Great Lileks - bleat - July 9th

And so it came to pass on a weekend night that the entire crew was assembled upstairs at the Valli at 1:30 AM, waiting for pancakes. In my mind everyone’s there: Dime-A-Time, the goat-aroma math professor who always sat in B-8 and never tipped more than ten cents; the perpetually grinning and grizzly-faced bobble-headed idiot savant who would sit for hours during peak time working problems on napkins and graph paper; the couples in the private booths of A section, the regulars in B, where you could see everyone come in the door. The loft is open and full. The kitchen’s sizzling - orders shouted, dishes crashing, Springsteen coming from the cook’s radio. Sam’s on the grill; maybe it’s Mickey. (He was the local revolutionary; I saw him the other night on an old 90s episode of COPS. He was leading a protest downtown. There was a scene in which he exchanged words with an officer, but it was with the bounds of civilized discourse. At the end of the segment the policeman said the event went pretty well, but they’d had to arrest some people, and Mickey had bit a cop.) I’m with the Giant Swede and the Crazy Uke in B-5, probably. Probably Jack as well, working through his third pack of Marlboros. In A-4: Mike, and probably his girlfriend, and a couple others. Mike looks dark and drowsy.