I have one of those faces. You know, the kind of face that says to people "walk up to me and say hello, I'm your friend."
The thing about that is that I don't have one of those personalities. When people do walk up to me and say hello, I usually pretend I can't hear them over the noise of my earbuds, despite the fact that I never blast my music like some people I see on the bus on my commute every morning. The reason I mention the part about my face is because one guy who didn't seem to give a shit about my earbuds was this old homeless guy I'd see at one of my bus stops. It was a hub stop, so I never knew where the guy was from. A hub stop is where a lot of buses stop, so I could never be sure where Lorenzo would come from or where he went. But I could always depend on him to be chatty as hell on the mornings when I just didn't want to deal with the world--it was like some twisted clockwork.
When he first started talking to me, he was convinced that I was some sort of nephew of his. He asked me why I hadn't come to see him. I just tried to ignore him. After a few moments, he worked out that I wasn't his nephew and I guess I felt bad for the guy and took out one of my earbuds. That was all it took. He would tell me all sorts of stuff about his life. A lot of it was pretty boring, so I imagine it was true. The rest of it was bizarre and clearly full of crap. Something about reading minds and how tin foil really does work to stop them from getting inside your head.
"Really? I'll have to remember that," I would say. He would, after all, tell his stories several times over to me. I don't know why I humored him. I guess, in a way, I wondered if he was, one day long ago, like me. That's the thing--he'd never talk about his childhood or what made him homeless. One time I tried to ask him how he ended up on the street and he just scratched his balding head with one hand and ran his fingers through his crazy-man beard. It was like he was trying to do that thing where you pat your own head with one hand while making a circle on your stomach with the other. Invariably, whenever I asked him a question that he didn't end up answering, he would take up this pose before he'd tell me he couldn't answer my question. Sometimes he'd say it was because he couldn't remember, other times, he'd smile and say it was top secret.
Then one day he asked me something strange. "Did I ever tell you you look a lot like my nephew?"
"Uh, no, no Lorenzo. You haven't," I said. I still wonder why I humored him as much as I did.
"Yeah, sorry about that. You know, you do look like my nephew," he insisted. I smiled and nodded and moved to put my earbud back in when he asked me a question. "Do you see them?"
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Every Friday stop by for another bit of fiction. Either a sequel to this or perhaps another story all together. This week's short story will be available ONLY FOR A WEEK, so don't hesitate if you're thinking about reading it! It'll be gone from this site as of Friday morning next week!
Orignal From: FIRE ESCAPE
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