While we were waiting for the beers to arrive he lit up a cigarette, squinting to protect his eyes from the three inch flame that shot up from his Bic, appropiately decorated with a scantily clad Playboy bunny stamped onto the side. I leaned back in a futile attempt to dodge the cloud-like puff of smoke which he exhaled simultaneously from his nostrils and his mouth, saving the last bit in his lungs to blow a couple of smoke rings in the general direction of the bar, grinning at me out of the corner of his eye as he did so.

Cigarette smoke makes me nauseous--I mean REALLY nauseous, but I was determined to keep my lunch in my stomach for as long as I could stand it. This odd character, whose vocabulary would surpass many an English professor but who spent his life collecting tattoos and hanging out in dark, dingy bars with "the real people of this country" (He claimed to be a poet, too, but I haven't seen any evidence of that yet)and spoke in a slow East Texas drawl just might be the source, or at least point me to the source, that I needed to wrap up this case.

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