"What're you doing in there?" I go, "What's it look like I'm doing?
I'm getting laid, man." That's when they started beating on the car.
The guy comes along that owned the car, remember? He couldn't believe it.
"Hey, what're you doing to my fucking car?" He tears into the cops and they club the shit out of him and throw him in the wagon. Oh, man."
Skip rubbed his eyes with a knuckle.
"I
get tears thinking about it."
Robin said, "You remember the last time we were here?"
The waiter appeared with Skip's drink and the bottle of wine, opened it and poured a taste into Skip's glass.
Robin watched Skip hold the wine in his mouth and wink at her, and for a moment she thought he was going to spit it out and do a scene with the waiter. Skip loved scenes. But this time he swallowed and gave her a sly grin.
"I wasn't gonna do nothing. Guy's a real waiter, wears a tux, probably been here all his life."
Robin tried again, patient.
"You remember the last time we had dinner here?"
Skip had to stop and think. She watched him look around, maybe for something that might remind him.
"We got picked up in 'seventy-eight… It wasn't after they brought us back."
"Before that. Before we went underground."
"Man, that was a long time ago."
"We came here December fifteenth, 1971," Robin said, "about a week after we got back from New York." She waited again as Skip frowned, thinking hard.
"We went to New York for that stop-the-war benefit."
He came alive.
"Yeah, in that big cathedral."
"St. John the Divine," Robin said.
"You sold tickets at the door and walked off with something like nine hundred dollars."
"I think it was more."
"You told me nine hundred."
"The People's Coalition for something or other."