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He topped off the old man's shot glass.

—L.L., how ’bout you take it easy on my customers. You buy the guy a drink, doesn't mean you have the right to browbeat him.

I raised a hand.

—It's cool, he's my dad.

L.L. wrote a novel.

It's on that shelf with the Nelson Algren and Bukowski and Kerouac at your local independent bookstore. If you have one of those. If not, you can find it on the Internet. But it will probably be the printing they did for the movie.

He wrote his novel before he met my mom. Really, he met my mom because he wrote the novel. It was a cult thing. Dozens of printings over the years, each of them a run of a couple thousand, well regarded enough to get him several guest lecture gigs in the late sixties as a not quite elder statesman of the counterculture. If not for that, he'd never have been at UC Berkeley in ’68. Never gone to the Fillmore with some of his grad students to see a happening, and loudly denigrate it as bullshit, sounding off at the back of the hall, a bottle of mescal in one hand and a huge joint in the other, surrounded by the more reactionary wing of the peace and freedom movement. If not for that, he'd never been challenged by an attractive young undergrad from SF State, who proposed to show him how rock music, acid and free love could change the world. Never would have eye-droppered a dose of U.S. government pure LSD and ended up fucking the undergrad's brains out in Golden Gate Park at dawn, receiving along the way what he once described to me as, The most sublime head known to man or Jesus. I saw the universe entire in that blow job, Web, the whole damn shooting match. Never would have taken the undergrad to wife that week. Never would have brought her back to Los Angeles with him. And certainly never would have gotten stone fucked up with her twelve years later, on one of the rare occasions they had sex anymore, and forgotten to make sure she had in her diaphragm and impregnated her with a child she would refuse to abort, all of it ending with me as his son. Or that's how he tells the story.

The old man rubbed a hand over his round belly.

—Would you have preferred that? If I'd just plopped you in front of the boob tube for your education? It could have prepared you for a menial life, it would have been no trouble at all. It would have been much easier than teaching you how to read when you were two. It would have been much easier than showing you the constellations or taking you to the Getty to see Rembrandts or the Hollywood Bowl to see Bernstein. It would have been much easier than giving you an education that you were able to use, something to share with your students. There's no nobler profession, no better use of a life than to teach, but I could have saved us both the trouble and given you a TV and that would have made you happy, it seems.

I looked at the old man.

—I'm not teaching anymore.

He blinked.

—Oh, and what kind of job have you turned your energies to?

—I'm. Cleaning stuff.

He picked at the tuft of gray hair sprouting from his right ear.

—A janitor.

—No.

—You're cleaning for a living?

—Well, for the last couple days.

—Then you are, my son, either a janitor or a housekeeper. Are you a housekeeper?

—No.

He swiveled on his stool and signaled the bartender.

—Do you have, by any chance, an application? My son, I think, might be looking to improve his employment situation.

The bartender blinked.

—We're not hiring.

My dad shrugged.

—Alas. Another beer then. He can use it to drown his useless dreams and sorrows.

I drained my glass and set it down.

—Thanks, Dad. But I think you're mistaking me for you.

He grinned, showing me the gap where his two upper front teeth used to be before he lost them in an Ensenada bar fight.

—Ah, now there's the little son of a bitch I raised.

Lincoln Lake Crows loves teachers and teaching. In theory. Which is to say he loves the idea of teachers and of teaching.

The Noblest Profession, Web. No greater calling than the passing of knowledge from one generation