The Last Known Steve Story
Paul Ewing
After his second wife, the one he said was so much better than the first, finally got the shits of him and kicked him out, Steve moved into that weekly rate motel out past the mall and started drinking seriously. As Steve stories went, it was pretty standard.
I still ran into Steve’s stepdaughter every couple of months at the grocery store, or in the pediatrician's waiting room, or picking up the kids from school, because those were the places I was frequenting back then, and she was usually more than happy to share Steve’s latest embarrassment with me. So I had a pretty good pipeline into the train wreck he had become, but I hadn’t seen him myself, at least not to speak to him, in six or seven years.
It wasn’t anything personal. I had a wife, a couple kids, a dog, a hamster, a gecko, mortgages on my home and the two small apartment buildings I owned and tried my best to maintain, and I played in a not so serious softball league during the summer. There was a lot going on without seeing the father of my childhood best friend. I didn’t see Eric much anymore either, but Eric was dead, so even when I tried, I couldn’t blame that on the lizard needing more crickets.
Eric and I were still friends at the time of his accident, but we were spinning in different circles. It was a function of our lives moving us apart, nothing serious. I was married, starting a family, a career, a retirement fund. Eric was bartending five or six nights a week, dating a new waitress every couple of months, trying to write a novel during his days. His death was more devastating than I thought possible, more devastating than I remember even, but still, we weren’t as close as we had been just a few years before. After Eric’s funeral, I removed myself from the drama that was the Roberts extended family, so I was a little surprised when the last known Steve story became mine to tell.
Like most of the Steve stories set after Eric's death, the one I tell begins in a bar.
My post-softball game round of beer and wings—the main reason I still played—landed me in the old sports bar in the mall parking lot. I didn’t think about Steve, or how his living in the hotel across the road would have made this his bar of choice until I saw him sitting there holding court. There was a good looking young bartender standing in front of him, and a beautiful older woman sitting next to him; the both of them hanging on his every word.
Steve didn’t seem to notice me when we walked in. And why should he? He was in his element. There was vodka. Even as a kid I knew he preferred vodka. There were women. As a young man striking out more times than not, I envied his ability to seemingly always close the deal. And there was the sound of his own voice. As an almost middle aged father, I imagined his ability to bullshit was the only comfort he had left. But I knew for certain there was no reason for him to pay attention to my group of mostly overweight dudes in silly matching softball team t-shirts, drinking beer, eating wings, acting like we were the people we actually wanted to be.
I was surprised at how well Steve was holding up. And not just because I hadn’t seen him in so long. I was surprised because of his drinking. Surprised because of his living in the hotel. Surprised because of his dead son.
Steve didn’t have that movie star glow about him anymore, but that was more the lack of idol worship on my part than it was the ravages of time, because Steve was somehow still a very good looking man. Although it couldn’t possibly be true, Steve was seemingly still a man very much in control. He was simply an older, perhaps a step slightly slower version of the Alpha Dad who once ruled our group of childhood dads. The dad we all wanted to pitch to us. The dad who always bought the post-game slushies. The dad we all secretly wished was our own.
Eric and I could go weeks without talking, months without seeing each other near the end, but I considered him my oldest, if not my best friend. And it was still a surprise, even a decade after his death, every time Eric didn’t show up late for one of my kid’s birthday parties. Every time Eric didn’t text me Phillies’ scores and stats. Every time Eric didn’t have a review of the new bar I drove past but was never going to step foot in. It was because of these lingering feelings, because sometimes the past isn’t necessarily in the past, and because I couldn’t accept Steve was happy not having a job, living in a hotel, drinking most of the time, that I felt this strange sense of obligation. Not to Steve so much, but to Eric. I felt I should be helping out his old man just because I could. I felt I should be helping out his old man just because his old man and I were in the same place at the same time. I felt I should be helping out his old man just because his old man and I were both still alive.
I hesitated before helping him. Not only was that my nature, but honestly, how much help was I actually going to be? It was late, and I needed to work in the morning. For his part, Steve had a woman, maybe even two, lined up at the bar waiting for him to get primed up enough to go. He didn’t need me pestering him. And the only thing we had between us really, was this shared history of lingering death. A collective past which had yet to help either of us.
So I did nothing.
Normally, I was one of the first to head out, but that night I stuck around, foolishly hoping Steve would leave without noticing me, and I could absolve myself.
When the rest of my teammates finished trickling out, and it felt like finally I had no choice, I made my move. “Hello Mr. Roberts,” I said, stepping up to the bar. I was using my empty bottle both as a reason to approach him, and as a protection from him.
“Rest of the team leave you, Carl?”
