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to Cole, who laughs.
    “Long night?”
    George laughs. “ A Lucky Coon ain’t so lucky for this coon.”
    Cole pours himself a drink. “Everything all right with Bert?”
    “Why you asking?”
    “Well you know, since he got married, he’s been acting kind of different.”
    George sits upright and looks at Cole. “Ain’t no way to talk about Bert.”
    Cole opens his broad mouth, ready to insist that he isn’t talking about Bert no way, but George holds up his hand.
    “Bert got pressures on him that you and me don’t fully understand.”
    Cole laughs sarcastically, but he will not meet George’s blazing eyes.
    “I said he got pressures on him that maybe we don’t understand, and if you can’t be respecting this, then maybe it’s best you hold your tongue.”
    Cole is stung now. He has no desire to argue, yet here he is fighting with old George. He takes a drink, and then he turns andaddresses his fellow performer with melancholy coursing through his voice.
    “I’m just worried, George. Bert ain’t never been one to mix in, you know that better than anybody, but this marriage thing seems to have beaten up on old Bert.”
    George says nothing. He takes a sip of his whiskey and he continues to look closely at Cole, whose face is as easy to read as that of a clock.
    Later.
    “George, you have to treat women like you’re a dead-swell coon who’s always got somebody that you’re ready to replace them with. You let a woman know that you’re feeling too much for her, then it’s over for you as a man. You may as well take up with one of those goddamn inverts that you see all over our business. You listening to me, George?”
    There were no colored girls in any of the venues they played on the Barbary Coast, and so after their performances George would rush down to the seaport, and the colored taverns, where he knew that a sporting welcome always awaited “Mr. George.” “Ladies, if it ain’t Mr. George paying us a visit this evening.” “Sit yourself down here, Mr. George, you sweet thing you.” George was barely out of his teens, but hustling was in his blood and the powdered and overscented dusky belles of the San Francisco seaport recognized one of their own kind. To begin with Bert would accompany him, but while George hurried upstairs in search of company his cautious colleague would stay downstairs by the bar, listening to the piano playing and concentrating on the drink in front of him. When George came back down he inevitably found his friend still there. Sometimes, the barman aside, Bert was the only patron left in the place, and although George was puzzled byBert’s reluctance he already knew that this was a subject that it was best not to raise with him. And then George began to leave the Midway Plaisance without waiting for his partner, who he sensed was deliberately taking his time in an effort to avoid the seaport. And sure enough some tension between the two of them began to dissipate, for there was no longer any expectation, and some nights Bert even found his way to the seaport by himself. Stumbling downstairs, his shirttail flapping outside his pants, George was always happy to see Bert sitting at the bar and grinning in his direction. And then one night, having taken a good fill of liquor, George forgot himself and asked Bert the question.
    “What’s the matter, Bert, you don’t like catting for women, or you don’t like colored girls, which is it?”
    Bert looked at him in fake surprise and arched his eyebrows.
    “Ain’t no other type of girl that I know of.”
    “Well I know some of these colored girls are sweet on you. And they got moist thick lips like they be putting soft rubber all over your body.”
    Bert laughed. “I already caught enough hell in my life and I ain’t got no interest in catching nothing else.”
    “You ain’t never heard of protection? It’s true that some of those female diseases gets ideas and likes to ease their way into a man’s body so we all