To my dismay, Leather Jacket moved clumsily over the couple of stools and sat on the one next to me. “I don’t care what the fuck he says, his name is Jimmy. My name is James, what’s yours?”

“So you’re both Jimmys.”

“What? No, I’m James.”

“Zach.”

“Lost?” he asked.

“No. Why?”

The bartender put another scotch in front of me and made a point of sneering at James.

James ignored the bartender. “There are only a couple of reasons to be in this shithole. One, you’re already drunk and want to get drunker. Two, you ain’t drunk and want to get drunk and this is where you usually come to get drunk. Three, you’re lost. You ain’t drunk. I’ve never seen you in here before. So, or ergo, you’re lost.”

“Nice reasoning,” I said.

“It’s a gift.” He took a long pull on his bottle of beer, which I believed to be a Pabst. “Also a curse.”

“How so?”

“I can always talk myself into having another drink.”

“I see.”

“So what do you do?”

“I’m an intrepid explorer, a dinosaur hunter.”

James laughed loudly and slapped my shoulder with a floppy hand in an exaggerated way that revealed some kind of insecurity and made me not trust him. Not that I would have trusted him anyway.

“What about you?”

“Between jobs. It’s rough out there.”

I nodded. My nod was sincere, as “out there” for me meant the world of my daughter. I looked around the bar. A couple of men were now playing pool. I sort of wanted to play also, but I was a bit afraid of the place. I think James sensed this.

“I had me a good job for a while,” he said. “I used to drive a truck for Ralphs. Then I got sent up for a bit. I don’t care what anybody says, nobody out here will cut an ex-con any slack. Know what I mean?”

“I can only imagine. Why were you in jail?”

“Prison,” he corrected me.

“Prison.”

“They said I stole some stuff. You know, everybody says it, but I really didn’t do it. Only thing I ever stole in my life was a box of Mr. Bubble when I was eight.”

“Mr. Bubble.”

“I had a thing about bubble baths.”

“Who doesn’t like a bubble bath?” I said.

“I know, right? So, where do you work?”

This whole thing was going south fast. “I work at the university.”

“No shit,” James said. He ran his fingers through his greasy hair. “What do you do over there?”

“I’m a technician in a lab.”

“No shit. Pay pretty good?”

“Pays shit,” I said. “I’m looking for something else. What about you, what’s the last job you had?” I was attempting to redirect the focus of the conversation back to him. I had read that was a good thing to do.