Hard wired and soft brained and with a courageous misunderstanding of our own place in life, a man I called “the Doctor” and I broke laws and damaged psyches, sideswiping our way through long nights and airless days long ago, that somehow leave me thinking of him as I stand in a Yerevan park trying to communicate with an Armenian Jehovah’s Witness.

One famous binge of behaving poorly required our participation (the Doctor and me; not the Jehovah woman) at a mid-Chicago institution called the Weed. At an hour I don’t often see anymore unless occasioned by a bladder or a deadline, we reached the establishment astoundingly in better shape than those who’d already put their wheels down there. To reach our perches we had to step over a large man having a rest squarely in mid-floor. “That’s Butchy”, the Doctor said. “Resident drunk?” I asked. “No, he’s the manager.”