"Do you remember your first time?"

"First time what?" Henry asked, blinking his bleary eyes, "Sex?"

"No," Tristan said lifting his glass, "Your first drink. The first time you got drunk." He grinned watching Henry try to lift his head from the bar for a moment, then lower it in drunken resignation.

Tristan shook his head. "The night is young, my beer is half full, and you're passed out like a third grader."

"The night isn't young, it's after one in the morning. But I'm getting my second wind," Henry said as he got his arms underneath him and pushed up off the bar until he raised himself back into a sitting position. "Where's my beer?"

"You drank it."

"Oh, yeah."

Tristan squinted in the dim light as he wearily surveyed the barroom. Except for a pair of ladies pushing fifty, wearing tight blouses, too much make-up, and with bad dye-jobs, Henry and himself were the only ones keeping the bar open. "God," Tristan said. "This place is a dive. Why do we keep coming here?"

"Because you live upstairs."

"But that doesn't excuse it, does it?"

"There's no excuse for anything we do," Henry said.

"Hey, Aarfy," Tristan called down the bar to the corpulent bartender, who sat watching The Odd Couple on an old television cantilevered on the wall opposite the bar, "We need another round here."

Aarfy, resenting having to move, waddled down the bar, grimacing, and sternly planted two beers down. He made an elaborate gesture of withdrawing a little book from his pocket and scrawled in it with a blunt pencil.

"What's the tab?"

"You don't want to know," Aarfy said.

Tristan sidled up close to Henry and said, "I think those two at the end of the bar are checking us out."

Henry glanced over. The ladies sat smoking cigarettes and sipping their cocktails; one looked up at him and smiled coquettishly.

"This is wrong," he said. "They're old enough to be our mothers."

"Maybe you're right. I'm too drunk to tell anymore," Tristan said with a groan, "but not drunk enough not to care."

"Whatever," Henry said, and took a long pull on his beer.

"You still haven't answered the question."

"What question?"

"Do you remember your first time."

Henry stood up, steadying himself against the bar. "I'm gonna crash on your couch upstairs." He turned and walked out.

Tristan finished his beer in a few long swallows and said to himself, What the hell. He walked down to the end of the bar, took an empty seat next to the two ladies, introduced himself and ordered three cocktails from Aarfy.