As He Lay Dying-2

Dave and I took another fishing trip, to upstate New York, in search of yet more steelhead. This time, we weren't fortunate enough to latch on to poachers and came up empty with respect to fish. While the fishing proved disappointing, the hanging out didn't.
We spent some time at a bar called The Silver Nickel after the waitress at the diner tipped us off that that was the place to be. Or that was where she planned to be, at least. And how could we have resisted hanging out at the bar where the waitress planned to be, she who joked about her menstrual cycle while serving us food?
And not just any food: Dave ordered the liver, and liver he got. A plate full, about the size of a fucking football. Yeah, he was going to eat it all. I would have felt as if I were in a Richard Russo novel, had I been familiar at the time with Richard Russo novels.
We played shuffleboard at The Silver Nickel, and the waitress did appear. That bar didn't particularly provide many entertainment opportunities, and we already had heard about the waitress's menses, so we drank cheap beer, perhaps Pabst, and eventually returned to our little fishermen's retreat, a modest boarding house of sorts that offered clean accommodations at a reasonable price.
An array of snapshots runs through my mind, a scrapbook chronicling the highs and lows of a friendship that consumed the majority of our lives. Mostly highs, though even the lows serve as a reminder that the road from start to finish rarely involves a straight line.
Like the time Dave and I planned to share a student subscription to The Wall Street Journal while in college. He didn't pay me over the course of an entire semester after I bought the subscription, so when he fronted the money for the keg one night, I figured I would take advantage of the opportunity to break even. When I left his dorm room without chipping in for the keg, he grabbed me from behind in the hallway, picked me up and started swinging me. I, preferring to have my feet hit the wall instead of my face, stuck my legs out and kicked off the cinder block. I must have jarred myself loose at some point, or he let me go, but as my feet hit the floor, my girlfriend ran up and kicked him straight in the balls. Apparently that hurt. Then Dave started to be more conciliatory, and I popped him hard in the chest with an open hand and sent him across the hallway. Somebody intervened, and I left in alcohol-fueled indignation. And leaving I was, until my girlfriend refused to go. She wouldn't leave until he and I talked.
As selfish as I consider her actions throughout most of that time, she did recognize the significance of my friendship with Dave. Our friendship with him. So I eventually went back upstairs, and we went back in the room and drank some more.
He always blamed that disagreement on our girlfriends at the time, despite mine having jumped to my defense. He may have been right, that they fomented the underlying tension because of how they felt about one another, then his Lady Macbeth drove him past the breaking point. 
He had a picture of a bodybuilder or some other fitness guy on the mini-fridge in that room and bet me that his abs would look like that in a few months. He never had a chance, but he didn't pay up on that bet, so maybe he did get me back for not helping out with the cost of the keg. Fucker. Then again, he bought plenty of stuff for my kids. But the clothes he took from me over the years, at least when he could still fit in my clothes.... 
So we caught no fish on that sojourn into Richard Russo land. Did we have to? We would have liked to. We really did go to fish. But we had the time, and it never amounted to a waste.