I didn’t know why I was surprised he knew I was lingering.
“Bunch of light weights. That’s what they are.”
“Katie,” Steve said to the woman behind the bar, who up close was still pretty, but mostly just young, a quality I found myself appreciating more with each passing year, “when you get a chance, give another one to Carl here. Put it on my tab.”
“Thanks Mr. Roberts,” I said, even though I had already nursed three beers, and wasn’t planning on a fourth. Most nights I stopped at two. It had taken me some time, but I’d learned my limits.
“Don’t call me Mr. Roberts. It sounds stupid now that you’re so old.”
“Jack’s home tonight,” the woman sitting next to Steve said. She was probably ten, maybe even fifteen years younger than Steve, and strikingly beautiful up close. “No use causing trouble if we don’t have to.”
She got up and left.
“Goodnight Michelle,” the bartender said. Steve didn’t say anything. He didn’t seem to notice she was leaving.
“Have a seat,” he said, as I was watching Michelle walk away.
Steve was the coolest adult I knew growing up, and I used to imagine what it would be like hanging out with him, sitting at a bar with him, drinking with him, so the reality of that scene finally unfolding was a pretty serious letdown.
After I’d finished the extra beer, and the only conversation between us was Steve’s slightest mention of the Phillies score from the muted television, I said without thinking it through, “Why don’t you let me drive you home?”
I didn’t doubt Steve made the not so dangerous walk across the highway seven nights a week, but on those other nights, I was home, peacefully asleep, free from any residual guilt.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m just staying across the street.”
I didn’t mention I knew this. I didn’t mention what a funny story it had been when his second wife kicked him out. I didn’t mention how pleased his stepdaughter seemed by her mother’s, as she put it, “Finally growing a pair.”
“No, I’m serious. I’d feel a whole lot better if you let me drive you home.”
“Well, if it’s going to help you sleep, then by all means Carl, take me home.”
“Leaving so soon?” the bartender asked as we were getting up to go. She was probably used to giving Steve a ride home herself at the end of the night, or at the very least, she was probably used to Steve sitting there drinking until she was ready to lock up.
“My ride’s leaving,” Steve said with a shrug. He put an excessive amount of money on the bar. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he walked back across the highway after I dropped him off. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he was simply appeasing me so I’d leave him alone.
“Not quite the old station wagon,” I said as we were getting into my van, “but it does the trick.”
Neither of us mentioned that Steve didn’t drive anymore, or how Eric had been killed by a drunk driver, or how those two things were indelibly intertwined.
“A minivan. Very nice. I should have expected nothing less.” I didn’t have time to figure out if this was a put down or not before he asked, “Do you think Eric would be a father by now?” It seemed an appropriate enough punishment for my forcing this ride upon him.
Even though Steve and I never would have been alone together if Eric hadn’t died, I had no interest in discussing his dead son. And I knew from experience, speculating about what Eric’s life would be like had it not ended, was a road best left untraveled.
“The van has a wireless hotspot so the kids can watch movies on the longer trips. You don’t even know they’re there. It’s pretty sweet. Let me tell you.”
“Must have been invented by a dad,” Steve said. “You guys drove me nuts screaming and rolling around in the back of the, what was it that you called it?”
“The family truckster.”
“Family truckster. That’s right. From that movie I wasn’t supposed to let you see. You guys were horrible back there. It took all I had to keep from yelling at you most nights.”
“Those rides were so much more fun than the games.”
“That’s because you sucked. If you weren’t Eric’s friend I never would have put you in. Maybe as a pinch runner or something; just to keep your mom from bitching at me. It didn’t take much to get her worked up. She’s probably still pissed I let you see that movie.”
“Yeah, I’m still pretty much playing to be included in the post game.”
“Sort of ironic, huh? I used to drive you home after baseball games, and here it is, what, twenty-five years later, and you’re driving me home after a softball game.”
By now we had gone down to the stop light, turned around, and found our way back up the road to the hotel. It had taken me two, maybe three times as long to make the drive as it would have taken Steve to simply walk through the parking lot and across the street. I knew my desire to drive him home was my way of doing the least amount possible to make myself feel better.
“I don’t know if you know this or not,” I said, “but I own a couple apartment buildings.” I was exaggerating more than lying. Making it seem as though my empire was somehow more than the two old buildings in need of more repair and attention than I could ever give them. “I have an open spot in one. It would be great having somebody in there I could trust.” More of a lie than an exaggeration.
“Thanks, but I’m set where I’m at.”
“You would really be helping me with some of the smaller things around the place. You know. The lawn. The snow. Something as simple as making sure the recycling bin is put back in the yard would probably keep the man across the street from calling me each week to tell me it hasn’t been done yet.”
