He reached out his hand to me. It was a gesture I’d come to know well. It was like a playful slap or maybe the way you’d knock your best buddy on the shoulder. You know, a little horseplay between two guys, but more tentative, like he didn’t want to touch me too hard. Or like he was leaving open the possibility that I’d step closer and he could turn it into an awkward sideways hug.

I could tell Uncle Lito was trying hard to figure out what to do with me. “We’re just a couple of bachelors,” he said to me on more than one occasion. “Living off the fat of the land, eh? What do you say we go to the Flame and get a bite to eat.” As if the Flame’s food qualified as the fat of the land. We’d sit in the booth and Uncle Lito would run down his day to me in great detail, how many bottles of this or that he sold and what he needed to reorder. I’d sit there completely silent. Of course. Whether I was really listening to him, it didn’t seem to matter much. He just kept up his end of a one-sided conversation, pretty much every waking moment.

“Whaddya say, Mike? You think we need to do some laundry today?”

“Time to go to work, Mike. Another day, another dollar. You feel like hanging around in the back while I clean things up a bit?”

“Getting low on supplies here, Mike. I think we need a trip to the store. Whaddya say we pick up a couple of honeys while we’re out, eh? Bring ’em back here? Have a party?”

This habit of his, this jabbering on and on all the time… it’s the kind of thing I’d run into a lot, wherever I went. People who naturally like to talk, it takes them a minute to get used to me, but once they do they just turn it on and never turn it off. God forbid there be one moment of silence.

The quiet people, on the other hand… I usually make them uncomfortable as hell, because they know they can’t compete with me. I’ll out-quiet anybody, in any venue for any stakes. I’m the undisputed champion of keeping my mouth shut and just sitting there like a piece of furniture.