He sipped at his donut-store coffee and then rolled down the window and spat it out. "Shit, that was last night's coffee," he said. "So, one night I was diving there, and I found, I dunno, fifty, a hundred boxes of hockey cards. Slightly dented at the corners, in the trash. I mean, hockey cards are just *paper*, right? The only thing that makes them valuable is the companies infusing them with marketing juju and glossy pictures of mullet-head, no-tooth jocks." "Tell me how you really feel," Alan said. "Sorry," Kurt said. "The hockey players in junior high were real jerks. I'm mentally scarred. "So I'm driving away and the law pulls me over. The local cops, they know me, mostly, 'cause I phone in B&Es when I spot them, but these guys had never met me before. So they get me out of the car and I explain what I was doing, and I quote the part of the Trespass to Property Act that says that I'm allowed to do what I'm doing, and then I open the trunk and I show him, and he busts a *nut*: 'You mean you found these in the *garbage?* My kid spends a fortune on these things! In the *garbage*?' He keeps saying, 'In the garbage?' and his partner leads him away and I put it behind me. "But then a couple nights later, I go back and there's someone in the dumpster, up to his nipples in hockey cards." "The cop," Alan said. "The cop," Kurt said. "Right." "That's the story about the cop in the dumpster, huh?" Alan said. "That's the story. The moral is: We're all only a c-hair away from jumping in the dumpster and getting down in it." "C-hair? I thought you were trying not to be sexist?" "*C* stands for *cock*, okay?" Alan grinned. He and Kurt hadn't had an evening chatting together in some time. When Kurt suggested that they go for a ride, Alan had been reluctant: too much on his mind those days, too much *Danny* on his mind. But this was just what he needed. What they both needed. "Okay," Alan said. "We going to eat?" "We're going to eat," Kurt said. "The Vietnamese place is just up ahead. I once heard a guy there trying to speak Thai to the waiters. It was amazing -- it was like he was a tourist even at home, an ugly fucked-up tourist. People suck." "Do they?" Alan said. "I quite like them. You know, there's pretty good Vietnamese in Chinatown." "This is good Vietnamese." "Better than Chinatown?" "Better situated," Kurt said. "If you're going dumpster diving afterward. I'm gonna take your cherry, buddy." He clapped a hand on Alan's shoulder. Real people didn't touch Alan much. He didn't know if he liked it.