“You knew Jim well, did you?” he asked, and looked at me like Jim would have looked at me when he heard something too L.A. for words—alarmed. “Just for cheap thrills,” I said. “He seemed more like the expensive-trouble kind,” Renzo said, “expensive regrets.” I laughed and said, “Well, in those days we thought we’d live forever. We thought the more we had to regret, the better. Besides, we didn’t believe death applied to us personally.” “Yeah,” Renzo said, “well, I was in Vietnam.”
