When you're younger and you spend your evenings in bacchanalian pursuits, one of the best parts is the morning-after breakfasts - an opportunity to see the pals you were blurrily and blearily (beerily?) exchanging deep, dark, truthful secrets with (maybe even spending fitful nights of as much desperate passion as two besotted souls can muster - getting lucky, if you will) in the light of the new day.

Breakfasts were also a good time to chase away what another drinking buddy of mine calls 'the guilties' away, that nagging feeling endemic to the morning after the night before, when you're absolutely certain that the incredibly hilarious bons mot you were reeling off effortlessly over the endless pitchers of beer and mixed drinks last night were actually the mean-spirited and boorish yammering of a man who'll die - and live - alone.

It was one such morning that a breakfast was organized. Among the eaters and coffee-drinkers were
Diego & Davy (an ironic and uncomfortable boy-boy coupling that we felt bad about subjecting to the same endless behind-the-back sniping and analysis we subjected all of the hetero relationships in our crowd to because we were all hypersensitive to showing off how cool, nonjudgmental, open and accepting we all were), Ramona (who was sort of everyone's girl in an always-platonic, best-friend, shoulder-to-cry-on kind of way) and DuWayne (who would have his own ugly and ill-fated fling with Ramona in a few months that would end with shouting matches and the probably inevitable splintering of that old gang of mine.)

The plethora of diners made it necessary for our waiters to slide two long tables together against a bench on a wall to let us all sit at one table. I was seated between four of my pals, two on each side, and the waitress pushed the two tables together to touch in front of me with a loud click.

"Goodbye, Mr. Bond." I said sotto voce with a faint Eastern Bloc accent. This broke everyone up and we proceeded to have a raucous, caffeinated breakfast, laughing, cackling and snorting, and the guilties dissipated like a fog in the midday sun and we we felt like forever friends.

Within six months, all of us would be bitterly single and barely speaking to one another.