I have heard people say that everyone has a story to tell. I may be the exception to that rule. I have nothing to say about my life or the lives of the people living around me in these townhouses. All of them look the same, the people more so than the houses. Quaint and beige. In their 60s and 70s. I am 63 years old. I get the paper about 5:30 or whenever the paper boy throws it in the drive, which lately has been past 6 during the week and on weekends, close to 6:30. When I’m done reading or sometimes if I’m not – if it’s a really engrossing paper but it’s getting close for to time for the kids to make it down to the bus stop – I”ll fold it over the arm of the chair and water my plants in the pot on the front stoop. The neighborhood kids have caused me too many interruptions. I like to wear my sandals with socks, which draws hysterics from the boys who walk by under the chestnuts to the stop sign and can’t find something more interesting along the way. They point and me say things they don’t think I can hear behind my back.

“Damn gramps, I can’t tell what is whiter: your legs or those socks.”

They say shit like that and then continue up the shady walk crunching under their feet and shooting chestnut guts all over the lawns. But I always go back to my paper and finish it before I move on to anything else. In the fall, it usually takes me more time. I like to read about football, college or pro, doesn’t matter. I am a football junkie and I like to read about the strategy – the chess aspect. Anything who knows about football knows that the offemsive and defensive coordinators are the ones who desrve all the credit. They determine the outcome, not the head coach or the players.

When the papers read, I have my breakfast – the same everyday: half a grapefruit, Cheerios, and a glass of orange juice. I eat it alone in the sunlight coming in from the sunporch to the kitchen and catching in my Sunflower drinking glasses. I usually start a small pot of coffee while I’m eating. My wife passed about four years ago. The first morning after her funeral – a Tuesday – I went through my regular routine and set a coffee cup out for her on the table out. I’ve been doing it ever since. The routine has me following it after 14 years in this house and 37 as a married couple. We got married young when she was a sophomore in high school and we had three kids, time flying, and we found ourselves as these old people, slaves to weak bodies and spotted skin. Our kids are spread out around the country like Apricot jam, a daughter in Oregon, our second in Dallas and our son in Buffalo. They all have familes and demanding jobs that keep them there. My son is about to leave his wife. He’s threatened it, but he hasn’t taken the reverse plunge yet. I like his wife, but I’ve forgotten her name a time or two, and it’s made it back to me that that’s enraged her. I can’t say that I care. I can’t say that it matters, either. But small things get blown out of proportion when you don’t have much to focus on.

I’ve done a decent job of protecting myself from needless fearless. Still, everyday just after breakfast and again after lunch, I take to watching throught he curtains in the living room at the townhouses across the street. The houses face perpindicular to mine. A boy hung himself in the side yard of one of the houses there a year ago. It happened in the night. I missed all the action except for a squad car that was late leaving that morning, about 5 am. I happened to read the story in the newspaper. His friends found him. He used shoe strings to hang himself in a closet. I think reading that story drew me to the windows, another step in my routine, but there was also something sinister about those houses.

I passed an old lady on my walk the other day. She had a young smile, but her skin was wrinkled and her posture was arched from what might have been her 106th year on Earth. She was sitting out in her garage in a whore-pink bathrobe on a bench along the wall, either gathering some fresh air or taking in the pedestrians, of which I was the only one. My guess is that she went out for the paper and stopped for a breather. We exchanged glances and I felt like I might have when I was a little boy and my mother had taken me to the grocery store and the stock boys and a few customers ran their hands through my red hair or smiled and waved hello. They were so much older. I was just a baby and I felt like one with her eyes on me.

I looked out at her house this morning and saw and ambulance in her driveway. She was sitting down to a stretcher and as they lifted her up to carry her away, I saw her look my way.

Mark laid the card on top of his closed menu. This was the best gift he’d gotten for his birthday. He wasn’t a card person, but he liked it because they personalized it for him. He would have laughed if he read the card, which said: “(cover) I don’t have any regrets in life … (on the inside) except not buying condom stock.” He was happy with the drawings, though, and they’d taken the time to decorate it with words and pictures they knew he’d like.

“I’m glad this occasion could bring out such bad taste in you guys,” he said. The guys were actually four girls –two he’d hired as interns when he started his own public relations company three years ago. The other two were summer interns he’d let stay on until another summer.

“Well, aren’t you going to read it?” Samantha joked.

“Ugh, my mother used to make me read my birthday cards aloud. I hated it. You either had to fake laugh or act touched,” Andrea said.

“I didn’t get to read it. What’s it say?” Jessica asked.

Jessica took the card and Angie leaned over. “I hadn’t seen it either,” she said.

All four girls had excused themselves to the ladies room before they gave him the card. They decorated it and signed it on the sink, then surprised him with it together.

