Strays

I was at a bar once and this guy told me the first job he ever had was at age fifteen, when his uncle hired him to help blow up a beaver dam. They stuffed the dam with a bunch of dynamite. His uncle told him to light the fuse, so he did. Then he asked his uncle what he was supposed to do now. His uncle said, “Run like hell, boy!”

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I have this memory, during the pandemic, of walking down my street in a weird kind of haze, and seeing my friend Kieran walking down the same street, in the opposite direction. I hadn’t seen Kieran since I left the South, and I didn’t have a clue what he was doing here. We stopped and hugged and talked. Turns out he just moved here. We played music together and made a record and it was really fun. Then he moved to Maine, though I still see him all the time.

What are the odds? Just on the sidewalk like that. One of the best things that ever happened to me.

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My neighbor Andrew got in trouble last Halloween for the decorations he hung up at the liquor store he’s worked at forever. They were not offensive decorations. They were just scary as hell. Disturbing. Every time I think about Andrew’s face—five ciders in, grinning like a fiend—telling me about it, I can’t stop laughing.

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I saw the Kurosawa movie Ran at IFC the other day. I love Ran. It’s pretty much a perfect movie. But there was an older couple behind me and they wouldn’t shut up. Just gabbing away. I’m kind of an asshole in movies sometimes. It’s a personal problem, and I’m working on it. Meditation has helped. They were a husband and wife (that was obvious), and whenever anything interesting happened, they would grunt, one after the other. No words, just different tones of grunts, repeated back at each other, a secret language. I was annoyed at first, then fascinated.

In the second half of the movie, they began farting. Back and forth. Similar cadence.

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The other day I got breakfast with Bud and there was an old woman in the booth behind us complaining about her son-in-law (I think?). She said, “He’s always opening cans and taking a sip. Leaving them there, only one sip gone. On the counter, on the coffee table. You got to throw away the whole can. He’s a soda waster. I can’t take it anymore.”

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Once I was at a bar and the gentleman next to me starting talking very animatedly to the bartender about the Mekons. He slammed his fist on the bar and said, “Jon Langford is a titan. A titan!” I hopped in the conversation, agreeing very much that Jon Langford was indeed a titan. Now that guy’s one of my best friends. His name is Matt.

It happens like that sometimes.

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Another time I was at a bar and this guy started crying. Weeping, tears everywhere, face down on the bar. I asked him what the problem was, and he looked at me, pulled his shirt up, and showed me the pistol he had tucked in his pants. Then he went back to crying.

I finished my drink and got up to leave. He looked up at me and asked if I would take a shot with him. I said sure. He ordered Jager, which I didn’t love, but whatever. We clinked glasses and downed the shots. He said it was on him. Then he went back to crying. I saw him two weeks later at the park, talking to a friend. He was laughing. We didn’t speak.

It happens like that sometimes too.

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I remember when I worked at the soup kitchen this one guy would always tell me how he stopped a robbery once. He said he threw himself in front of the gunman and got shot twice in the chest. Sometimes he said he got stabbed in the stomach. Other times it was just a really big fistfight. The cops were called. Everybody told him he was a hero. Whenever I asked him his name, he always told me he had the same name I did. But I never once told him my name. He gave me a baseball cap with deep white sweat rings on it. I still have it somewhere.

I am positive we have the same name.