Kevin

Kevin came rollicking in, hair matted to the left side of his fleshy squash head, skull cap crumpled in his ham-hock hands, billowing about the factory entrance, like some Thanksgiving Day parade balloon. He was a man incapable of whispering.

“Ya’ see Donald? He caught his dick-beatas! Right in the machine! Dumbass panicked, tried to pull his hands outta-da machine, rips his finga-tips off, and won’t even sue! OSHA was there earlier in the week yellin’ at them for that machine, too! Dumbass. His damn dick-beatas in casts…” He says, bludgeoning a paper towel roll with palsied fist in demonstration.
“Ain’t no way to whack off like a man should.”
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Kevin used to work with my uncles in their old factory, before my grandfather sold the company “pecker-nosed Gary”, as Kevin would say. They say he used to lift desks two-at-a-time onto the trucks, like a scrappy-haired Samson. Now he makes deliveries for my uncle’s new start-up company every Wednesday, parading his bulged torso about the New England coast, “Cuz, damn, they got good chowda down the cape.”
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“Gad damn Giants, coverin’ eleven straight games, then I pick ‘em…. What are you looking at Paco?”
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He’d amiably harass Paco, who used to work at the old factory and now is working at the new one.
“Fuck you, Kay-in” Paco would say, before returning to lacquering drawers.
Kevin would tell stories every time he stopped by, about the old days, the drunken reveries of the old factory, the shit-head bosses and shit-nosed suck-ups. He’d talk about the Hell’s Angels, and how he used to drink thirties before noon. He’d hawk the stories up from the back of his throat, beads of sweat glittering his brow, his thick forearms displaying prison-dull tattoos of naked ladies and skulls and fire and guns. He was the best story-teller I ever heard. I ate it up. He once had an old Caddy, ’78, with its roof shorn off, as if hacked by a saw. He drove around in it for a year, the backseat littered with crushed beer cans and soggy porn, his novelty horn blaring, announcing his arrival. If it rained, he just drove faster. All the old workers would dart to the bar across the street, nine deep in that thing as soon as pay-day hit at noon on Thursday and be drunk as all hell by 12:30 the same day.
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Today was the last day I saw Kevin. I was headed to school in a few days, and frankly, was glad to be out of the loop of menial labor for the time. He told me as he left that if I wanted to start anything in New ‘Hampshit’ I’d know where to find my muscle. He meant it. He and his brother Scottie were humongous. They loved to be in the thick of things.
“But really, you got a head on your shouldas. I’m fucked as it is. Just remember who your friends are.”
Kevin was from the old school. He was as loyal to you as you were to him. His was a code of conduct that doesn’t exist anymore. He’d take a bullet for you.
“Heh-heh, get the hell outta here. Don’t let those hick cops in New Hampshire get ya!”
The last words I heard him say.

I found myself at his funeral three weeks later, his bloodless body lying supine seven feet away. A man, so used to being amongst friends rattling off stories, now confined to the sparse accommodations of a 7x4 six foot deep hell … I couldn’t help but feel as though this man were a hero. Sure, he was no saint, debauched and drugged as his life was. But how many American heroes’ lives are? Lindbergh despised Jews, Sosa and McGuire were on the juice, and Clinton was getting his noodle shellacked by a secretary when he should have been busy with Bosnia. Kevin was a man who drank his whiskey straight, kept his friends loyal, told his stories with passion, and lived his life with no regrets. And now, staring at his lifeless face, bereft of that conspiratorial gleam that garnished the corners of his cheeks, I couldn’t help but wonder how they found so large a suit to cover so large a man.