"Well, as long as I've got someone's approval," he says with a laugh. "And I think you being a professor lends it a little more weight than it would if you were just the person serving me drinks at a bar." Being a bartender is fine, he figures, it's a job, but there's something about the idea of being a professor that just seems a little other to someone like Hopper. She's smarter than the average person in Hawkins, that's for are, especially a person like him, someone who just barely got out in the first place and then only managed to do it on the back of a war.

When the good stuff had ended, he'd gone shuffling right back to where he'd come from.

"So if anyone challenges me on that, I can point 'em toward you?" he asks, still smiling. "You'll take them on for me?"