The waitress came and took the menus away one at a time as they ordered.

The girls loved him. They all were younger than him by at least 15 years and were into guys their age. On the way to the bar, they drove, and all the music on the way to the Mexican place was music they thought he’d like. They knew he liked classic rock, so they’d brought along some Whitesnake to listen on the car stereo. They were so young, they had no concept of classic rock.

“I want to hear Mark read it,” Samantha said.

Samantha was the leader of the four. She was the only one of them with dark hair and Mark had wondered why it was that dark-haired women always took the lead.

Mark glanced up at them as he read. Since it was his birthday, he allowed himself to dream a little. In his dream, he was drinking Guinness in a real pub in Ireland. The bar was closed and the barmaids were using a hose to wash the floors down. The bar floors were slanted so that all the spilled beer could be flushed out in one big river each night. He felt the foamy water thick with beer dampen his shoes and seep in through the shoe laces. The barmaids wore traditional outfits with big billowing shoulders and hats with ruffled brims that looked like shower caps. These last few details pulled him away from the fantasy. Irish women wouldn’t dress that way. He couldn’t imagine how they’d really dress or how this idea came to him that seemed more milmaid than bar maid. But, not being able to imagine the details of their clothing, he let the dream go as he closed the card.

“Thanks for the card,” he said. “I am a virgin you know.” (TO BE CONTINUED)

“Beer,” I said to the bartender. I scooted my stool to the ledge.

Kyle looked up.

“Budweiser.”

Dazed, he managed all this in one motion: he dropped his chin, raised it again, swung it back and forth from the bartender to me. He was moving his head the way his brain felt.

“Hey,” he said. He was talking to me.

“Hey.”

“You here alone?” he asked.

I said I was. He studied me. His eyes were washed over with alcohol and the corners were streaked with broken bloodvessels. I noticed a dark shape under a shirt sleeve that was the edging of a tattoo. His T-shirt was too small, too tight, and high on his arms. He looked less drunk as he sat up. He was collecting himself to concentrate on speech.

“You’re not here with anyone?”

“No.” I told him why.

“You need a shot,” he said. “I’m buying.”

He bought us both shots. He was right. I needed one. The bartender brought the shots and my beer at the same time.

“I got it,” he said, waving over my drink. The bartender raised his hands and stepped off.

“Hey, thanks man,” I said.

We tossed the shots back. I didn’t know what it was and couldn’t taste it. It was brown. I guessed it was Tequila, but the aftertaste never came.

“How old are you man?” he asked.

“I’m 32,” I said.

“Look at you, man,” he said. “You’re cut. You can hide it well. I’d play down your age.”

I thought about pushing him gently on the shoulder so he’d tumble off his stool on his pretty face. He made me feel old with what he meant as compliment, which is the worst way for an insult to come. They hurt more that way, when they are accidental and more honest. What he meant was that the bar was filled with young women and that if I stood any chance with them, I’d need to lie. But I was just out for a beer. I grabbed my stein and he picked his up.

“Cheers?” he asked.

We put the glasses together. The clink was drowned out by the music and the tables behind us. Long tables had been arranged perpindicular to the bar. We were upstairs on a landing above the main bar. Several large parties had gathered to see a couple guys strum guitars. Ten or 15 people sat at along the sides of each table, most in baseball jerseys. The season was just underway and a few groups had gone to the afternoon game. It was early in the season, before everyone gives up hope on the local boys.

We realized the building noise that was there the whole time and turned our attention to the conversations behind us.

“Some cute girls here,” he said.

I nodded.

“That one over there … see her?”

He motioned with his drunk head toward the corner. I saw her.

“She was just over here.”

The girl he pointed to was about his age, about 22 or 23. She had brown spiraling hair and a pretty face. She wore a sleeveless cotton top with a brown pattern across the top two-thirds and a white strip around her waist. Her pants carried the color from the bottom part of her shirt down to her shoes.

“I saw her talking to you,” I said. She was hard to miss.

“Do you want to go talk?” he asked. “Will you come with me?”

“Yeah, I’ll go with you.”

We went over and sat down. Kyle first. He was good-sized, not tall or imposing, but built. I couldn’t hear what Kyle was saying, but he sat down next to the girl he pointed to and the one I’d recognized. She drew right into him. Their conversation was close, between maybe a couple inches. They took turns leaning into each others ears and shouting.

I said hello to the girls across from me. They looked at me like I was about to rob them. Kyle didn’t notice. There were two guys at the table with the group of girls. They were boyfriends who belonged to a couple of the ladies and they said nothing to me, apparently not willing to protect anything more than the women they’d laid claim to. I didn’t talk to them and didn’t want to.

