” He tapped the side of his head. I stared at his Chiclets. He started talking about where my agency should bid for new business, like the defense industry.

I said, “Yeah, excellent, wow.”

He said, “You gotta be aggressive.”

I said, “That’s right.” He seemed psyched as hell. He grabbed the back of my neck and yanked it.

“I really like you, Mike,” he said. He turned around and yelled to the women in the kitchen, “How’s it going in there!” They both went, “Fine.”

Linda once told me how he could go for days without sleep, how he napped on the floor of his office, how he screamed at his reporting staff so hard one time that he broke a blood vessel in his face and fainted and had to be carried out of the meeting by paramedics. But his news program had revolutionized the way networks reported information to us. He invented the informal patter that anchors you see today are using—he started that, he battled for it, he believed in it, and he won. He loved his job.