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Red and Ed and Clyde How strange to realize they have all been dead for years, my father and his two drunken, derelict friends, and that I am older now than any of them lived to be: Ed, stomped to death in a gutter on skid row, Red of cancer of the liver at 68, and Clyde, who died defending his daughter’s honor, although she was a whore. They were comic and pathetic, never tragic. Their lives were like bad performances in a tawdry drama named Loss, and the audience dwindled as the play ground on, plotless and repetitive. Alcohol fed their dreams like nothing else could, and they lived to dream. When Ed went to jail, Red got him out. When Red went to jail, Clyde got him out. Red was the only one who managed to hang onto his family, although that connection was tenuous at times, and once his wife emptied a .45 at him and his current girlfriend in a dimly lit bar. She missed, if indeed she intended to hit the man she loved in spite of all he could do to prove he didn’t love her. The other two had already lost their wives and children along the way somewhere. I understand the bond between them better now than I did then. I no longer think of them as the drunken three stooges, wisecracking their way through life and leaving little but wreckage behind them. Going to get drunk again tonight, God 81 how I dread it. Perhaps I even understand, although I couldn’t explain it, why one of Ed’s sons went to prison and the other one became a judge. 82 ...

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