“I don’t know Carl.”
“I could give it to you at the same price as the hotel. Less probably.”
“That’s not really the issue. I like where I’m at. Everything’s where I need it to be. And I don’t have to deal with a lot of extra shit.”
I didn’t respond. The impulse to help Steve was good, but now that I’d indulged it, and thankfully, he declined, I could walk away with impunity. I could tell people, “I offered him a place to live. What else could I do?” And like donating ten dollars online to the Red Cross after an earthquake kills thousands of people in a country I couldn’t find on a map, I felt like I’d done my part.
What the hell was I thinking?
I was careful with the people I let into my buildings. I’d rather let an apartment sit empty for a few months than take a chance. An unemployed womanizing alcoholic in his late sixties wasn’t somebody I would have given a second thought to if I hadn’t known him my whole life. If he hadn’t coached my little league team that one year we actually won. If Eric hadn’t died.
“It’s better than you’d think,” Steve said. “I only pay the one bill, and I got this pretty Puerto Rican woman with one of those big round asses coming in a couple times a week to clean up and give me fresh towels. She’s trying to teach me Spanish.”
“Just think about it.”
“Thanks for the ride.”
We shook hands.
“Anytime,” I said, trying to hold back my smile. “Anytime.”
Life rolled along like life rolls along, and I pretty much forgot about running into Steve at the bar and driving him home until he was knocking on my door one Saturday morning a few months later.
“I found this when I was packing up at the hotel,” he said, instead of hello, when I opened the door.
He was holding a signed hardcover edition of the Raymond Carver book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. It was the gift I’d given Eric for being best man at my wedding. It took me months to track it down. But it was worth it. Eric loved that book. He told me it changed his life. That’s not something you’d expect a real person to say, as much as it’s something you’d hear from a character in a television movie, but Eric said it just the same. I fought my way through the book. Most of it anyway. I liked the story about the drunk guy with his furniture in the yard. Maybe because it reminded me of Steve, but more than likely because it was at the beginning.
I passed through my surprise and invited Steve into the house. I wouldn’t have guessed he knew where I lived.
I silently tried, and quietly failed, to steer him away from the living room. There were two pictures of Eric and me prominently displayed on a bookshelf I didn’t want him to see. One taken at my wedding. The other was actually taken by Steve, after a baseball game; Eric and I leaning against the family truckster, slushies in hand.
“Can I get you something to drink?” I asked.
“No. I’m good.”
Standing there, book in hand, for the first time I could remember, Steve looked out of place. Even in the hospital when they were talking about pulling the plug and the possibility of organ donation, Steve looked like he was in control. In spite of the world around him crumbling into hundreds of tiny pieces, Steve remained whole. Defiant. I took some comfort in that. It allowed me to go home when it was finally over.
“So what’s going on?” I asked. I wanted to get this thing moving along. I knew whatever was happening didn’t have anything to do with the book in his hand. And honestly, I wanted Steve out of the house before my kids got home. I didn’t want them meeting him now that they were old enough to remember him. I didn’t want to spend my morning explaining who he was, and how we were connected to him. And I didn’t need the memory of those nights spent sleeping in the hospital waiting room circling around my mind.
“I found this book, like I said, when I was cleaning up at the hotel. I don’t remember how I came to have it. But I was thinking it would be best if I gave it back to you before I lost it. Or worse. I’m surprised it survived as long as it has.”
I knew Steve was lying. I knew he had gone to his first ex-wife’s house and dug around the Eric shrine she maintained in her living room until he found it. Maybe he was brave and asked her for help, but more than likely he waited until she was at work, and snuck in. He’d lived there twenty years, no doubt sneaking in and out more nights than he could remember, so it would have been an easy enough thing for him to do during the day.
“You’re packing up the hotel room? That’s probably not a bad thing, huh? It should be good for you getting out there into a more normal life.”
“Maybe if the decision was mine I could call it a good thing. But I’ve been told to leave.”
I wasn’t sure I should ask, but I wanted to know, and besides, he showed up at my house unannounced and uninvited, he owed me that much, “What happened?”
“It wasn’t a big deal. My friend Michelle, her husband Jack came over. There was a lot of screaming, but nothing was broken. Nobody got hurt. Christ, Jack’s not even capable of hurting me. But the manager’s been pissed at me since the cleaning lady quit, so he’s making a federal case out of the whole thing. Which is really a joke, let me tell you, with some of the shit that goes on over there.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I know you’re busy, so I’ll let you get back to it. It seemed wrong giving it to the library book sale. And I think Eric would have wanted it to find its way back to you. Anyway, that’s why I’m here.”
