Walking back from Video Lair (I rented “Swingers” and “Tideland”) I saw white-haired Dave, tall, tanned, handlebar mustache, sunglasses, baseball cap. He saw me and laughed.
“Ol’ Ben is still trying to figure out that lottery machine,” he said.
“Oh, man. I’m sorry!”
“Oh, it’s OK. See, normally, if we run a mistake like that, we have to buy it. But Dave” by which he meant the other Dave “ended up buying it.”
“Awesome!” I said.
“He was sayin’ that he hopes you don’t think he was mad at you.”
I thought about how we’d yelled at each other, in public, and how he’d stormed off into the back room and slammed things around. “Oh, no, it was all just a silly mistake.”
So his name is Ben. I’ll have to buy him a beer or something.