Thanksgiving and the Meatheads
I met Shawn Summas on Thanksgiving Eve, November 27th, 2019. I'd been at a gin-mill bar in a converted row-home, on a dirty side-street of the Moyamensing neighborhood in South Philadelphia. The day had been a difficult one. I stopped, on the way home, to drown the demoralizing combination of my fortieth birthday and getting laid off from work right before the holiday.
I'd gotten there around five, parked my car, a white, 1986 Ford Crown Victoria sedan, in an opportune spot at the curb, and plodded through the raw, November cold into the warmth of the still-quiet bar. I nodded to Big Nick, the regular barman, and handed over forty dollars. My simple, long-standing arrangement with the management was, forty dollars per visit for a fifth of John Bodie Bourbon Whiskey, a soft-pack of Trafalgar Square non-filter king-size cigarettes, and access to the private back room for as long as it took to consume both.
I leaned my scarred hands on the edge of the bar and let my head hang down while I waited for Nick to fill my order.
"Church Philips?" A voice next to me called out. "Is that you?"
I squeezed my eyes shut and ground my teeth. `God that I don't believe in, please let that voice be a hallucination. Please.'
"Church, it is you!" The voice tapped my shoulder.
I opened my eyes, leaned back off the bar, and turned to my accuser. I found myself looking down into a pair of faded-blue eyes, deep-set in a drawn, too-thin face of sharp features. The man was chalky pale, clean shaven, and egg bald. He wore a navy-blue or black pea coat that looked like money. A gold watch glinted from his right sleeve. "Hi Stephen." I said to him.
His name was Stephen Wolf. He and I had been friends from the summer before we entered seventh grade until almost the next summer. Sometime that spring, my mother found out Stephen's deceased father had been Jewish. Even though Stephen was being raised Roman Catholic, and attended the same church we did, his Jewish heritage made him untouchable.
`We don't associate with Christ killers,' she shrilled, and that was the end of our friendship. The following year, Stephen's mother put him in a private school, and I didn't see him except in passing. Twenty-six years later, here he was at my regular watering hole.
"Church! I can't believe it's you. What's it been, like a million years?" He held a thin, long-fingered hand out for me to shake.
I shook it. "At least that long. How have you been? You live around here?" I said the words mechanically, like I was an underqualified telemarketer reading from a script.
His expression twisted with what I took to be disgust. "Me, live in this neighborhood? Not a chance. No, I'm in the area visiting a client. I'm a corporate lawyer and the machine shop around the corner is a very small piece of a conglomerate I represent. I stopped in here for a quick one in honor of the holiday. I have a lot to be thankful for." He paused to think about something. "I should be getting back to the shop soon. I left the Mercedes in their lot to keep it off the street and don't want them to lock it in."
"Yeah, don't want the Mercedes locked in." I said with no meaning.
He smiled like I'd just made a great joke. A thought struck him and his smile widened. "Hey, you remember that big white car you had in high school? There's one just like it parked outside. I haven't seen one of them in ages. What ever happened to that one you had?"
"That's it." I shrugged. "I'm still driving it."
Nick picked that moment to set my order on the bar. A blue-labeled bottle, a forest-green soft pack, an empty rocks glass, and an empty ashtray. "Sorry for the wait, Church." He said and moved away.
Stephen's smile turned to a grimace of horror, as the implications of what he'd just seen, settled on him. I sighed. I couldn't even feel embarrassed. I just didn't care. "Great to see you, Stephen." I said, with no enthusiasm. "Why don't you get your Mercedes and hurry out of my neighborhood? Wouldn't want one of the locals to mug you."
"Yeah, I better hurry." He nodded and fled.
"Thank you for that kick in the teeth." I said to no one. I gathered my stuff off the bar, crossed the room, and opened the narrow, black door into the back room.
When smoking was banned in all public places in Pennsylvania, the bar owner turned the back room into a private club through the ingenious device of hanging a sign on the door that said `PRIVATE' in capital letters. No dues were charged for access. The smokers simply went through the door while the non-smokers stayed in the main bar. Inside the room were two flat-panel televisions always tuned to twenty-four-hour sports channels, one mirrored wall to make the dingy, smoke-stained room feel bigger, and six high, round, red-topped, tables with three or four stools each. These sat on a mint-green tile floor that I assumed was the original asbestos-based type.
