steve

this was a piece i wrote for a literary journalism course i took last semester. i spent a lot of time hanging out with steve, a northampton street performer. this is my first attempt at the genre, and i loved everything about it.




“Good actors transcend the medium,” Steve said, his brown eyes sparkling under grey wisps of hair. He leaned over, his 5’7”, near-300 pound frame showing the wear of his years, and placed his guitar case on the sidewalk.

“Take Grace Kelly. She was an awful actress. But Meryl Streep on the other hand.... Did you see her in that movie with Jack Nicholson?”

I hadn’t, but I nodded.

“Yeah, Ironweed!,” he continued, becoming more animated. Speaking quicker now, pools of saliva began to form in the corners of his mouth. “That film was amazing. Jack Nicholson transcends the medium, too.”

He paused, his mouth forming a smile. “And have you seen Good Will Hunting?!” he asked, his smile growing larger. I nodded again.

“Ya’know that one scene? They smoke weed in public!” He nearly screamed the last three words and, looking left, then right, then left again, he flipped forward the matches in his matchbook to reveal a half-smoked joint. He waited a beat and then smirked as though he was a toddler and his joint was a toy he had brought to show-and-tell.


We were standing on the main drag of Northampton in front of Faces, a trash can on our left and a bench on our right. Steve leaned over and pulled his acoustic guitar from its case.

“So, where are you two from?” He asked my friend and I as he began to strum the strings of his guitar.

I opened my mouth to respond. “Wait!” Steve cut me off. “She sounds like she’s from Quincy and you sound like you’re from 12th St. Manhattan.” He chucked, his eyes sparkling.

“I’m from upstate New York,” I said.

“And I’m from Hampstead,” said my friend. “But I used to work right by Quincy, in Andover.”

“I know Andover,” Steve said. “Lawrence, Methuen, Lowell. I’m from Lunenburg. Near Fitchburg. People always assumed we went and hung out in Lowell. Why would you go to Lowell when you could go to Boston? Boston isn’t scary, it’s a tiny city.”

My friend and I nodded along. She recognized the geography, I didn’t. I smiled and said, “Alright, Steve. We’re gonna go get lunch. Will you be here for a while?”

He smiled, wielding his guitar. “Of course!”


We ran into Steve again an hour later, across the street and down a full block, in front of CVS.

“You can’t walk through this town without running into me, huh?!” he yelled from afar and broke into a fit of deep, rumbling laughter. He had his guitar in his hands and his case, filled with a few one-dollar bills and coins, was open at his feet. His fingers, peeking out from homemade fingerless gloves, were plucking away at the strings.

I asked Steve what brought him to the Valley.

“Well,” he said, shifting his eyes upwards in thought. “I went to U-Mass. Majored in history and beer. Surprisingly, I got out of there in just four years.”

After graduating, he stayed in the Valley, going to graduate school at U-Mass and taking odd jobs, and just never left.

“I was married for a while, too,” he said. “It was a U-Mass kind of marriage. Met in college, got married. No kids, though. Which is good, I guess, since we got divorced. But sometimes I wonder if I should’ve stayed married. Congregational guilt, ya know? She was my first lover, and you gotta stay with the same woman for life.”

His tone changed, his forehead wrinkled and his mouth turned down into a slight frown. “I started dating a Hampshire girl when I was thirty-five and she was twenty-five” he said. “Her name was Susan. I moved in with her right away and lived with her for almost two semesters. People thought I went to Hampshire...” He paused, smiling sadly. “I laid on that couch for a whole week once.” And then, for the first time since I’d met him, Steve began to sing.

“If you’re a Hampshire girl and a U-Mass boy falls in love with you, don’t break his heart,” he sang in his speaking voice -- gravelly but smooth, as if he was rapping over folk guitar. His face contorted and he quickly lowered it into his hands, “Susan... I’m still in love with you!”

He rolled his hat down over his eyes and rubbed them through the red woolen fabric. The seconds passed slowly. He looked up at me with newly-reddened eyes and said, a smirk breaking out across his face and his fist reaching forward for a pound. “Good fake crying, huh?”


Not ten minutes later, a man in a faux leather jacket walked his dog past us. Steve struck up a conversation with him as though the two were old friends. “Hey! She’s from New York!” he yelled, flinging his entire right arm in my direction, indicating to the leather man that he and I shared some sort of connection. The man kept walking, smiling politely and muttering hello back.

