Sam glanced down at the scrap of paper on which I had scrawled the address. He read it aloud.

"OK. Yes. This should be it."

I stared, uncomprehending, at the lack of Aleck's.

"Are you sure you're reading it right?" I asked. "Lemme see that."
Sam handed me the paper scrap.

"Yeah, it's right."

I paused to contemplate the situation. Use logic, I told myself. Aleck's is one of the most phenomenal places on the face of the earth and therefore it must exist, hence I must be in the wrong spot.

"OK, Sam," I said. "I think it's one of those deals where we're on Whatever Street East and we're supposed to be on Whatever Street West. We'll just drive down a ways and we'll come to it."

I breathed easier.

My first visit to Aleck's was during the Democratic National Convention in 1988, which I covered for an alternative weekly. To cover a national political convention for an alternative weekly is to write very impassioned stuff about everything but the convention. You'll almost certainly not get a floor pass, which is where everyone is, and, if you do get a floor pass, nobody who's anybody will talk to you because nobody who's anybody knows who you are. So you write about the protesters because you don't need a pass to do that, and, besides, that's your audience. And you write about the host city because doing that lets you do two things. One, explore it as a microcosm of the socio-economic failures of an inherently predatory political system. Two, go on a restaurant eating binge.