When I was bartending there was this massive guy named Jim who came in all the time; massive like a left tackle, or like a safe you’d keep gold bricks in, that kind of mighty presence in a room. For a long time he drove an 18-wheeler all over America, and sometimes he’d speak a few lines in this pretend-urgent voice that he’d crackle and distort like it was coming over a CB radio. He had beautiful snow-white hair that he combed back on his head.

He carried this game around in his pocket in a Ziploc bag called Pass The Pigs. The game was just two rubber pigs the size of Monopoly pieces that you would toss like dice, and the way their bodies landed gave you a certain amount of points. Sometimes he would be at the bar in the early afternoon, when the place was silent like some drafty old church and the daylight was smashing through the windows in thick, filthy beams with all this constellated dust hanging in them, no activity besides muted baseball highlights. And he would look down the bar at someone who he had seen probably a thousand other times in his life, guys who had disappeared without ceremony and had been gone for weeks, but then their new routine out there had been punctured by some unforeseen event, some work that had dried up, the girl they were staying with in another town had kicked them out, and now they were back, sitting in this wounded hunch, waiting for the crisis of their lives to be interrupted and mended. And Jim would say to them, “You wanna play Pigs?” and for a moment the room felt like a nursery, he had made his way across the bar now, Jim with his pigs and one of his cooing infant orphans, and they would do that through a beer or two, playing Pigs and waiting for the day to turn, for a commotion to arrive in this room that made their drinking feel less like a nasty rash and more like an event where they were going to come out on top for once.