Old man Stan
had a face that looked coarse. He was
for the most part, always clean shaven and his deep rooted eyes, sunken into
those old worn-out eye sockets, I’m sure never saw the bottom of his gaunt
chin. His eyes were red more often than they were white, rimmed with sweat from
booze, and the large holes that were in his nostrils were red as raw hamburger.
Stan’s two room apartment on Albemarle Street, where he lived his last ten
years before he died, in the late evenings you could hear him cursing and
yelling and fighting with his demons, as if they were dragging him, or he was
dragging them about, and the window often—more often than not, wide-open in the
middle of winter.
He was a tall man and never wanted to be
bothered much—he per near lived at the
bar, some one-hundred feet away from his apartment, they called him Big Bird (he was all of six-foot six; thin as a
string bean). He read
the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book, so he told me, once upon a time; he had it
on his built in the wall bookshelf—I seen it there, but at the end, it didn’t
do him much good. But evidently, he had found sobriety at one time and it
lasted a good year or so, so I heard from the grapevine.
When drunk, you could hear him all the
way down the halls and through the walls, and into the residing apartment next
to his (which was my
apartment at the time), —in
particularly, when he had those heated fits with his demons.
Few people in those days saw him smile,
he was seventy-two years old when he up and died of cancer. Made his last rent payment while in the
hospital; the new folks that now rent the apartment next to Stan’s, sometimes,
they say, you can hear old Stan still bellowing, and he’s got the T.V. on loud
trying to drawn the sound of his yelling out.
I used to go over to Stan’s apartment
when I lived across the hall from him, and tell him to turn the television
down, this was in the wee hours of the night, or morning, and when he’d open
his door, I’d just look at what a mess he was making of trying to live with his
demons in his apartment. He didn’t offer much conversation, he’d just stand and
look at me in his hopeless topsy-turvy, doughty look, standing there trying to
think of what I just said, and what to say, and he’d mumble something like:
“Yaw, the television, I better turn the
television down, that’s right, I’ll turn it down—sorry about that, okay!”
Then he’d turnabout, and per near, slam
the door in my face.
So after a few years he got cancer, his
daughter came over now and then and cleaned the apartment now and then and
washed his cloths, then he ended up in the hospital—; the awful part about it
was, he paid his rent those last two months from his hospital bed, never to return
to his apartment, but that was all he had in life: that apartment, and that Big
Book on the shelf, collecting dust, and that was all he had but the booze, and
that he had no longer; and he looked the first day I saw him, just the same as
the last day I saw him.
What can one say to such a story? When
you’re young you don’t know what path you’ll lead? For him, at the end, it was trackless. No
faultfinding, no hurting—for he is long dead now, this refuge of alcoholism he
sought, is not a release from all misery, rather it is the transcending of
misery arising from misery. To Old Stan,
I suppose it was indeed a refuge secure, the only one, and best one he could
find, knew of, as a person with little and at times no affability. In a like manner, to be just, it is hard to
come by a person of nobility, not everywhere is he born.
Note: written December 25, 2010/ No: 643
Reedited and Revised, 7-20015
