Kindness Among Friends: Tales Of The Sportsmen's Club

Charlie's Sportsmen's Club is a two-story, skid-row joint housing a long bar, a poker room, and a Chinese restaurant, with hotel rooms rambling across the upper floor. Business depends on a subculture of alcoholics, hustlers, shills, gamblers, and those in need of a cheap bed. Among them is Alexander Kyness, whose friends call him "Kindness," a man who has chosen the club as the place to live a life of obscurity. In this odd, little world that ticks along to its own beat of greed, deception, and predation, Kindness's stance of detachment is tested by a number of strange occurrences. More than a few times, unusual events and lingering mysteries ignite his curiosity and beckon him to apply powers of investigation for which he has an apparent gift. Kindness's self-willed anonymity and aversion to personal entanglement may meet their match in Dolly "Little Doll" Grey, the manager with formidable wit and will who keeps order over the misfits and malcontents in this place where "something interesting always happens." In narrating the disarming happenings-at times hilarious, while at other times horrifying-at Charlie's, Kindness shows himself to be a man worth getting to know, especially if you wish life had dealt you a better hand.