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to my being out with my friends;
     it’s just that I’d rather spend time with her than them. Of course, I would never tell them that.
    Sports, lubricated by beer, is the glue that holds us together. But I sometimes wonder if they would be my friends, if I would
     have any male friends, without sports. It represents at least 70 percent of what we talk about.
    My attitude toward sports has evolved as I’ve grown older. For years I wanted to play professionally, though down deep I knew
     that was never going to be a realistic possibility. Then I got to the pointwhere I lived vicariously through modern athletes, and that was reasonably satisfying.
    Now, approaching forty and fading fast, I think I’m embarking on a new phase. I’m going to start living vicariously through
     someone who is already living vicariously through an athlete. It should be far less exhausting. All I have to do is find someone
     to fill the role; I think this is why men have sons.
    The renovation is scheduled to last for six weeks, although I have no idea why they would be doing it at all. Charlie’s is
     perfect, and in my experience perfection is generally a tough thing to improve upon.
    So we have been spending our time at The Sports Shack, an upscale restaurant-bar located on Route 4 in Teaneck. It has a ski-lodge-impersonation
     motif, and it operates under the assumption that if you have enough TVs, and a gimmicky enough decor, everything else will
     take care of itself. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
    The hamburgers aren’t thick enough, the french fries aren’t crisp enough, and unless you tell them otherwise every single
     time, they serve the beer in a glass. Clusters of TVs sometimes all show the same baseball game, when there are plenty of
     others to choose from, and the other night one of the TVs was tuned to a
Best of the X Games
retrospective.
    Best of the X Games
? Now, there’s a show that should run all of ten seconds. In any event, what is it doing in a sports bar? What is happening
     to the country I love?
    But here we sit, drinking our beer, eating our food, and watching our games, thereby trying to restore a sense of order out
     of this chaos.
    Tonight Pete is late in arriving, and Vince is in a bad mood because the Mets are losing. He would also be in a bad mood if
     the Mets were winning, or if they were not playing, or if there were no such thing as the Mets.
    He stares in the direction of the bar. “Do you see that?” he asks, then shakes his head. “Unbelievable.”
    I look over there but don’t see anything that would be considered difficult to believe. “What are you talking about?”
    “That guy is in a three-piece suit. With a tie.”
    “So?”
    “So?” he sneers. “So it’s supposed to be a sports bar. What’s next, flowers on the tables? That smelly stuff in a pot?”
    “You mean potpourri?”
    He looks at me like a bug he found in his soup. “Yes, Mr. Foo-Foo. That’s exactly what I mean.”
    Pete arrives, and not a moment too soon. Vince is harder to handle one-on-one than LeBron James. Pete doesn’t say hello; for
     some reason greetings have never been a part of the relationship among the three of us. We don’t say good-bye, either. Or
How was your day?
    “I need a favor” is the first thing Pete says to me.
    “Dream on,” I say, though we both know that I will do whatever he asks. Since I am a criminal defense attorney, Pete’s job
     as a police lieutenant makes him a valuable source of information for me, and I call upon him all the time. He grumbles, but
     he always comes through.
    Even if that weren’t the case, I would do whatever Pete needs. Doing favors fits squarely within our definition of friendship,
     and to refuse one would be highly unusual. But pretending to resist is a necessary part of the process.
    “Actually, I’m doing you a favor,” he says. “I’ve got you a client.”
    “Just what I need,” I say. I am independently wealthy, a result of inheritance