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the prom in 1982. All the more impressive, he would surely add with a subsequent tabletop drum roll, considering she wasn’t his date. And Jay? He would get fuzzy—tired fuzzy—a state whose border was marked by signs he could just make out ahead. The sudden onset of the blinks was one of those signs, and at the moment they were hitting him pretty good, so he figured he could stand whatever inane insight Bunker was going to share with him since it would likely have faded in memory by morning.
    “Give me your wisdom, Bunk,” Jay said with a waiting grin.
    “Listen to him, Grady,” Jude chided his friend, choosing not to call him ‘farmboy’, a sure sign that he was serious about this. Drunk, yes, but serious.
    “I’m listening.”
    Steve frowned as his head moved to the beat that the two Japanese honeys were getting nasty to. “If it’s so fucking profound, say it already.”
    “The point is this,” Bunker began, his eyes slitting at Jay. “Do you think my sister was the first person not to give that sack of garbage—”
    “Don’t be a prick,” Steve said without looking back.
    Bunker turned to face his buddy. “Oh, you can call them scum and I can’t call them sacks of garbage?”
    “I was repeating a rule,” Steve answered. “You’re just getting vile as you go along.”
    “Pardon moi , Mother Theresa,” Bunker said, looking back to Jay. “This homeless individual was probably ignored, or turned down, by a hundred people in the four hours before my sister came along. But when she did— whammo !” He lifted his glass to his lips, only to discover with a downward glance that it was just a pile of ice cubes melted to smooth rounds. He put the disappointing empty down and ran a hand over his head. “And that’s the lesson. You don’t know, you can’t know, what these crackheads are going to do. God only knows what kinda shit they’ve got up their sleeve.”
    Jay thought on Bunker’s words for a moment, then told them, “Sign Guy’s not a crackhead.”
    “How the hell do you know?” Jude challenged. “How? Did you get a urine sample? Get him to piss in that can of his and run it to a lab?”
    “I just...know,” Jay said, believing he did know (and why was that? he wondered to his drunken self). The bum was different. The bum was pretty far out there, sure, but dope wasn’t his thing. His sign is his thing , Jay thought suddenly, and how true that was.
    “You just know,” Jude parroted doubtfully, studying his friend hard until revelation deflated his stare. “You gave him money, didn’t you?”
    Jay didn’t answer, which was answer enough.
    “You can’t give money to people like that,” Jude said. “You can’t.”
    “I can’t be a nice person?” Jay asked him, puzzled. Blitzed and puzzled in concert.
    Jude slumped back from his friend. “What the hell happened to the farmboy who was gonna make it big on the Street? Where the fuck did he go?” His head shook with minor disgust at the transgression, and he leaned close to Jay again. “You want to be successful in this business, in this world—sure you can be a nice guy.” Now he nodded. Too big, too emphatically for it to be sincere. “Sure you can—to the people that matter . Your friends, your family, and sometimes to the people who trust you with their green. But not, not , NOT to deadbeats that this city would be better off without.”
    Jay shook his head, in surprise at the depth of his friend’s harsh cynicism, handy though it could be. “You’re gonna be a rich motherfucker someday, Duffault.”
    “You may be, too, if you curb some of your wayward charitable activities.”
    Jay snickered, the topic of Sign Guy finished to death, it seemed. He’d tired of it, as had they all, his hand coming up to stifle a yawn as the waitress made it to their table. She was a young and pretty Japanese girl, with bright eyes and barely budded breasts showing as subtle, pointed mounds beneath a loose white tank top. A primo