Steve woke up. He remembered most of the night before. He had been talking about the newspaper, how it was once a godsend but now felt like a burden. “I still read it,” he said. “I still walk down my porch and bend down and pick it up. I mean, it’s where I work. Shouldn’t I be loyal? But it’s getting harder to do, and not just the bending down part.” He was talking to a young women he hoped to talk to more through the course of the evening, though he was not certain, even as the words left his mouth, that emphasizing his infirmity was the best strategy. But she had let him buy her a drink and she had gone with him to a banquette and pressed up against him, her insights surging. Steve knew that things had accelerated further—the woman had woken up in his bed—but his memory had blurry patches and dropouts. “Of course,” his ex-wife would have said. “That’s how it is with your irredeemable drunks.” He did remember the young woman asking him what felt like to work for a business that was systematically destroying the hopes of young people like her, and he had confessed that he was usually too tired to care. Maybe that’s what had sealed the deal: his helplessness.
©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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