“Thanks,” I said, taking the book from his hand. We both knew, although neither of us was going to acknowledge it, that Steve had run out of options.
“I’m heading to my place on James Street to rake the leaves,” I said. “You should ride along.”
In the beginning, it worked out pretty well for the both of us. Steve did those little things I struggled to find time for. He took in the trash cans, he shoveled the snow, and when summer rolled around, he found the old push mower in the basement and took care of the small section of grass in the backyard. Sure, he missed a rent check or two, but the apartment was a barely livable room, and it had been empty for over a year. So even if there was only one check every three months, it was still an improvement. And it was an improvement I was getting without having to replace the ancient stove, without painting the dirty walls, and without dealing with that embarrassing shower.
In the middle, things changed.
I only noticed Steve’s growing obsession with Angela because an obsession with Angela became the second thing we shared.
Angela was my perfect tenant. She was twenty six and finishing up grad school. She had a full time job, so she was always busy, meaning there were never any wild parties for people to complain about. She was clean and organized and always paid her rent three days before it was due. She had one on again off again boyfriend, this smart ass kid called Jim who I didn’t particularly care for, but his presence meant there wasn’t a string of men running in and out of the place.
But mostly, she was perfect because she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in real life. I didn’t even mind when she texted, asking me to drive across town and change the burned out light on the porch.
She was somebody I never would have been able to talk to if I wasn’t her landlord. She was somebody Steve never would have any trouble lining up. Even when he was living in the hotel, drinking pretty much all day, he never seemed to have any trouble finding women to help him pass the time.
Angela’s lack of interest only seemed to fuel Steve’s obsession. For me, it was enough to see her, to interact with her, but Steve never wanted a woman he couldn’t have in one form or another. It wasn’t something we were fully aware of when we were kids. We were just kids. We knew Steve was more like a character from a movie than he was the normal suburban father and husband, but we wouldn’t have been able to understand what it meant when Steve was sneaking off with other neighborhood wives. We couldn’t imagine Steve having girlfriends in the city. We knew nothing about his ladies from the office.
Eric and I talked about it some when we were in college and both sets of our parents had divorced. Pondered whether Steve had slept with my mom. A conversation which thankfully never got too far. Much like the conversations I tried to have a few years later about how Eric was following in Steve’s footsteps. Eric always insisting it was different because he wasn’t married. Because he didn’t have kids.
In the end, things took a turn for the bizarre.
When Angela got back from the gym that afternoon, her door wasn’t shut. Leaving it unlocked was one thing, it was in the hallway on the second floor, so it wasn’t a big deal if she forgot to lock it, but she’d never go out and not actually close the door.
The way her apartment was set up, Angela could see his sleeping legs draped across her bed from the doorway. Enough was enough, she thought. Jim needed to be taught a lesson. She had too much going on to deal with this bullshit, so instead of waking him and yelling at him herself, she walked outside and called the police.
But it wasn’t the off again boyfriend sleeping in her bed.
Steve was more drunk than normal that afternoon, and when he was trying to masturbate, he fell asleep.
Angela couldn’t tell from her angle by the door that Steve’s pants were undone, that a pair of her underwear was in his hands.
One of the police officers who came to the house had been on the scene of Eric’s car accident, and he remembered Steve, because really, how are you supposed to forget something like that? They gave Steve a hard time, but they were careful not to tell Angela what he'd been up to. They didn’t tell her this was something Steve had been doing at least once a week for the better part of the last two months. They told her he was drunk, and sleeping it off. That he must have stumbled into the wrong door, and not realizing it, fell asleep. It made sense. Their doors were next to each other. Me, they told the truth. And with that truth came an ultimatum to deal with the problem before they had to.
Angela was relieved it wasn’t Jim. “Had I known it was Steve,” she told me after Steve had disappeared, “I never would have called the cops. I would have let him sleep it off. He was always helping me move things. Always had a funny story even though he’s the saddest person I’ve ever met. He even finished my laundry when I left it by the machine.”
Before I decided what I was going to do, Steve was gone. There was no call, no note, no way to know for sure when he actually disappeared. I left his few belongings in the apartment because I didn’t have the time or the energy or the money to fix up the place for a real tenant. And I left his few belongings alone because I always expected to see him back in his room someday. I would have put money on it. Especially after Angela finished school, got engaged to Jim, and moved away.
And it seemed right somehow that Steve had become like a character from the book Eric loved so much. And when I tell my Steve story, if I’m at home, especially if we’re sitting in the living room, I take the book out from behind the picture of Eric and I standing against the family truckster, and I pass it around. Hoping that paging through a collection of stories none of them have ever read, might make those listening to me better understand what happened.
