Steven

I hadn't seen Steven since Bill's Off Broadway closed for renovations a few months back. There he had played the pool table almost nightly, drinking “coast to coasts”, an inexplicably named off menu special, consisting of a shot of bottom shelf bourbon (from Kentucky) and a tall-can of Busch (brewed in similarly landlocked Minnesota). Steven and I never spoke more than the few words that were necessary to facilitate a proper pool game. Which, barring the uncommon eight-ball scratch, he easily won with a poised and practiced drunkenness, which at times bordered on buffoonery.
We were outside Clever Dunne's, an Irish bar not far from Bill's that blessed by proximity was serving as temporary respite for its hard drinking refugees. Walking up Olive I had stopped to say hello to Greg, a large young black man, whose voice and mannerisms seemed gentled by the reactions he saw in others to his size (and occasionally) his race. He moved with a slow methodical purpose that belied his early twenty-something age. This, and a simple earnestness made him quite likeable. We smiled and greeted as people who drink together, but know little of each other do. He was smoking a spliff with Steven and I joined them. Steven, in contrast to Greg was much older, on the short side of average and white. He was loud and gesticulated, often and with wild fervor; only still and calm the second before he shot a pool ball and the moment after. The spliff dwindled and Greg went inside, leaving Steven and myself. Steven grew uncharacteristically quiet. I looked over the man. He wore, as always, white dungarees splattered with numerous paints, a black leather jacket, at least twenty years out of fashion, and open at the front exposing a Cosby sweater with zigzagging vertical stripes. His short cropped white hair stood straight up above a round face, featuring a round nose reddened by broken capillaries. He pulled a pouch of tobacco from his jacket pocket and leaned towards me, rolling a pregnant cigarette as he spoke intimately, stale beer smell permeated his gruff speech.
“What's your name again?”
Not for the first time, I reintroduced myself, “Arlo”
“You know Harlo,” I wasn't going to correct him, he would forget it before we met again. “I'm not even supposed to be here.”
Thinking that he meant he ought to have been at the defunct Bill's, I said as much, thumbed a camel out its pack and placed it between my lips. He shook his head, and lit his cigarette then mine. The lighter looked small in his large hands, which I surmised had grown slowly around paintbrush and roller handles.
“I'm fifty-two years old.” He looked older. “And I was not brought into this world with love. My dad raped my mom.” His voice rising, “I shouldn't be HERE,” he gestured with both hands wide, to make clear that “here”, meant everywhere. I had no response to this and did not think he wanted one of me, so I smoked, and he smoked and then he went on, “I got them together in the same room 30 years ago, today. And I told them they needed to talk, that I needed them to talk, so I could move on. My brother and sister said it could never be done, 'don't even try it,' they said. But there they were, big Harold,” he raised a hand above his head, and lowered it, “And little Marie, ninety pounds dripping wet, both there in the living room. And they talked. To make a long story short...” A common refrain of his, bordering on apology.
“My dad said he was drunk and he was sorry.” He re-lit his cigarette. “My mom said that if it wasn't for me, she would have killed him. I shouldn't be here.”
Over the next half-hour, before Greg leaned out the open window to tell him he was up on the pool table Steve told me his whole life in small discontinuous segments. He told me about growing up on Air Force bases in Puerto Rico, Oklahoma, and Spokane. About his brother's death of lung cancer. (He is terrified of cancer, he knows the medical names of most common forms.) He told me of his sister, 26 years his senior, and her niece, older than him as well. Of his mother's three marriages to Air Force men. And her fourth and final to the cook who stayed. He told me of his only son, and his six grandchildren who live in Florida. Of his halcyon days hitchhiking across the country in buckskin and fringe in early '70s.
He told me lies, but mostly truths. And he told it to a stranger. He told it because I was a stranger. He didn't want advice or conciliatory words, he just wanted to be heard. To confess all to someone with no vested interest, and then walk away lighter.