I drifted to a table near the mirrored wall. I didn't have to sit there. The room was empty except for me, but I hate sports and wanted some distance between me and the overly enthusiastic announcer. The mirror was as far as I could get from the televisions and still be in the room. I opened my whiskey bottle, filled my glass, and put the contents down in a lump. I tore the cellophane from the top of the cigarette pack and went through the delicate motions of coaxing the first one out without mashing the end. I tamped it on the face of my watch and lit it with my plain Zippo lighter.
The first warm wave of whiskey lapped at my senses and softened the misery of the day. Soon, the nicotine and alcohol shook hands and I actually felt pleasant for a moment. Cigarettes and hard liquor go together like hot apple pie and vanilla ice cream. They can be enjoyed separately, but added together, the result is greater than the sum of the parts. Because I felt pleasant, I decided to ruin it and look in the mirror. For some reason, I wanted to see what Stephen saw.
My posture was still decent and I wasn't losing my hair, but there was little else to brag about. Six-foot-four-inches and two-hundred-and-eighty-pounds of flabby fat. Streaks of grey invaded my lifeless brown hair, too long and brushed straight back. The heavy features of my puffy fat face were starting to sag. My wide-set brown eyes were permanently bloodshot, and thin red lines of burst capillaries branched across the tops of my cheeks and over my thick, fleshy nose. A decade of heavy drinking and deliberate neglect was making itself more visible each day.
My job as a heavy construction and industrial welder had also left its impressions. White scars crisscrossed my hands and complimented permanently swollen knuckles and a stippled white rash on the back of my left hand from an encounter with a wire wheel. My palms were thick with coarse callouses, almost as unfeeling as the leather gloves I wore too infrequently. My face and forearms were permanently tan from years spent outdoors and too much exposure to ultraviolent weld flash.
Underneath it all was a strong body, built from hard physical labor, that still did most of what I told it to. It had been getting harder though. The constant, low-level hangover aside, my knees hurt more often than not, my lower back suffered from the weight I carried, and physical exertion made me gasp more than it should. I stubbed my cigarette out, lit another, and refilled my glass from the bottle. "Fuck it." I said aloud and had another drink.
Hours later, my bottle was at low tide and the empty, crushed soft-pack nestled in a bed of ashes and stubs in the over-flowing tray. I moved with deliberate steps from the back room into the main bar for another pack of smokes. Nick handed them over with the recommendation I call it a night. As he typically had better judgement than me, I listened and left.
I staggered onto the sidewalk. It was cold as fuck and windy as shit; that damp cold that chills to the bone. I felt it, in spite of the whiskey that burned inside me. I leaned against the brick front of the bar to steady my swaying body while I opened the fresh pack and lit a cigarette. The cold and nicotine were bracing.
A pair of voices clubbed their way through the alcohol fog, attracting my wandering attention. The voices rumbled and growled as they argued and threatened. Two massively-muscled but comically-short gym rats, both dressed in tight blue jeans and puffy red ski jackets, stood deep-chest to deep-chest, cursing each other in voices thick with protein powder and stupidity.
Two carbon copies of this oddly uniformed pair, watched the dick-measuring contest with matching erotic leers as they silently held a lithe young man against the far end of the same coarse brick wall that supported me. The harsh glare from the window between us shone on the shaved heads of the gym rats. A flashing neon bathed the youth's taught, white face with red. He was clearly unhappy with his situation, but had to endure for lack of options.
I hate bullies and was beyond drunk enough to be reckless. I decided to give the young man an option. I got rid of my cigarette, opened the passenger side of the Vic, and took a starter pistol revolver from the glove box. It wasn't a real gun that would fire bullets, but it looked real enough. I also figured they wouldn't be able to identify the hollow bang' of a blank from the more solid boom' of a real round if I did fire the thing. I held the gun low and squared off with the meatheads.
"HEY, DOUCHEBAGS," I shouted, "let the kid go and fuck off!"
The two arguers stopped arguing. Four round faces, above four thick necks, turned toward me. The one closest to me spoke, his thick voice sounded thicker and stupider than the rest. "What's it your business? What makes you think you can make us?"
I leveled the gun at him and leaned hard on the words. "Six shots and four broad targets says so. Wanna try me?"
The spokesman's face flushed from chapped-white to mottled-purple as he weighed the odds. Gun beats fist' is as simple as rock beats scissors,' but he took his time mulling it over. His stupid face bunched up tight, he spit on the sidewalk, and snarled. "LET THIS FAT FUCK HAVE THE LITTLE PUSSY!"
