At first I didn’t recognize him. Riley saw me at DeQuincy’s bar just as I was starting my second beer. When he said my name, the tone reminded me of the way people used to talk to me when I was a kid. The way other kids used to talk to me. I didn’t like it back then, either. The last time I remembered him talking to me was when he sat across the aisle from me in Mrs. Gorskey’s sophomore English class. He kept failing his writing assignments. I told him to borrow essays from old copies of The Reader’s Digest.
“Is that what you do?”
It wasn’t. I actually wrote mine; but I wasn’t going to tell him that or he’d try and get me to write his too. “Trust me,” I said. “She’ll never know the difference.”
She never did. Neither did he.
Riley sat on the empty stool next to me like we were long lost friends. “Shit, man,” he said, slapping me on the shoulder. “How the hell are ya? You living around here now?”
“For about two years. You?”
“Ten years,” he answered. “Off and on.”
The bartender came over and Riley ordered a beer. “So what’s it been?” he asked after his beer arrived.
“Twenty years.”
“Well shit,” he said, raising his glass in a toast. “It’s good to see somebody from the old hometown.”
“Yeah.” I raised my glass, too, though for no particular reason. “You ever go back?” I asked.
He nodded. “I went back once, for about six months. I hated it. You?”
“I haven’t lived there since I graduated high school.”
“I hear you’re a big college professor now.”
He heard? Who the fuck does he talk to? Who do I talk to?
“I WAS a college instructor. Now I’m a full time bar stool warmer.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah, well, the hours are better and the general company is not so full of bullshit.”
“Politics,” he answered.
“And economics,” I said. “It’s one of those ‘We’re all in this together’ scenarios…”
“… where you’re the one who gets fucked.” he finished.
“Well said.”
He smiled. “I’m familiar with that.”
I looked at him. I shuffled through the card catalog in my mind trying to remember something about him. He moved slowly and deliberately, lifting the glass to his mouth. His head was shaved and he’d put on weight. There was a squareness to his jaw that suggested he’d gone the military route. Even chinless wonders end up, somehow, looking more Greco-roman when they get out of the military. “Didn’t you go into the military?”
“Yup. The Army.”
That’s right, I thought. I was getting a clearer picture of who he was back then. Used to come into school wearing camos and black boots. He even shaved his head to look like a grunt. That was back during the first Gulf War. I’d met a few guys who came back from that one; some of them in bars. A few of them had been students at the same time I was – using the GI Bill to try and figure out how to get back into regular life. Most of them seemed to adjust ok. A few didn’t. Some came back with health problems they didn’t go there with.
“I stayed in,” he said.
“
Cool.”
He shrugged and laughed a short, bitter laugh. “I guess so.”
“Did you end up going back to Iraq this time around?”
He shook his head. “Afghanistan,” he said.
“You’re a pretty lucky guy, then,” I said.
“I guess so. Lucky.”
His beer was empty, so I bought him another one. We talked some more. I found out how he’d heard about me. His sister’s kid had my mom for homeroom last year. “Apparently she talks about you all the time,” Riley said. “She must be proud of you.”
“She leaves a lot out,” I said.
“It’s gotta be kind of nice, though,” he said. “Maybe she’s just proud that you followed in her footsteps.”
No. Actually she always wanted me to be a lawyer. I shrugged. “Moms,” I said.
“I hear ya.”
We drank and talked and drank and talked. We traded off rounds. Had a couple of shots. We talked about people from home – where they were the last time we’d heard of them. Who was married. Who was divorced. Who had kids. Who found religion.
“I seem to remember that YOU were pretty religious back in the day,” he remarked.
“I guess.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he went on. “You used to carry your bible and shit to school.”
“I remember.”
“So what happened?”
I shrugged. “It passed.”
“It passed? What do you mean, ‘It passed’?”
Like gas. Like the flu. I shrugged and drained my beer. “I reached the age of common sense,” I said. That made me think about what my mom had told me. That college had ruined me. Exact words. Ruined. It was time to change the subject. “Are you still in the army?”
He snorted. “No.”
“What happened? I didn’t think they were letting anybody out.”
“They didn’t want to let me out,” he said. “Tried to stop-loss my ass.”
I’d heard the term. There are two things you can count on in academic circles: that new terminology is dissected to the point of meaninglessness and political issues are discussed with the same intensity as the importance of poetic metaphor in literature.
“So what happened?”
“I let them the first time,” he said. “They sent me back to Afghanistan. I led a convoy unit. When my bit was up, they wanted to do it again. So I told them to shove it up their ass.”
“That couldn’t have gone well.”
“When I didn’t report, they arrested me. I spent a year in prison and was dishonorably discharged.”
“They didn’t consider all the years you put in?”
He smiled. It was almost sardonic. “Sure they did. That’s why I only got a year.”
“Oh.”
“They talk the talk about respecting service and those who serve. But really all they really say is ‘What have you done for me lately?’”
That sounded a little familiar. I bought him another beer. “That sucks. So what are you doing now?”
“I was working construction. Then the real estate collapse happened. So now I’m drawing unemployment and sleeping on a buddy’s couch.”
“You really told them to shove it up their ass?”
“Yup.”
“Why?”
His face darkened a little. The lines became harder, more defined. “I also told them I was tired of watching kids get blown to hell. I told them they either needed to let us fight or get us the fuck out.”
“They couldn’t have handled that very well.”
He snorted. “Chain of command bullshit. Most of those guys haven’t seen action in YEARS, man. Fucking assholes. I bet their kids aren’t get blown up in the desert.”
Probably not.
We sat and drank and talked about other things. We talked about baseball and how much the Series sucked last year. We talked about not missing the snow, and about how the old hometown never really changes – how nothing ever really changes. The bar was starting to get crowded and happy hour was nearly over. He gave me a phone number.
“Give me a call,” he said. “We should do this again sometime.”
“Sure thing,” I said. “You know where to find me.”
He laughed as he stood up. “You better be careful,” he joked. “I might just take your stool out from under you.”
“You wouldn’t be the first.”
We walked out together. Then he turned and shook my hand. I always fancied myself as having a firm hand shake; his nearly broke my fingers. “Take it easy,” he said.
“You too.”
“See you around.”
“Sure thing.”
He went off across the parking lot, heading west. When I was sure he was far enough away, I shook the life back into my fingers and headed towards the bus stop.
