Karl pitched it as a double date, but when he swung by to pick me up a little before eight, he was alone in the Rabbit.

“Where’s your half?” I asked. “Picking up on the way?”

“Nah, I’ll meet someone there,” he said.

“What! This is a disaster.”

“It’s classy. You can both sit in the back. It’ll be like you hired a chauffeur.”

“A chauffeur driving a Volkswagen? Chaperone at best.”

“It was good enough for Hitler,” Karl said.

“I don’t even know what to say to that, aside from the fact I’m pretty sure the Führer didn’t toot around in a Volkswagen.”

“Focus on the carpooling aspects and try not to procreate tonight,” Karl said. “For my sake.”

“Tell me, my driver, what do you think the odds are of that?”

“Nice jeans.”

“Are they too tight?”

“Compared to bike shorts? No.”

“I guess I haven’t worn them in a while.”

“Relax, Durak. You’ll have fun tonight. Of this, I cannot be more sure.”

Andie the Adjunct was game enough, though when we piled into the back seat of Karl’s Rabbit, I’d neglected to take into account how far back Karl needed to push his seat just to fit into his car. I rode with my knees propped up on the back of his chair, rejecting Andie’s suggestion (in a very gentlemanly way, I thought) that I ride in the front.

“Dean and I work together,” Karl said, turning onto the southern end of the truck route. The VW diesel roared like a garbage truck.

“What do you guys do?” Andie shouted.

“We make computer games,” Karl said, glancing in the rearview mirror.

“I love Pac-Man!” she said.

“That’s an arcade game,” Karl fired back.

“What?” Andie shouted as the Rabbit hit the top end of fourth gear. Karl didn’t answer. The Rabbit barreled into the darkness. It seemed better to leave it there.

The Chimney Corner was a single-story motel built in a flat-bottomed angular U-shape parallel to the truck route. The original road sign, complete with brick red neon chimney and illuminated plastic-letter marquee, pointed to the main parking lot around the side. Plastic letters, unchanged since the motel’s debut, slid into disrepair. They read FREE DREAMS where the usual cat-call of cable television and air conditioned rooms hung. The animated neon chimney had once puffed neon clouds of white smoke with day-glow yellow Zs inside, but now only the middle cloud flickered.

I expected to see the rooms pulsing with light and silhouettes of a Friday crowd, but they looked solemnly dark, their repainted red doors missing numbers. The only sign of life emanated from the original lobby, rooted in the center of the court, where bar-brand neon seeped through a fogged bank of windows. A double-wide set of padded black doors swung in and out, flashing glimpses beneath the surface.

We wheeled into the ruptured blacktop lot, shocks bottoming. The night was young by the Chimney’s standards, but a respectable row of custom vans, muscle cars, and a cluster of ape-hanger Harleys lined up. Beyond the border of the motel’s property, a twelve foot fence bowed out against a frozen tidal wave of crushed cars. Alleys of salvage chassis loomed in the greasy green glare of security lighting. Two boys shared a cigarette in a pickup truck bed, one perched like a gargoyle in a sleeveless leather vest on the tailgate.

“Oh,” Andie said. “I think I’ve heard of this place.”

Our chauffeur killed the engine, but he didn’t hustle around to open our doors.

Roscoe Coppin, owner and main bartender, greeted us with a frog-faced smile and standard Bostonian hello: “This fuckin’ guy!” He squeezed Karl’s shoulder with one hand and wiped off the lobby-desk-turned bar with a white towel. The bar itself was pretty low-key. Two mismatched booths with high backs shadowed couples, their conversations carved inward. A few singles studied tumblers in various states of emptiness. The Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” rained in the background and lingering smoke gave volume to the light of the golden Löwenbräu sign above the juke box. We had three long-neck beers before we had another word.

“You catch that fish yet?”

“Not yet,” Karl said. “You’ll be the second to know after my fishing guide here.”

“Ah now this fuckin’ guy,” Roscoe zeroed in on me standing next to Andie. “Dean, yeah? I gotta standing offer for that fish.” He hooked his thumb to a blank wooden panel mounted over the threshold to a back office. “Put the Admiral right up there in an action pose.”

“The General,” I said. “General Sherman.”

“Admiral, general, grand marshal, grand wizard, who gives a flying fuck. I’ll mount him up.”

Karl found this inordinately funny.

“What’s the matter, sweetie?” Roscoe asked Andie. “You maybe like a white wine or a whiskey ginger or something?”

“Just pacing myself.”

“You’d be the fuckin’ first in here to do that.”

Andie wiped her mouth with a bar napkin and minted a polite smile. Her beer was but a sip down.

“My God,” I said. “Did you eat dinner?” She hadn’t. That’s what people did on dates, after all.

“I had a late lunch,” she shook her head. “I’ll be fine. I just don’t hold my alcohol very well.”

“Hang in there doll. We do a real nice midnight dinner Fridays,” Roscoe said. “You’ll find yourself something to knock that appetite down in the mean time.” Roscoe winked at Karl. “Be a host, Karl.”

“Be a host, Karl,” Karl parroted in parrot voice. Roscoe crabbed off to pour a round elsewhere. Karl pelican gulped his beer and offered us each an arm.

“You are standing in a seedy bar of ill-repute. A foul-mouthed bartender serves customers. Exits are east and west.”

Andie didn’t understand what he was talking about, but took his arm anyhow. His cheer was infectious. I gathered her beer and my beer and looped around Karl’s free elbow.

I wasn’t thinking how pretty Andie actually looked in the rainbow twilight of the bar, or how she’d gone to some lengths to put on dark lines of mascara she never wore in the library. I wasn’t even thinking about sleeping with her. I was thinking that for the first time it occurred to me that Karl had people he talked to about his life, about us fishing, about what else he did beyond the invisible rooms of our imaginary worlds shuttled in and out of the stack. The older brother becomes the younger brother with the smallest unexpected change in perspective. I wanted to know everyone he knew.

“Go east,” I said, because it was the direction of morning.

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