Paul Ewing
After his second wife, the one he said was so much better than the first, finally got the shits of him and kicked him out, Steve moved into that weekly rate motel out past the mall and started drinking seriously. As Steve stories went, it was pretty standard.
I still ran into Steve’s stepdaughter every couple of months at the grocery store, or in the pediatrician's waiting room, or picking up the kids from school, because those were the places I was frequenting back then, and she was usually more than happy to share Steve’s latest embarrassment with me. So I had a pretty good pipeline into the train wreck he had become, but I hadn’t seen him myself, at least not to speak to him, in six or seven years.
It wasn’t anything personal. I had a wife, a couple kids, a dog, a hamster, a gecko, mortgages on my home and the two small apartment buildings I owned and tried my best to maintain, and I played in a not so serious softball league during the summer. There was a lot going on without seeing the father of my childhood best friend. I didn’t see Eric much anymore either, but Eric was dead, so even when I tried, I couldn’t blame that on the lizard needing more crickets.
Eric and I were still friends at the time of his accident, but we were spinning in different circles. It was a function of our lives moving us apart, nothing serious. I was married, starting a family, a career, a retirement fund. Eric was bartending five or six nights a week, dating a new waitress every couple of months, trying to write a novel during his days. His death was more devastating than I thought possible, more devastating than I remember even, but still, we weren’t as close as we had been just a few years before. After Eric’s funeral, I removed myself from the drama that was the Roberts extended family, so I was a little surprised when the last known Steve story became mine to tell.
Like most of the Steve stories set after Eric's death, the one I tell begins in a bar.
My post-softball game round of beer and wings—the main reason I still played—landed me in the old sports bar in the mall parking lot. I didn’t think about Steve, or how his living in the hotel across the road would have made this his bar of choice until I saw him sitting there holding court. There was a good looking young bartender standing in front of him, and a beautiful older woman sitting next to him; the both of them hanging on his every word.
Steve didn’t seem to notice me when we walked in. And why should he? He was in his element. There was vodka. Even as a kid I knew he preferred vodka. There were women. As a young man striking out more times than not, I envied his ability to seemingly always close the deal. And there was the sound of his own voice. As an almost middle aged father, I imagined his ability to bullshit was the only comfort he had left. But I knew for certain there was no reason for him to pay attention to my group of mostly overweight dudes in silly matching softball team t-shirts, drinking beer, eating wings, acting like we were the people we actually wanted to be.
I was surprised at how well Steve was holding up. And not just because I hadn’t seen him in so long. I was surprised because of his drinking. Surprised because of his living in the hotel. Surprised because of his dead son.
Steve didn’t have that movie star glow about him anymore, but that was more the lack of idol worship on my part than it was the ravages of time, because Steve was somehow still a very good looking man. Although it couldn’t possibly be true, Steve was seemingly still a man very much in control. He was simply an older, perhaps a step slightly slower version of the Alpha Dad who once ruled our group of childhood dads. The dad we all wanted to pitch to us. The dad who always bought the post-game slushies. The dad we all secretly wished was our own.
Eric and I could go weeks without talking, months without seeing each other near the end, but I considered him my oldest, if not my best friend. And it was still a surprise, even a decade after his death, every time Eric didn’t show up late for one of my kid’s birthday parties. Every time Eric didn’t text me Phillies’ scores and stats. Every time Eric didn’t have a review of the new bar I drove past but was never going to step foot in. It was because of these lingering feelings, because sometimes the past isn’t necessarily in the past, and because I couldn’t accept Steve was happy not having a job, living in a hotel, drinking most of the time, that I felt this strange sense of obligation. Not to Steve so much, but to Eric. I felt I should be helping out his old man just because I could. I felt I should be helping out his old man just because his old man and I were in the same place at the same time. I felt I should be helping out his old man just because his old man and I were both still alive.
I hesitated before helping him. Not only was that my nature, but honestly, how much help was I actually going to be? It was late, and I needed to work in the morning. For his part, Steve had a woman, maybe even two, lined up at the bar waiting for him to get primed up enough to go. He didn’t need me pestering him. And the only thing we had between us really, was this shared history of lingering death. A collective past which had yet to help either of us.
So I did nothing.
Normally, I was one of the first to head out, but that night I stuck around, foolishly hoping Steve would leave without noticing me, and I could absolve myself.
When the rest of my teammates finished trickling out, and it felt like finally I had no choice, I made my move. “Hello Mr. Roberts,” I said, stepping up to the bar. I was using my empty bottle both as a reason to approach him, and as a protection from him.
“Rest of the team leave you, Carl?”
I didn’t know why I was surprised he knew I was lingering.
