For a thousand easy bucks, I could lie all right. I had the gift all great liars had: the uncanny ability to figure out exactly what Herr Other wanted to hear, and if in this case he had a medical degree and a Ph.D. in Psychiatry and ran his own clinic, all the greater the satisfaction would be when I duped him right there on his home turf. I listened carefully to Dr. Berman and proceeded to spew forth fallacies with the reckless abandon of a seasoned mendax.

Unlike the others, Greg hadn’t been able to wait until the first game was over to crack open a beer. After two months of sitting in those bleachers, watching through the backstop as his girlfriend Kim’s team played weekly double headers, he needed the beer just to get through the next inning, the next batter, the next pitch. Lately, he’d begun to experience this desperation as anger, even fury, and he couldn’t account for the sheer quantity of it.