For a while, he remembered, their warm-up had been fifty push-ups. Fifty! He couldn't bring back who'd won the bet -if either of them had ever made it to their weight. Probably both – that was the way they were back then.

But he remembered the garage. They never parked cars in it, not even in the winter. Just his dad's tools on the wall, the workbench, the ping-pong table in the middle. Bikes and skates, skis and balls and sports equipment all over the place. Pretty good jock family up till his dad died. His sister Dorothy training with him that whole last summer she was home before she went to college. They were going to ski cross-country from Des Moines to Iowa City when she came back on Christmas break.

Cole lifted his cheek off the floor, pulled his arms up to beside his shoulders, pushed. This time, even the first few were hard. Eight.

Turning onto his side, he sat up, then pulled his mattress off its concrete pad, onto the floor. He rolled onto it, hooked his hands behind his head, tried a sit-up. Once upon a time he could really do sit-ups – sixty in a minute. Polacek couldn't touch him.

Again he started fast. Again he faded quickly, but he forced himself through fifteen and on to twenty. He wasn't going to accept less than twenty, although the last couple felt like they ripped something inside him. But he got to it, turned on his side away from Jose, gulped for breath, closed his eyes.

The clang of the outer door to the common room jolted him up. Cole had dozed through the twenty minutes that inmates were allowed out into the common room every morning. Two guards with the trolley holding the lunches banged again on the outer door. 'Back in your rooms, girls!'

When everyone was back where they belonged, the guard entered his code into the box outside and all the cell bolts slammed into place. Seeing the mattress on the floor with Cole cross-legged now on it, the guard distributing the trays couldn't resist a little moment of clever repartee. 'Having a picnic, Alice?' he asked. 'Nice day for it.' He slid the tray under the door.

Cole barely heard and didn't care.

Eric was the social worker who passed out the pills -he stopped at the door. This was the first dose Cole had told him he was going to miss – he'd get his usual come dinnertime again – and Eric wanted to check to make sure Cole was comfortable with the idea. He was.

Then, finally, the food. If Cole thought he'd felt a jab of hunger before, it was nothing compared to now, with another of the jail's full-fledged meals actually in front of him. All the meals he'd had so far included four slices of white bread and four pats of butter. The butter was soft, warm, and he smeared one of the pats onto a piece of the bread, folded it over, and put it all, whole, into his mouth. While he chewed, he looked down at the tray. Today, lunch was two thick slabs of meatloaf with gravy, mixed peas and carrots, mashed potatoes and more gravy, canned peaches in a plastic bowl, milk and two chocolate chip cookies.

The bread went down. Cole stabbed at the meatloaf so hard that he broke his plastic fork. It didn't matter. He used his spoon, shoveled in a few more bites, began to savor, to taste – prodded by the mnemonic smell of the gravy, to remember.

Polacek's kitchen. A winter day, later afternoon, snow outside. An after-school snack before hockey, Polacek's mom pouring reheated gravy over bread and cold meatloaf.

Polacek. He hadn't thought of him in years, and now he found himself wondering where his old best friend was. Certainly no place like here. He probably had a job someplace, maybe even was married. Polacek with kids? Imagine.

The last year of high school they had stopped being friends over the dope – marijuana, then. Polacek really believing it was the killer weed. Didn't want any part of it. So Cole started hanging with the other guys – Reece, Baugh, Neillsen, Parducci.

Baugh was the best of them. He had even been friends with Polacek before, as Cole had. The good students through grade school, Little League, Boy Scouts. Then, after Cole's dad died, when Cole had been trying to get through that darkness, Baugh turning him on the first time. No doubt he had good intentions – that was who Baugh was – trying to make Cole feel better about life with his sister gone away to college, his dad gone for good. Hey, life isn't easy. People need to laugh, get high, forget themselves. It was an unbelievable bummer his dad dying.

'Marijuana, bfd. Come on, Cole, it's totally harmless. Marijuana never killed anybody.'

Baugh was dead now four years though.

Polacek trying to get him to stop a few times, coming around the house, worried about how much Cole was changing.

Yeah? Well, people change. Cole wasn't hooked on anything. He could stop anytime he wanted. The other guys – Reece, Neillsen, Parducci – his mom kept up with their moms. Last Cole heard, Reece had become a cop back home. He knew Neillsen worked at GM. Parducci was still playing ball, second year in Triple A, might make the bigs.

Telling himself, soaking up his gravy, 'Didn't hook any of them. Didn't hook me either. Not the marijuana.'

Another flash – the last time he saw Polacek. A party at Notre Dame. Cole had dropped out after a semester and his mom sent him up to visit his old friend, subliminal message that maybe he'd see how great Steve was doing and clean his own act up. Subtle as a cherry bomb. But he'd gone. Cole in his own mind nowhere near any kind of junkie. This is recreation, that's all – the only kind he knows anymore, constant doping. But he can quit anytime.

He's shocked at Steve, in a frat now, with his alligator shirt, drinking beer, dancing to Hootie. Just like so unaware, so naive. Whereas Cole that night, he was the king…

There was this girl, somebody somebody. By now he was into cocaine whenever he could get it, dealing a little to cover costs. So he and this girl, they're upstairs in the bathroom. They've got lines laid out and one of the dorks comes in and next thing there's Polacek, angry but calm, laying some trip about him being a guest and abusing their friendship. Cole's got to leave right now! They can't have cocaine in their house. The college could close them down. They could lose their charter.

Cole' s temper out the window – half the blow wasted now, scattered in the commotion. 'Who gives a shit, Steve? About any of this?' Screaming at him.

'Everybody here, Cole. Everybody who's trying to make a life.'

Polacek, the dweeb. Never saw him again, and good damn riddance. The best friend, though, that he'd ever had.

'Hey, Alice! You done? What's a matter? They put too much pepper in that for you?'

23

Ten years ago, when Sharron Pratt had been a city supervisor, she had lobbied to pass an obscure change in the city's law regarding business announcements in the community's newspapers. Previously, if you wanted to file a Fictitious Business Name statement, a Notice of Application to Sell Alcoholic Beverages, a Notice of Foreclosure, or any number of other legal notices, the law required that you publish this information in any newspaper with a paid circulation of at least one hundred and fifty thousand.

Sharron had persuaded the other supervisors that this law unfairly discriminated against the smaller, more 'community-based' newspapers that proliferated all over the city, and which could receive no revenue from this lucrative market. Largely as a result of her efforts, the law was changed to require filing of these notices in any newspaper with a print run of over ten thousand copies, of which the most well-known in the English language was the Daily Democrat.

As a practical matter, this change in the law made a millionaire out of Chad Lacey, the Daily Democrat publisher, a friend and political ally of Sharron Pratt. Suddenly Lacey's community bulletin, distributed for free on racks or as a throw-away on driveways mostly in the Haight-Ashbury district, found itself on the receiving end of almost three hundred thousand dollars per year in city money alone. Lacey could now afford to hire a few well-known guest columnists and to pay several full-time reporters. With the paper's new respectability, distribution went into three more districts in the city – the Sunset, the Richmond, Twin Peaks, and the Democrat became the city's premier free newspaper.