Jesus' Son

The narrator describes a time when he met a man with horn-rimmed glasses on a boat on Puget Sound in Washington. The man buys the narrator a beer and tells him he’s from Poland and in the US on business. The two men head down to the man’s car below deck and exit the ferry to the waterfront. They go to a restaurant where, following a long anecdote, the man admits he is actually from Cleveland, Ohio.

He admits the stories he told were false, but that some of the details were true. The man drops the narrator off at his friend’s apartment, but he’s unable to reach them to get inside. The narrator wanders around for a while, and eventually enters a bar named Kelly’s. There’s one woman in the place, and she and the narrator dance. They kiss, and when the narrator asks her to take him home, she says she can’t, because her husband is home. They eventually agree that he’ll come over, and they’ll pretend he’s her cousin. The woman gets upset and admits that she was only married four days previously.