Not in a mean way, really. It was more like they had already listened to every crazy story a guy could make up when he had absolutely nothing left to his name.
At the start, I figured they were just messing with me.
I kept throwing questions at them. What was I called? Did I get beat up? Did anybody ever show up looking for me?
One guy told me folks just called me Ben because that was the name I answered to this one night when somebody asked. Another dude mentioned I always just stayed totally out of the way. A third guy guessed maybe I hit the bottle too hard and totally fried my brain.
But I didn’t feel wasted at all. I just felt completely hollow.