I shake my head in wonder at my friend’s perpetual time warp. Carol Doda was, or is (for all I know), a stripper in San Francisco who surely would admit she was in her prime a quarter of a century ago, when, with all the protest marches and riots in the big cities, it seemed the country was on the verge of revolution. But Dan’s most precious memory of the period is a mental postcard of two giant breasts. Yet I must have drooled over the same issues of Playboy.

“You’re looking larger than life,” I say un diplomatically

“Jeez,” he complains, “if I get any fatter I’ll have to be driven to work on a forklift.”

I laugh, knowing I like him because I doubt he has censored a single thought since the day he got married. An hour before his wedding (a humongous affair with a catered outdoor reception at the Arts Center), he knew he was making a horrible mistake.

“Brenda could handle the fact that her husband-to-be had an emotional age of fifteen,” he told me once after work over a couple of beers, “but when she discovered afterward I really was only two, it freaked her. I should have called it off, but I didn’t have (he balls.” I put my feet up on his desk and selectively rehash my year at Mays amp; Burton. Clan loves gossip the way my kid loves grease disguised as food.

“Shitfire!” he exclaims.

“They really fucked you, didn’t they?” I nod, marveling at how high Dan’s voice gets when he becomes indignant. At the PD’s Office we joked that if he could make his voice sound that shrill for a few more seconds he could market it as a dog whistle.

“I escaped with a client, though,” I say, feeling a need not to sound too pathetic and tell him about Andrew Chapman.

His Razorback red tie choking his bulging neck, Clan loosens his collar as if my story sticks in his craw.

“Aren’t you a little worried,” he mumbles, “that when this case hits the newspapers they might come after the fee?”