One Man, Many Pasts

I once worked at an assisted living facility — a place where old people go to die, essentially. I was paid under the table to prime and paint and peel wallpaper and rip up carpet, but it was a brief stint due to my commitments to school. In the two weeks I worked there, I earned maybe $250. Not bad for a high school student — God knows it put gas in my ’93 Nissan Pathfinder.

While working at the facility, I had the pleasure of interacting with the elderly. Many of them without families, either because they had been abandoned by them or because they simply outlived their kin, and they seemed to enjoy having someone my age around to talk to. During my time there I heard countless war stories. One man claimed to be a Navajo Code Talker, another claimed he was dropped into enemy territory during Vietnam, but most sat quietly while others spoke of their war histories, probably mulling over the things they had seen instead of choosing to relive that past through words.

Of all the men I met, however, one stuck out most. I’ve since forgotten his name, and he passed away during my last few days of work there, but his stories stuck out more than any others. When I started working at the home, the manager told me about this man. “He’s delirious, you know, he suffers from dementia but he’s a great man. Every day he tells a different life story — every day he’s someone or something new.”

He was right. On my first day of work, the man rolled up in his wheelchair and introduced himself as a pastor. While I primed the walls and primed them some more, he went on about his days as a missionary in Spain and France and Germany. He told me about various miracles he had witnessed and the things that God had told him in his sleep. He said to me one day, “God told me you’d be here — said you’d be here to help.”

The man was missing on my second day of work, out for testing at the hospital. He returned on my third day, this time to tell me about his life as a major league baseball player. “Back in the day,” he said, “I struck out the greats. I beat the Yankees and the Red Sox. Rodriguez ain’t got nothin’ on me, boy.”

On my fourth day, he told me stories about his job as a pilot during Vietnam. His best friend had been shot down, his cousin tortured by the Viet Cong, and he himself narrowly escaped crashing into a mountain. “Bastards thought they could tear down the good ol’ USA, son, but we taught ’em not.”

On my fifth day he claimed to be an oilman from Texas, and said he had struck black gold some thirty years ago under the hot desert sun. “My family took the money, though, said I was crazy and left me here. I ain’t seen ’em since.”

His stories changed like the seasons, and near the end of my employment — and the end of his life — they seemed to get stranger.

One day he claimed to be Earl Warren, judge of the famous Brown v. Board of Education case. The problem with this was that Earl Warren had died in 1974 and was white — whereas this man was black and for the time being alive. Another day he claimed to have stepped foot on the moon, proudly declaring that he was the first and only black man to do so. During his stay on Luna, he interacted with “space aliens that sounded an awful lot like Russians”.

On my last day of working at the home, he pulled me aside for a quiet, brief conversation.

“I’ve been a lot of things, son, and you’re the only person who listens to me.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Mmhm, but let me tell you something.”
“What’s that?”
“I ain’t crazy,” he started, “I ain’t never been any of those things, but I tell everyone I had been.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because it’s the funniest damn thing to see their faces when I tell ’em I was an astronaut.”

In his delusions, in his dementia, he had not lost his humor. I left at 2pm that day, and returned a few hours later when I saw an ambulance at the facility. Upon my asking who had passed this time, because it was a regular occurrence, I discovered my friend had died of a massive heart attack after telling the new nurse one of his stories.

Blue ‘Stang Granny

She isn’t here every night, though damn if she doesn’t arrive most nights around 9pm. Almost as tall as I am, which means she’s probably somewhere around 5′ 9″ — maybe 5′ 8″, I won’t pretend to be an expert on gauging height from a distance. But she pulls in most nights around 9pm.

It’s an unusual sight. Here she is, an old lady — honest to God she must be sixty-something — driving to Starbucks in a blue Mustang convertible. The roar of her engine echoes in the parking lot, coupled with headlights brighter than the Sahara sun. If the car itself had not drawn your attention, you’d imagine the driver of the vehicle to be a twenty-something able-bodied guy. Quite the opposite, this woman full of combed back silver hair steps out in black pants, a white cable-knit sweater, and flip-flops.

Fucking flip-flops.

In the real world there’s no backing music. Explosions don’t shoot out from the hoods of the cars in the background and Slash doesn’t descend from the heavens aboard a flaming pegasus. For all I know the woman may as well be playing Sade quietly in the borders of her own ocean blue powerhouse, but in my mind — and surely in the minds of everyone else — there’s an outpouring of utter badassery when granny arrives.

