It was a place where the party just never stopped and never really started either. People drifted in and out but we just stayed and stayed. It was hard to know whether it was night or day.

Two brothers, half-Mexican on their mother’s side, owned the place and ostensibly it was a hairdressing shop and they were the hairdressers. But I never saw a client or so much as a trim. They inherited it from someone, a father maybe, and you could still see etched in the stonework that it used to be for carpentry.

I might have known them well, but there was no evidence of it. Brothers from another mother. My brothers were there too. Sisters.

Across the alley and over a fence there was a volleyball game going on. There were no teams, only sides. A girl dragged me over there for a while but I didn’t stay.

I saw Everett, talked to him, hugged him for the first time. His face lit up when I said that I was close to retiring. He said I’d probably be running an Uber. I realized that if that was his thought, he probably was doing it now, and ran some calculations in my head about whether it would be cheaper to let him drive me back and forth. It seemed like that would be unlikely.

I got hungry and ransacked the fridge. There was a spendy little meal in to-go packaging that wasn’t too old. No way to crack the crab claws (I guess since the folding pliers tool is no longer always in my pocket) but I took down the lettuce wraps anyway.

It had to be a bisbee but it wasn’t. In order for there to be that many concentrated idlers, and for other reasons, there had to be a college closer. Like Oxford in Ohio, the wrong Miami.

The only other thing I recall from the event was that there were bigger plans, something to do with moving and storing a large crop of furniture and other belongings. It makes sense that it could have been mine, but it could have been anybody’s.

I was cool in a hot way in those days. Full of opinions and always shooting them off like fireworks. Admired but feared by too many people. Not the thin poet who no one feared any longer. Purposeful yet gainfully employed.

To the extent that employment means any kind of gain at all, weighed off against the sold hours that you’ll never see again.