The bigger guy who took Steve's girlfriend was kind of a bully. Steve's girlfriend started showing up with black eyes from falling into doorknobs. One day with the help of a couple people she got her stuff together and moved out of the farmhouse they were renting and out of Champaign and we never saw or heard from her again.
One Friday night Steve was drunker than usual, but merry, wishing everybody a long and happy life. Sometime later the bully came into the bar and I guess Steve had never forgotten the girlfriend because he started taunting the bully and then the two stepped out into the alley and Steve got his jaw broken. He was wired shut for a month, maybe two, drinking Ragu sauce out of a straw.
He became a foreman on the grounds crew which he wasn't too happy about. He hated giving orders to other people and he still had to take orders from those above him. But being a state employee he got to retire pretty early, before anybody else in the crowd. We were all like fascinated by the idea of never having to work again. What was he going to do we all asked him. He told us he was going to move to Las Vegas.
After a year he was still in Urbana. He told me later that he had never planned on going to Las Vegas, it was just something he said to get people to stop bugging him. He was going to stay in town and do nothing and just enjoy the fact that he no longer had to take orders from anybody.
He moved into that little house where he would die maybe twenty years later. He came out to the bars maybe once a week, but he was argumentative when drunk and he would piss people off and then he would stay away from that bar for three or four weeks. Eventually he stopped going out to the bars at all, He had some friends who would come by and he would do cocaine, but after awhile he stopped that and then he stopped drinking too.
I was back in Chicago by then. I'd come back to Champaign once a year for this big 4th of July party where all the old crowd showed up. I'd come the night before and get drunk downtown and the next morning I would be sort of killing time before the big party started and I dropped by his house. We used to have those postgame recaps after acid trips, and now in old age we would have discussions about life, and I did that for maybe a dozen years. He had a good piece of money from the grounds crew and he got some money from the VA for PTSD, which I think was sort of a scam, and he was pretty cheap. But he did subscribe to magazines and he bought a lot of books and CDs and the place was just crammed with stuff, The curtains on the window were never opened, He had a little porch with a beatup kitchen chair and I'd say, 'Steve why don't you step outside and smoke a cig in that chair and feel the evening breeze and watch the cars go by," and he'd just snort.
The magazines and books piled up unread on the floor and the little table where his ashtray was,and I'm sure he never listened to the CDs because he got had a big screen tv which he'd turn on first thing in the afternoon and turn off late at night before he stumbled to bed. He didn't drink, but he smoked those Lucky Stripe stubbies, smoked them all his life, and lots of dope, and pills, pills that once may have been recreational but now were painkillers, His feet hurt, his back hurt, other stuff hurt, everytime I visited him he could walk less far.
Last fall a buddy who frequently called him about sports kept getting his answering machine, and then his mailbox was full. He was in a little group of us ex-Champaign people who email each other and he wrote us and I got in touch with an old pal of his who still lived in town and he got around to checking on him and it turned out that he had been in the hospital for his feet. They were better now and he was feeling a little chipper and we all kind of joked about how we had thought he was dead.
But then a few weeks ago now he was dead. I keep wondering did he die in his sleep in his bedroom? A lot of times when people die they feel sick before and head to the bathroom and die there, was that what happened?. I like to think he died in that chair in the front room watching his big screen tv and puffing on a Lucky Strike. I guess it doesn't make any difference, but that's what I like to think anyway..
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