A few minutes passed. I asked the usual questions. Where they were from (didn’t care), what they did for a living (somethine boring), anything disingenious I could think of, the less I cared the better. I would have asked them whether the home team won or lost, but I knew they were fair weather fans. The jerseys they wore were excuses to drink, not to be real fans. All the while, Kyle worked the girl next to us. I kept the others occupied solely because he bought my drink.

After about 10 minutes, he abruptly looked at me and said, “I’m going to go smoke.”

“Okay,” I said.

“If you’re not here when I get back, that’s cool.”

“Okay.”

He got up and abandoned the definite progress he’d made with the girl. She liked him, but he was too drunk to realize it. She asked me to move over into the vacant chair.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Chelsea.”

She told me she was Italian which threw me given her name. She was a pediatric nurse and her voice was gentle, as I imagined her to be with kids. We talked for a bit and there was no spark. She excused herself to smoke. Kyle never came back. I fought through the bodies to the lower bar and saw him later on. We talked again as he made his way from crowd to crowd, and he was even more gone than before.

I sat at the bar and asked the bartender what led him to a career pouring beer. He worked as a server for three years and learned all the popular drinks and how to make them.

That is one way to do it, I thought. The other way to learn them is to drink them. Kyle could be on his way to something big. He could be a bartender, a more prosperous direction than drunk. And he could mix a few for himself and take a few sips in between visiting with the girls. He would have a real reason to talk to them, then, and an endless supply of the stuff that kept his confidence up and the pick up lines flowing. Kyle’s problem came after he’d gotten the women to pay attention. There wasn’t enough substance left in him to keep the ladies interested beyond introductions.

I thought this and smiled as I pulled the collar up on my jacket and walked into the cold spring night: Kyle is young and is going home, alone, without any wisdom about how his youth had let him down.

He would dream about the job and those would turn to nightmares, then he’d fantasize about quitting and those would never interfere too severely with his performance, but they would be the root for long daydreams in which he’d mark his steps to the boss’ office to tell him off or for measuring his steps from his work space to the front door and onto the street, into the night – the clear, wide open night, the street lamps keeping the industrial streets warm even on the coldest nights with tropical orange circles coloring the sidewalks and streets. He would earn praise from his bosses, though, no matter what he thought about. He would earn a reputation through the organization as a hard worker despite the limited time he planned to put in. He worked as a sorter for the postal office on the long conveyor belts that spun mail day and night for eternity, neverending piles rolling toward him, and he only quit there when the night shift made it too hard for him to sleep during daylight hours and when lesser workers who were tenured and made more than he did would relax their efforts. He had picked up the slack for them to no avail – in fact, to the same paycheck. He quit a job that he’d begun for a telecommuncaitions company as a temp staff person. He’d been considered for full-time work and when he’d learned that he’d been bypassed, he walked out though he had a full summer to work before the job’s completion.

Another place, he served Mexican food, still another he parked cars in airport lot, and at one more he loaded heavy hardware into a warehouse. There, he doted over a woman who was his ideal female. She was red-headed, pale-skinnned and her hair was bobbed at the shoulder, and she was intelligent and pretty, a mother, a good one that always talked positively. He’d befriended her on a few lonely nights in the stock room, while she was actually sorting and stacking boxes for the first of the spring shipments and he’d saw something gentle in her. She was confused about her husband, who seemed a good man, she showed him a photo from her wallet one night with a couple, their children, all in matching red and black, two girls with big ribbons – one with faint hair the other a toddler and bald – and all sitting on folded legs, looking into oblivion. They were splitting up. Her husband was never home and when he was, he was lazy.

One night, he walked up through the uneven stacked boxes dull in the back warehouse light and asked her if she wanted to go out after work for drink. “No, nah … No, I have to be home.” He heard the next day that she’d been surprised and unflattered by the offer and he heard on the way into work, he didn’t even clock in. He just set his broom down and walked away. This had been his last job and the blow to his ego had left and even bigger dent in his psyche. He didn’t go outside for weeks except to pick up the morning paper, and by the time he’d taken it, it was already sun-bleached, the cover photos faded, and the newsprint syrupy brown. He brought the paper back to his chair and read the entire edition, including the classifieds (he took no action on them) and he read while spinning from his music collection and sipping coffee. He never left the block for weeks. He just perused the paper, tracked the statistics on the sports pages, and moved his foot nervosuly while he read. He never thought about her again. She was a reason to quit more than she was a love interest.

He read in the same chair and occasionally put the paper down to look at the sky, a high blue place from the angle he could see and daydreasmed good thoughts about what the world must look like from so high above, how strange his house in the neighborhood must seem and how small a matter it must be in the world for one man not to find work or to labor that particular day.

This was his work history and it was too much to fit on a resume.