Free Amp'd by Ken Pisani

to share his toys with the dim boy next door.
    â€œI don’t smoke that shit. Makes me stupid.”
    As luck would have it, my tongue is too frozen under a swirly gob to reply.
    â€œMight help you sleep,” I finally offer. “They engineer it now so precisely—the place I go to has twenty-two different strains. I have stuff that makes you calm and other blends that keep you alert. They even make one that has no psychoactive effect—it doesn’t get you stoned. I don’t have that one.”
    â€œLike nonalcoholic beer. What a waste of fucking time.”
    â€œDecaf.”
    â€œWomen who don’t fuck.”
    â€œAll right, all done here,” I take my half-empty mug to the sink.
    â€œAnything still open?”
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œBar?”
    â€œHard to know. Last time I pulled an all-nighter here, I was twenty-two.”
    â€œWell, let’s go see what’s what.”
    â€œI don’t even know what that means.”
    â€œYeah, you do. You just have to stop being such a smart-ass.”
    â€œMy ass is no smarter than yours.”
    â€œThen let’s go ass up into the world, and see what’s what.”
    *   *   *
    Our unassuming midwestern village offers exactly one option for late-night drinking, the Loading Zone, where said drinking is done with remarkable efficiency. It smells of beer and sawdust and the booths are almost dark enough to disguise the seats clotted with tiny buds of burst upholstery. This isn’t a place for the sophistication of a martini or the frivolity of blender drinks; it’s a beer-and-a-shot kind of place, and the shots are nameless, neither Jack nor Jägermeister. Even ordering a Sam Adams instead of a Bud earns me a look of disdain from the bartender; I consider asking him, Then why the hell do you serve it? but the answer might be as simple as To weed out the ass wipes while he beats me with a cue stick, so I don’t.
    This is a practiced lot of late-night drinkers, hunched over glasses like guard dogs and pasty faced from a preferred avoidance of daylight: out-of-work townies drinking their emergency funds, blue-collar guys who’ll be piloting forklifts in a few hours, criminals meeting after a heist to divvy up the loot while planning how to bump each other off. And Fred Weber.
    â€œCan’t sleep worth a damn,” Mr. Weber confides when we slide into the booth on either side of him.
    â€œI thought you were taking medical marijuana.”
    â€œDoes the goddamn pot barista tell everyone my business?”
    â€œSorry! My dad. You’re right; he shouldn’t have told me, and I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
    â€œForget it,” he waves me off. “I’ve been your father’s lawyer for thirty-seven years; if we have any secrets, it’s only because we’ve forgotten what the hell they are.”
    The guy at the next table coughs up a thumb-sized wad of phlegm and spews it into his empty beer glass. Now that he has our attention and we have his, he stares for a very long time at the place where my arm used to be, as if trying to process the information—is it gone, or merely tucked behind me, or some other optical illusion, or yet another alcoholic hallucination? It’s why I don’t like leaving the house, aside from breakfast at the Four Corners and the occasional trip to Dim Sum, both places where they’ve grown accustomed to me. But I’m especially uncomfortable here, where even two arms might provide inadequate defense against the unpredictable, and the mere act of causing someone to question his own eyes could be enough to incite confrontation. Or in this case, cause the man to rise from his table and wobble to sit at the bar.
    â€œAnyway,” Mr. Weber continues, “I had to stop. It helped me sleep, but it also made me stupid.”
    â€œWhat did I say?” Steve beams at this affirmation as if he were a