I was reading The Incognito Lounge on break. I had just finished a shopping list for a man who could not do it by himself and was amazed that at Walmart you can buy an entire case of frozen burritos for $114 dollars. But the man said he only wanted four. Still the possibilities I told him. We could live like Mexican Kings. It was, I thought, the kind of thing that might happen in a story by Denis Johnson, or in a poem in The Incognito Lounge where he wrote, "Darkness, my name is Denis Johnson/ and I am almost ready to confess." The man went to bed and his dreams mixed in with the dreams and confessions of the others and as happens the dead began to whisper in the eaves of this old motel. And then I swear I felt my dead friend Cody beside me, saw his tall shadow, heard him saying do you remember that night and I said yes that night in March when you were still alive and we drove up from Binghamton to hear Denis Johnson at Cornell and when we walked in he said from the podium tonight for some reason I feel I'm just going to read poems and we were absolutely fucking sure he did he did it just for us, we were the roughest poorest dressed ones in the great hall of terrific haircuts was full of a dark and luminous light that rose as Johnson recited. After the applause, Cody and I stole nametags off a table and crashed the reception and drank free booze and ate enormous amounts of shrimp from a six foot tall bubbling shrimp fountain and asked Denis Johnson so many questions about the war zones he had been in and what accidents he had survived and then Cody said we have to go we don't belong here, and when Johnson asked what do we do, Cody looked him dead and dangerous in the eye and smirked, then said we rob banks man, the stories we could tell you if we only had more time, and we left, just as security arrived followed by the two Asian girls whose name tags we had swiped. We drove back on black roads through downpour rain and ended up at the Belmar bar for last call and as we drank our whiskeys down fast, we wondered if we'd ever see Denis Johnson again. And then Cody was dead, and then so was Denis Johnson. But I'm still here, doing what I told Cody should have been our last words to Denis Johnson. What do you do? What do we do? Mr. Johnson, we save lives.