Friends described that mind-set as part of Isner's evolution.
It's a hesitancy that highlights one of the innate dangers of hotel scenes, that creeping sensation that you're not in a real bar, a sense that a friend described as "the feeling that everyone's waiting for a taxi to the airport".
His first place was a sparse one-bedroom apartment that a friend described as something like a "crack den".
Listen to the banter in any Dublin pub: pun upon pun spiralling in wafts of surreality to hang under the ceiling in the cigarette smoke, "that incense", as a friend described it, "which heaven doesn't want".
Those who had never before sunk their teeth into a steaming glazed ring recalled the first time they heard a friend describe Krispy Kremes with words that struck them as inappropriately fawning for a mass-manufactured, caloric fried snack.
That's how a friend describes her experience of trying to buy a family house in London.
The police described that man as a friend of Mr. Wagner's who also has multiple tattoos and white supremacist views.
Other friends describe that some participants were being held at gunpoint at the club, as police forced them to sit on the ground and have their photos taken by journalists.
As the Financial Times has reported, from that point on Mercer wanted to know exactly how her donations were being spent, and wanted to invest only in what another friend described as "things that she thinks put lead on the target".
She then explained how her friend described a sex act that had allegedly taken place between her and Johnson.
