I'd been to a couple of games with them; we'd sit up there in the bleachers and inhale watery beer and throw cigars to the late, lamented Dave Henderson. They couldn't not be loud and boisterous, so they gave me shit about my hair, which didn't even come down to my collar. I could take a few minutes of this, but then I needed to go to a nice sterile shopping mall and decompress.

"Aaaay, we got some beauties for you today, Cap'n Taylor, some real skinny oily ones.".

"Going to the game tonight, Rory?"

"A bunch of us are, yeah. Why, you wanna go?"

"Can't. Going to Jersey tomorrow."

"Jersey! Sheesh!" All the buys on the boat went "sheesh!" They couldn't believe anyone would be stupid enough to go to that place.

They tossed me a couple of half-dead lobsters and showed me where they'd trapped them on the chart. I jotted the locations down and put the bugs on ice. Later, when I got back, I'd have to dismantle them and run the analysis.

We traded speculation on what Sam Horn might do against the Yanks. These guys were Negro-haters all, and their heroes were gigantic black men with clubs, a contradiction I wasn't brave enough to point out.

I went to handle the most depressing part of my job. Poor people get tired of welfare cheese after a while and start looking for other sources of protein. For example, fish. But poor people can't charter a boat to go out and catch swordfish, so they fish off docks. That means they're looking for bottom fish. Anyone who knows about Boston Harbor gets queasy just at the mention of bottom fish, but these people were worried about kwashiorkor, not cancer. Three-quarters of them were Southeast Asian.

So a month ago I'd typed up a highly alarming paragraph about what these particular bottom fish would do to your health, especially to the health of unborn children. Tried to make it simple: no chemical terms, no words like "carcinogenicity." Took it to the Pearl, which is my hangout, and persuaded Hoa to translate it to Vietnamese for me.