I was noticing that his pack of cigarettes on the bar had some kind of yellow sticker instead of the blue tax stamp. "Ain't that a crock?" he asked. "You can't smoke and they give you lighters for a souvenir. But it's a good lighter. On Mars last week, they gave us all some cheap pen-and-pencil sets." "You get something every trip, hah?" I took a good, long drink of ale and he finished his scotch and water. "Shoot. You call a trip a 'shoot'." One of the girls was working her way down the bar. She was going to slide onto the empty stool at his right and give him the business, but she looked at him first and decided not to. She curled around me and asked if I'd buy her a li'l ole drink. I said no and she moved on to the next. I could kind of feel the young fellow quivering. When I looked at him, he stood up. I followed him out of the dump. The manager grinned without thinking and said, "G'night, boys," to us. The kid stopped in the street and said to me: "You don't have to follow me around, Pappy." He sounded like one wrong word and I would get socked in the teeth. "Take it easy. I know a place where they won't spit in your eye." He pulled himself together and made a joke of it. "This I have to see," he said. "Near here?" "A few blocks." We started walking. It was a nice night. "I don'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." * * * * *