Self-Absorbed Boomer read this piece about one of his favorite authors whom he almost got to meet.

One evening about fifteen years ago, I was where my bride had learned to expect me to be more often than she wished, which was at the bar of the Lion’s Head, in Greenwich Village. After a few beers, I felt the inevitable (my maternal grandmother used to say, “Know why beer goes through you so fast? It doesn’t have to stop to change color.”) need to visit the room a few steps from where I was seated. Having spent thirty seconds or so reading the superurinary graffiti (“God made Shakespeare, then broke the mold. God broke the mold, then made Jacqueline Susann. Mailer will advise God what molds he’s trying on.”) and doing the obligatory manual ablution, I swung the door open and saw a man with disheveled hair and a sallow complexion, wearing a rumpled sport jacket, sitting on the barstool I had temporarily vacated. Tommy Butler, the bartender, spotted me and tapped the man on the shoulder, saying, “Hey! That’s his place. You’ll have to move.” The man cast a plaintive glance at me as he slid off the stool and began to walk away. He seemed frail, and I wanted to say, “Wait. It’s OK. You sit; I’ll stand for a while.” Tommy, though, tended bar with an iron hand, and would brook no challenge to any of his orders, even from their putative beneficiaries. So I retook my seat and got another beer. After a few minutes, when Tommy was out of earshot, I mentioned to a friend sitting next to me that I felt bad about the man who’d been ousted from my place. “Oh, yeah,” my friend said, “that was Fred Exley.“