I didn’t grow up with donuts. But Pat did. Every Wednesday at 3am, we stand in front of the donut case. He knows all the names — old fashioned, sugar, glazed, one called a long john, another a bear claw and he explains to me that donut holes are punched from the middle of the donut. I feel like a bit of a donut not figuring that one out. A jelly mind and the filling of getting older.

Pat sets his face to a super-glaze. His origins baked from European intellectuals. Perhaps that explains his critical knowledge of donuts. Two donuts in hand and I make the spectacles above the fateful roadway in the Great Gatsby. Look through the holes and what do you see? The Chinese guy who works at the counter. A graveyard shift. An immortal among donuts.

We have milk. It’s off. Tastes like a cow with very dodgy udder. The coffee is cramped black like the mood of the cabdriver who buys four old fashioned and complains about the lack of rides. The coffee might give him a lift.

Two young people order five donuts and two glasses of water and I say, —there’s a drought on, have some sour milk — but they ignore me, and Pat and I wonder what they will say when we’re kicking their heads in outside, all out of control on sugar and tightening arteries, blood pressure skyrocketing, seizures, memory blackouts, cognac and donuts make old men fucking dangerous.