Like me, like the married couple that was in a few days ago, she’s a regular here. When she comes in, she comes prepared with her refillable oversized cup. I think she gets tea, but it’s hard to tell with the way she just hands over payment and her cup simultaneously, like she’s completing a drug transaction with the Colombian cartel. It’s quiet, it’s quick, and she hangs around long enough to exchange maybe a handful of pleasantries with the baristas behind the counter before getting back into her Mustang and going off to do whatever she does during the night.

Maybe she fights crime. Maybe she’s a real life Barbara Gordon, a retired Batgirl from the days of yore.

On this particular night she stays longer than usual. Her Starbucks card, as I understand, didn’t have as much money on it as she thought it did and was unable to pay the remaining balance. “We can fix that!” says the cashier, who immediately cuts her size on the point-of-sale system. Her size (and thus price) were cut, but they still refilled her cup to the brim. The old woman is grateful, but of few words. “I must have forgotten to refill it,” she starts, “I had a lot to do today.”

The cashier laughs and says she understands before telling the woman about how much she has to do all week, comparing their schedules as if the old woman really even cares. She doesn’t, at least it doesn’t seem so, in the way she replies with words like “Mmhm” and “Yeah?”

Eventually her cup comes back to her and she makes her exit stage right back to Badass Blue, something I’ve taken to calling her brilliant, blaring blue ‘Stang.

The Old Gamer

He sits alone in the corner of the shop with his Toshiba laptop. I’m sitting maybe eight feet in front of him, but he doesn’t notice my watching. His eyes, enlarged by his wireframe glasses, are affixed to his screen. From here I can hear rampant clicking from a separate, gold colored mouse.

He’s been here for hours, I presume, as he usually is on the days he comes in. I’ve seen him here before in the daytime, only to see him in the same spot when I return hours later.

League of Legends, World of Warcraft, DOTA 2 — God only knows what he’s playing, but it sucks up enough of the store’s internet to slow down everyone else’s. He doesn’t appear to care, though. He’s enveloped in his mystical world, and has probably transformed himself into whatever character he’s playing as. On occasion he’ll suck his teeth in disappointment, or grunt in excitement. He constantly looks back and forth, his eyes darting from one end of the screen to the other over and over again in unison with his clicks. He’s so into it he requires a sweat rag that sits next to him on a table that also holds his drinks and his food.

The drink he ordered is now gone, replaced by ice and Brisk pink lemonade. He hasn’t touched it since I arrived, and beads of perspiration drip slowly down the sides of his cup. A scone of some kind sits on a brown wrapper,  but there only appears to be one bite taken from it. I imagine he’s too deep into his game to care about eating.

He’s a nice man — I know this from previous, brief discussion with him. One night a couple of weeks ago as he left the shop, he stopped and asked me about my laptop.

“MacBook?”
“Yessir.”
“I bet it has a great battery, I wish I could afford one.”
“It does alright.”
“You play any games?”
“I’ve been known to fall into fits of playing Civilization V for hours on end, but other than that not really, no.”
“I love games, man, I wish they had this stuff when I was your age.”
“Come here often?”
“I come here for the free wi-fi, I stay because they’re nice to me.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Well hey, have a good night.”

After that he sat in his car for a few minutes, scrolling through his smartphone.

He has a scruffy, peppered goatee. He’s got a gut that fights against the pull of a red Under Armour shirt, and legs like tree trunks that sprout from the openings of black basketball shorts. He’s slightly overweight, but not unhealthy. When I say he’s old, he’s maybe in his mid-50s — and I presume he has some joint problems based on the fact that he walks with a cane.

But he’s young at heart — he’s genuinely nice to everyone around him. He offered to give up his seat tonight to a family that had just gotten in from New Jersey, which I assume is a big gesture from him given how entrenched he was in his MMORPG.

As nice as he is, he sits alone. I have to wonder where his family is, or if he even has any family. I have to wonder what drives him to play games that are meant for my demographic. Is he playing vicariously for a lost child? Or does he just really love virtually killing and looting people? Does his imagination run free like, perhaps, it couldn’t when he was young?

The possibilities, I imagine, are endless. But then so is his imagination, at least so it seems.