“Bunch of light weights. That’s what they are.”
“Katie,” Steve said to the woman behind the bar, who up close was still pretty, but mostly just young, a quality I found myself appreciating more with each passing year, “when you get a chance, give another one to Carl here. Put it on my tab.”
“Thanks Mr. Roberts,” I said, even though I had already nursed three beers, and wasn’t planning on a fourth. Most nights I stopped at two. It had taken me some time, but I’d learned my limits.
“Don’t call me Mr. Roberts. It sounds stupid now that you’re so old.”
“Jack’s home tonight,” the woman sitting next to Steve said. She was probably ten, maybe even fifteen years younger than Steve, and strikingly beautiful up close. “No use causing trouble if we don’t have to.”
She got up and left.
“Goodnight Michelle,” the bartender said. Steve didn’t say anything. He didn’t seem to notice she was leaving.
“Have a seat,” he said, as I was watching Michelle walk away.
Steve was the coolest adult I knew growing up, and I used to imagine what it would be like hanging out with him, sitting at a bar with him, drinking with him, so the reality of that scene finally unfolding was a pretty serious letdown.
After I’d finished the extra beer, and the only conversation between us was Steve’s slightest mention of the Phillies score from the muted television, I said without thinking it through, “Why don’t you let me drive you home?”
I didn’t doubt Steve made the not so dangerous walk across the highway seven nights a week, but on those other nights, I was home, peacefully asleep, free from any residual guilt.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m just staying across the street.”
I didn’t mention I knew this. I didn’t mention what a funny story it had been when his second wife kicked him out. I didn’t mention how pleased his stepdaughter seemed by her mother’s, as she put it, “Finally growing a pair.”
“No, I’m serious. I’d feel a whole lot better if you let me drive you home.”
“Well, if it’s going to help you sleep, then by all means Carl, take me home.”
“Leaving so soon?” the bartender asked as we were getting up to go. She was probably used to giving Steve a ride home herself at the end of the night, or at the very least, she was probably used to Steve sitting there drinking until she was ready to lock up.
“My ride’s leaving,” Steve said with a shrug. He put an excessive amount of money on the bar. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he walked back across the highway after I dropped him off. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he was simply appeasing me so I’d leave him alone.
“Not quite the old station wagon,” I said as we were getting into my van, “but it does the trick.”
Neither of us mentioned that Steve didn’t drive anymore, or how Eric had been killed by a drunk driver, or how those two things were indelibly intertwined.
“A minivan. Very nice. I should have expected nothing less.” I didn’t have time to figure out if this was a put down or not before he asked, “Do you think Eric would be a father by now?” It seemed an appropriate enough punishment for my forcing this ride upon him.
Even though Steve and I never would have been alone together if Eric hadn’t died, I had no interest in discussing his dead son. And I knew from experience, speculating about what Eric’s life would be like had it not ended, was a road best left untraveled.
“The van has a wireless hotspot so the kids can watch movies on the longer trips. You don’t even know they’re there. It’s pretty sweet. Let me tell you.”
“Must have been invented by a dad,” Steve said. “You guys drove me nuts screaming and rolling around in the back of the, what was it that you called it?”
“The family truckster.”
“Family truckster. That’s right. From that movie I wasn’t supposed to let you see. You guys were horrible back there. It took all I had to keep from yelling at you most nights.”
“Those rides were so much more fun than the games.”
“That’s because you sucked. If you weren’t Eric’s friend I never would have put you in. Maybe as a pinch runner or something; just to keep your mom from bitching at me. It didn’t take much to get her worked up. She’s probably still pissed I let you see that movie.”
“Yeah, I’m still pretty much playing to be included in the post game.”
“Sort of ironic, huh? I used to drive you home after baseball games, and here it is, what, twenty-five years later, and you’re driving me home after a softball game.”
By now we had gone down to the stop light, turned around, and found our way back up the road to the hotel. It had taken me two, maybe three times as long to make the drive as it would have taken Steve to simply walk through the parking lot and across the street. I knew my desire to drive him home was my way of doing the least amount possible to make myself feel better.
“I don’t know if you know this or not,” I said, “but I own a couple apartment buildings.” I was exaggerating more than lying. Making it seem as though my empire was somehow more than the two old buildings in need of more repair and attention than I could ever give them. “I have an open spot in one. It would be great having somebody in there I could trust.” More of a lie than an exaggeration.
“Thanks, but I’m set where I’m at.”
“You would really be helping me with some of the smaller things around the place. You know. The lawn. The snow. Something as simple as making sure the recycling bin is put back in the yard would probably keep the man across the street from calling me each week to tell me it hasn’t been done yet.”
