That Mess Last Year

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This is Bud Lide’s story and I heard it in a Third Avenue bar and it is pretty obvious that Bud will never put it in his terse journalese because he, as much as anyone, wants to avoid one of those quilted cells that they give you for writing about that sort of thing.

We were in a booth, four of us, and it was that afternoon last week when little Jimmy Derider swung on Walker, the City Editor, and was tossed out. Bud Lide, who had been out west for several months doing something or other, sat and listened while the conversation turned from Jimmy Derider and became general — the topic being all of the people in the world who are small, weak, afraid and ineffectual. Jimmy was one of those. After fifteen years of being bullied by Walker, he had finally made a weak attempt to punch Walker’s face in.

One of the things that none of us mentioned was the way Bud Lide was drinking. He had been drinking ever since he got back from his extended stay in the mesa country. It worried the rest of us and we had the idea that by ignoring him, he’d be helped to fight his way up out of his alcoholic haze.

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