Another August story

“Lemme tell you…Dave was the kind of guy that would call you up on Thursday night, all, ‘Hey man, let’s go downtown and get some beers, maybe meet some girls, it’ll be chill, man, c’mon,’ and then it would take about 45 minutes to figure out what place we were supposed to be going to, and then you’d get over to his place and he still wouldn’t be ready, and by the time he finished all his showering and hair care and all that stuff it’d be, like, one o’clock, and everybody would have crashed out playing Nintendo or something.”

Hunter was the kind of guy who liked to exaggerate his stories, sometimes creating entire personalities for people from his past out of a few tiny fragments of behavior. This little diatribe about Dave had sprung from the events of a single night, when he had arrived at Dave’s while the aforementioned showering and primping had been in progress and had amused himself by doing shots of Rumpelmintz until he had passed out on the couch, vaguely aware that Dave had tried to rouse him at one point but remembering that he had been completely unable to respond in any coherent way. He had awakened the next morning nestled in the couch, with the unmistakable sour smell of vomit now emanating from under the cushion he was using as a pillow.

He didn’t tell Dave about the puke, either; that’s also the kind of guy that Hunter was. But he was pretty harmless; not the kind of buddy that you’d call if you REALLY needed help, but the kind that you just sort of left in your E-vite distribution list because it seemed kind of wrong when you thought about taking him out.

So Hunter just kind of slid through the world as an adult; found a pretty good job, got married a time or two, had some kids, moved around the country a little bit, all the standard stuff. But THEN, on one very magical day, Hunter fell right into the role that he had been created for, that very few human beings on the entire planet were as qualified to do as he was.

Hunter retired and sat around all day, with either his grandkids or other kids from the neighborhood that were sent over by their parents for a little free babysitting, and he told them stories. Bowling stories, hiking stories, stories about guys he had known in college, stories about a car he’d almost bought one time in Omaha; it never mattered. The kids would sit, transfixed, unable to be coaxed from his side even by the siren’s song of the television. He was the Joe DiMaggio of telling stories, the Michael Jordan--he was the TIGER WOODS of telling stories to kids.

Unfortunately, he was also the Tiger Woods of eating fatty foods and not exercising, so he died four years into his retirement. But his LEGACY, man, his legacy lives on, in all those kid’s...um...hearts, or something. Yeah, their hearts.