“I don’t know Carl.”
“I could give it to you at the same price as the hotel. Less probably.”
“That’s not really the issue. I like where I’m at. Everything’s where I need it to be. And I don’t have to deal with a lot of extra shit.”
I didn’t respond. The impulse to help Steve was good, but now that I’d indulged it, and thankfully, he declined, I could walk away with impunity. I could tell people, “I offered him a place to live. What else could I do?” And like donating ten dollars online to the Red Cross after an earthquake kills thousands of people in a country I couldn’t find on a map, I felt like I’d done my part.
What the hell was I thinking?
I was careful with the people I let into my buildings. I’d rather let an apartment sit empty for a few months than take a chance. An unemployed womanizing alcoholic in his late sixties wasn’t somebody I would have given a second thought to if I hadn’t known him my whole life. If he hadn’t coached my little league team that one year we actually won. If Eric hadn’t died.
“It’s better than you’d think,” Steve said. “I only pay the one bill, and I got this pretty Puerto Rican woman with one of those big round asses coming in a couple times a week to clean up and give me fresh towels. She’s trying to teach me Spanish.”
“Just think about it.”
“Thanks for the ride.”
We shook hands.
“Anytime,” I said, trying to hold back my smile. “Anytime.”
Life rolled along like life rolls along, and I pretty much forgot about running into Steve at the bar and driving him home until he was knocking on my door one Saturday morning a few months later.
“I found this when I was packing up at the hotel,” he said, instead of hello, when I opened the door.
He was holding a signed hardcover edition of the Raymond Carver book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. It was the gift I’d given Eric for being best man at my wedding. It took me months to track it down. But it was worth it. Eric loved that book. He told me it changed his life. That’s not something you’d expect a real person to say, as much as it’s something you’d hear from a character in a television movie, but Eric said it just the same. I fought my way through the book. Most of it anyway. I liked the story about the drunk guy with his furniture in the yard. Maybe because it reminded me of Steve, but more than likely because it was at the beginning.
I passed through my surprise and invited Steve into the house. I wouldn’t have guessed he knew where I lived.
I silently tried, and quietly failed, to steer him away from the living room. There were two pictures of Eric and me prominently displayed on a bookshelf I didn’t want him to see. One taken at my wedding. The other was actually taken by Steve, after a baseball game; Eric and I leaning against the family truckster, slushies in hand.
“Can I get you something to drink?” I asked.
“No. I’m good.”
Standing there, book in hand, for the first time I could remember, Steve looked out of place. Even in the hospital when they were talking about pulling the plug and the possibility of organ donation, Steve looked like he was in control. In spite of the world around him crumbling into hundreds of tiny pieces, Steve remained whole. Defiant. I took some comfort in that. It allowed me to go home when it was finally over.
“So what’s going on?” I asked. I wanted to get this thing moving along. I knew whatever was happening didn’t have anything to do with the book in his hand. And honestly, I wanted Steve out of the house before my kids got home. I didn’t want them meeting him now that they were old enough to remember him. I didn’t want to spend my morning explaining who he was, and how we were connected to him. And I didn’t need the memory of those nights spent sleeping in the hospital waiting room circling around my mind.
“I found this book, like I said, when I was cleaning up at the hotel. I don’t remember how I came to have it. But I was thinking it would be best if I gave it back to you before I lost it. Or worse. I’m surprised it survived as long as it has.”
I knew Steve was lying. I knew he had gone to his first ex-wife’s house and dug around the Eric shrine she maintained in her living room until he found it. Maybe he was brave and asked her for help, but more than likely he waited until she was at work, and snuck in. He’d lived there twenty years, no doubt sneaking in and out more nights than he could remember, so it would have been an easy enough thing for him to do during the day.
“You’re packing up the hotel room? That’s probably not a bad thing, huh? It should be good for you getting out there into a more normal life.”
“Maybe if the decision was mine I could call it a good thing. But I’ve been told to leave.”
I wasn’t sure I should ask, but I wanted to know, and besides, he showed up at my house unannounced and uninvited, he owed me that much, “What happened?”
“It wasn’t a big deal. My friend Michelle, her husband Jack came over. There was a lot of screaming, but nothing was broken. Nobody got hurt. Christ, Jack’s not even capable of hurting me. But the manager’s been pissed at me since the cleaning lady quit, so he’s making a federal case out of the whole thing. Which is really a joke, let me tell you, with some of the shit that goes on over there.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I know you’re busy, so I’ll let you get back to it. It seemed wrong giving it to the library book sale. And I think Eric would have wanted it to find its way back to you. Anyway, that’s why I’m here.”
