't know this city at all," he said. "I'm from Covington, Kentucky.
You do your drinking at home there. We don't have places like this." He
meant the whole Skid Row area.

"It's not so bad," I said. "I spend a lot of time here."

"Is that a fact? I mean, down home a man your age would likely have a
wife and children."

"I do. The hell with them."

He laughed like a real youngster and I figured he couldn't even be
twenty-five. He didn't have any trouble with the broken curbstones in
spite of his scotch and waters. I asked him about it.

"Sense of balance," he said. "You have to be tops for balance to be a
spacer--you spend so much time outside in a suit. People don't know how
much. Punctures. And you aren't worth a damn if you lose your point."

"What's that mean?"

"Oh. Well, it's hard to describe. When you're outside and you lose your
point, it means you're all mixed up, you don't know which way the
can--that's the ship--which way the can is. It's having all that room
around you. But if you have a good balance, you feel a little tugging to
the ship, or maybe you just _know_ which way the ship is without feeling
it. Then you have your point and you can get the work done."

"There must be a lot that's hard to describe."

He thought that might be a crack and he clammed up on me.

"You call this Gandytown," I said after a while. "It's where the
stove-up old railroad men hang out. This is the place."

* * * * *

It was the second week of the month, before everybody's pension check
was all gone. Oswiak's was jumping. The Grandsons of the Pioneers were
on the juke singing the _Man from Mars Yodel_ and old Paddy Shea was
jigging in the middle of the floor. He had a full seidel of beer in his
right hand and his empty left sleeve was flapping.

The kid balked at the screen door. "Too damn bright," he said.

I shrugged and went on in and he followed. We sat down at a table. At
Oswiak's you can drink at the bar if you want to, but none of the
regulars do.

Paddy jigged over and said: "Welcome home, Doc." He's a Liverpool
Irishman; they talk like Scots, some say, but they sound almost like
Brooklyn to me.

"Hello, Paddy. I brought somebody uglier than you. Now what do you say?"

Paddy jigged around the kid in a half-circle with his sleeve flapping
and then flopped into a chair when the record stopped. He took a big
drink from the seidel and said: "Can he do this?" Paddy stretched hi