Greg had finished his
poetry reading at the
library, and now the
microphone was open to anybody in attendance who wanted to take the
stage.
At one point a young man got up and read a long, loud,
angry-sounding poem about meeting a bum on the street and discovering
that he had led much the same life as the narrator had; the implication was that he was meeting his future self there in the gutter.
After he was done, an old man in the audience whose name, we later discovered, was Harley Davidson spoke up. "That sounded to me,"
he said thoughtfully, "like it was about someone who came to Las Vegas and
lost everything." The young man nodded.
"That happened to me seven times," the old man said.