“Thanks,” I said, taking the book from his hand. We both knew, although neither of us was going to acknowledge it, that Steve had run out of options.
“I’m heading to my place on James Street to rake the leaves,” I said. “You should ride along.”
In the beginning, it worked out pretty well for the both of us. Steve did those little things I struggled to find time for. He took in the trash cans, he shoveled the snow, and when summer rolled around, he found the old push mower in the basement and took care of the small section of grass in the backyard. Sure, he missed a rent check or two, but the apartment was a barely livable room, and it had been empty for over a year. So even if there was only one check every three months, it was still an improvement. And it was an improvement I was getting without having to replace the ancient stove, without painting the dirty walls, and without dealing with that embarrassing shower.
In the middle, things changed.
I only noticed Steve’s growing obsession with Angela because an obsession with Angela became the second thing we shared.
Angela was my perfect tenant. She was twenty six and finishing up grad school. She had a full time job, so she was always busy, meaning there were never any wild parties for people to complain about. She was clean and organized and always paid her rent three days before it was due. She had one on again off again boyfriend, this smart ass kid called Jim who I didn’t particularly care for, but his presence meant there wasn’t a string of men running in and out of the place.
But mostly, she was perfect because she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in real life. I didn’t even mind when she texted, asking me to drive across town and change the burned out light on the porch.
She was somebody I never would have been able to talk to if I wasn’t her landlord. She was somebody Steve never would have any trouble lining up. Even when he was living in the hotel, drinking pretty much all day, he never seemed to have any trouble finding women to help him pass the time.
Angela’s lack of interest only seemed to fuel Steve’s obsession. For me, it was enough to see her, to interact with her, but Steve never wanted a woman he couldn’t have in one form or another. It wasn’t something we were fully aware of when we were kids. We were just kids. We knew Steve was more like a character from a movie than he was the normal suburban father and husband, but we wouldn’t have been able to understand what it meant when Steve was sneaking off with other neighborhood wives. We couldn’t imagine Steve having girlfriends in the city. We knew nothing about his ladies from the office.
Eric and I talked about it some when we were in college and both sets of our parents had divorced. Pondered whether Steve had slept with my mom. A conversation which thankfully never got too far. Much like the conversations I tried to have a few years later about how Eric was following in Steve’s footsteps. Eric always insisting it was different because he wasn’t married. Because he didn’t have kids.
In the end, things took a turn for the bizarre.
When Angela got back from the gym that afternoon, her door wasn’t shut. Leaving it unlocked was one thing, it was in the hallway on the second floor, so it wasn’t a big deal if she forgot to lock it, but she’d never go out and not actually close the door.
The way her apartment was set up, Angela could see his sleeping legs draped across her bed from the doorway. Enough was enough, she thought. Jim needed to be taught a lesson. She had too much going on to deal with this bullshit, so instead of waking him and yelling at him herself, she walked outside and called the police.
But it wasn’t the off again boyfriend sleeping in her bed.
Steve was more drunk than normal that afternoon, and when he was trying to masturbate, he fell asleep.
Angela couldn’t tell from her angle by the door that Steve’s pants were undone, that a pair of her underwear was in his hands.
One of the police officers who came to the house had been on the scene of Eric’s car accident, and he remembered Steve, because really, how are you supposed to forget something like that? They gave Steve a hard time, but they were careful not to tell Angela what he'd been up to. They didn’t tell her this was something Steve had been doing at least once a week for the better part of the last two months. They told her he was drunk, and sleeping it off. That he must have stumbled into the wrong door, and not realizing it, fell asleep. It made sense. Their doors were next to each other. Me, they told the truth. And with that truth came an ultimatum to deal with the problem before they had to.
Angela was relieved it wasn’t Jim. “Had I known it was Steve,” she told me after Steve had disappeared, “I never would have called the cops. I would have let him sleep it off. He was always helping me move things. Always had a funny story even though he’s the saddest person I’ve ever met. He even finished my laundry when I left it by the machine.”
Before I decided what I was going to do, Steve was gone. There was no call, no note, no way to know for sure when he actually disappeared. I left his few belongings in the apartment because I didn’t have the time or the energy or the money to fix up the place for a real tenant. And I left his few belongings alone because I always expected to see him back in his room someday. I would have put money on it. Especially after Angela finished school, got engaged to Jim, and moved away.
And it seemed right somehow that Steve had become like a character from the book Eric loved so much. And when I tell my Steve story, if I’m at home, especially if we’re sitting in the living room, I take the book out from behind the picture of Eric and I standing against the family truckster, and I pass it around. Hoping that paging through a collection of stories none of them have ever read, might make those listening to me better understand what happened.