They released the young man with a savage shove in my direction. He stumbled, but kept his feet under him, and moved close to me. I flicked my eyes toward him to see if he was OK and couldn't look away. He was perfect, just what I would have wanted in a man if my circumstances were different, if it was possible for someone, anyone to love me. He was about six inches shorter than me, that made him five-foot-ten. His outfit was inappropriate for the frigid weather, but looked great; a black long-sleeve compression top hugged a broad, lean, defined torso and tucked into tight black jeans that stretched over powerful dancer's legs and ended above patent-leather pump heels. He had soft-features on a smooth, oval face framed with shoulder-length black hair, and a big pair of haunting ice-blue eyes. I could have stared at him all day.
He cleared his throat, the sound dragged me back from my vague fantasy. I looked passed him to check on the meatheads. They glared hatred and bridled against the invisible restraint of the pointed gun. I awkwardly dug in the right pocket of my brown, insulated hooded sweatshirt with my left hand, found my car keys, and gave them to the young man along with some orders. "Get in the passenger side, start the car."
He did as he was told. The old V-8 caught with a clatter of dry lifters and worn bearings, but quieted as the oil pressure built. I eased around the front of the car, keeping the gun on the enemy until the last second. I pulled the driver's door open, dove in, rammed the car in gear, and buried the throttle in what felt like one motion. Acceleration closed the door for me as we roared into the night. I glanced in the mirror to see four red ski jackets uselessly running after us.
We cleared out of the neighborhood, ran east on Oregon Avenue, and turned right to lose ourselves in the darkened industrial streets on the far side of the stadiums. I cut the lights and coasted a long block before I pulled over. No other cars moved on the street. I shoved the heat on `high' for the shivering, under-dressed youth and lit a cigarette with shaking hands. He appeared serenely calm, like his life hadn't been threatened and I was the one over-reacting. "WELL?" I shouted in his face.
He offered his hand, which I shook. "I'm Shawn Summas," he said in a low-register tenor voice, "thank you for saving me."
I told him my name as I lunged for the glove box. I stowed the revolver and grabbed a half-empty, flat bottle of whiskey. The encounter had sobered me and I was in no mood to be sober. I gulped from the bottle, returned it to the glove box, and stubbed my cigarette out in the full tray. Shawn continued to shiver despite the heater's efforts. I struggled out of my jacket and offered it to him. He refused with a shake of his head. "I can't, then you'll be cold."
"Look, kid, I'm fat and I'm shitfaced. I won't be cold. Keep the fuckin' thing. The bastards that gave it to me laid me off todayÉtoo fucking cheap to pay the holiday."
He ignored my bitterness and accepted the jacket. He got it on with far less effort than it took me to get it off. It fit him like a tent, but he stopped shivering. He stared at me, his mind obviously working on something he didn't share, then he made a request. "I need to go to Baltimore. I have friends beyond the tunnel. Will you take me?"
I wasn't sure I heard him right. If I did, it was the ballsiest thing I'd ever heard. This kid I met less than five minutes ago wanted me to drive him to another state. I lit another smoke. "ID." I demanded and held my left palm open to him.
He pulled a wallet from somewhere, extracted a license, and passed it over. It read, `Shawn C. Summas, Cleveland, Ohio, born February 3rd, 1998.'
I handed the card back and counted two decades and an extra year on my fingers. "When the fuck did 1998 get to be twenty-one years ago?" I asked no one. "Sorry, kid, you're old enough, but I'm too fucked up for highway driving. If you're not a hallucination, I can take you tomorrow."
"No, please," he begged, "I need to go tonight. What if I drive your car? Will you let me?"
I pulled my watch off and stretched the band. I'd like to say I thought it over, but the adrenalin was almost gone and the whiskey had a stranglehold on my reason. I slipped the watch back on, threw the driver's door open, and heaved myself out. "Fuck it. Sure, complete stranger; drive my car to Baltimore." I reeled around to the passenger side and rapped my knuckles on the window. He popped the door open, slid to the driver's side, and shut that door while I tossed my smoke and climbed in.
He moved the seat to suit his smaller frame, buckled the rarely used seatbelt, and adjusted the mirrors. I took the flat bottle from the glove box and swallowed the rest of its contents. The last thing I remember saying before I passed-out was, "I don't recommend trying to harvest my organs, kid, they're pretty beat."