"The Bick is another part of my education," he says. "I have good powers of concentration. Whenever I want, I can look up and be diverted. You can keep in touch with reality here. Keep in touch with the working people, the old people. Truck drivers will come in, sit down, and ask you what the hell you are a student for. You get in conversations with Negroes about race, about male virility. There are all kinds of people."

"What kinds?" asks Henry.

"Night watchmen, bands from the Boston Tea Party, show people, folksingers, Irish drunk singers, drunken clubbies who slobber around, even prostitutes."

"There's sex, to be sure," says the bearded student. "But the Bick's a place where people can just sit around and talk. Where groups sort of shift as the night goes. It's a place where people can let down their defenses."

Joe and the bearded student are sitting there when this high school kid comes up. "Got any grass," he says. "Any what?" says Joe. "Oh, yeah, grass. No. Try Friday or Saturday night." The kid goes off to another table.

The mop man wheels his cart up the aisle. He picks up a strawberry shortcake bowl full of Marlboro filters and dumps in into the plastic trash bin.

The counter man blinks the lights twice. The Bick is closig for an hour. Blitman gets up to go.

Outside, he looks through the plate glass window to see the Texas Wrangler man chasing dirty water across the tile floor.

A truck driver pulls up, finds the door locked, and swears.

Joe goes home to bed