By PFC Pflege
Part 1
I met Mark through friends of mine. He was 19 years old; I was 28. It was the summer that everyone was gin-rummy mad, and played whenever we could. Most of the guys were in their early twenties, and didn’t have a place of their own yet, or, if they did, it was a small apartment. Since I had just bought a house, it was natural that a lot of the games were played there. We’d have 6 or 8 guys playing, sometimes more; none of us had a lot of money, so the stakes were real low. On the weekends, if the fever was on, we sometimes played all night, nodding over the cards as the light of early dawn filled the rooms.