Steve turned to me and stage whispered, “He’s not really from New York. Hasn’t been there in over twenty years. He probably was born in the Bronx and moved to Schutesbury when he was five. I know people who’ll tell me ‘I’m from New York City’ and I’m like ‘I’ve known you for twenty years and I’ve never been to the city.” He held out his fist for another pound. “Come on,” he chuckled. “Am I funny?!”

As the leather jacket man walked away, a short, red headed man stumbled past him heading in our direction. Steve brightened at the sight of him. “Hey! Tom!” he called from some distance. Tom arrived smelling of whiskey and slurring his words. Steve’s face fell. “Man...” he sighed. “Did you fall off the wagon? You had four months clean!”

Tom hesitated drunkenly. “Y-yeah.” he finally stammered. “My parole officer told me to get outta’ Dodge.” Tom staggered off and Steve turned to me, shaking his head.

“That’s why I’ve never been into the hard stuff,” he said frowning and crinkling his forehead.

“Strictly beer for me. Except for in college. Hampshire always had the best pot and the best acid,” he reminisced. “U-Mass had the best parties, though. But you’d get at the end of the line and the beer would be gone by the time you got to the front.” He continued, beginning to play the guitar and shifting his voice into a slightly more melodic tone. “I dropped acid behind Atkins once. Spent hours staring at an apple orchard. Psychedelic Trees.” He closed his eyes and sang in low, droning, faux remembrance: “Was it ’75, ’85, ’95, 2005?”


He snapped open his eyes, looking directly at me with legitimate concern. “Aren’t you freezing?!” he asked. “If you were my granddaughter, I wouldn’t want you out here in the cold. When are you taking the bus back?” I told him that my friend and I were leaving in forty minutes. “Good,” he continued. “But listen. I’ve got $30. It should be enough to buy some Chinese food and beer. We can split the chinese food three ways. You two can get tonic waters and when no one’s looking I can pour the beer into your cups. I’ve got good reefer, too... Sorry, but I’m gonna bogart that.”

We politely refused. He smiled and bent down to place his guitar in its case. He pulled out a crinkled, brown Hay Market paper bag and coffee cup. Extending both out to me, he asked, “Want some?”

I refused again. He smiled in anticipation of the joke he knew he was about to make. “Good,” he said. “There’s herpes and date rape drugs in there.” He winked and said, with his fist waiting for a pound, “I’m funny, right?!”

I raised my fist to meet his. He smiled contentedly. “Herpes was a huge problem when I was at U-Mass,” he said, feigning seriousness. “You’d be with a girl and you’d go to put a condom on and she’d tell you ‘No, no I’m clean,’ and then next thing you know, you’d have herpes! Is that still a problem? You two have herpes?”


About a week later a friend and I walked out of the Northampton CVS and saw Steve, guitar in hand, moneyless case open at his feet.

He recognized me immediately. “What are you doin’? Getting Chinese food?” he asked.

We told him that we were getting film developed.

“Let me get you stoned,” he said, his eyes twinkling mischievously. “I didn’t have enough weed for you last time.”

We declined.

“No problem,” he said. “Lemme tell ya. I had a great night last night. It doesn’t take much to make me happy. All I need is a couch, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe, Animal House, a j, a beer, a nice glass of wine, and some good conversation.”

We invited him to Bruegger's Bagels for lunch on us. He smiled and said, “Absolutely. It’s starting to rain.”


We walked over two store fronts and Steve held the door open for us. As we made our way to the counter to order, we passed a woman leaving the store. “Hey!” Steve said. “How have you been?”

The woman smiled politely and said, “Fine.” She made eye contact with me and then quickly wove her way through the throng of people and out of the store.

“I don’t remember what she does,” Steve said, turning back to us. “She’s either a psychiatrist or an artist. What else do people do in Northampton? Lawyer? No!” He started laughing his low, rumbling laugh. He put his hand out for a pound.

“Am I funny or what?”

We sat down at a table in the back of Bruegger's Bagels, Steve sitting across from my friend and I. He took off the layers of winter clothing that he had piled on that morning, letting his wispy grey hair fall freely. It stuck to his head in clumps.

He launched into his rehearsed “Susan” speech, rubbing his eyes and crying. After the allotted period of time, he looked up and started laughing.

“Tricked ya!” he said to my friend. “I wasn’t really crying.”

“You did that to me last time we hung out,” I said.

“Yeah, I know,” he said, his eyes still red. “I do that to everyone. But it comes from a real place. Everyone is heartbroken, but sometimes you just have to get rid of that negative energy. There’s always a point when you realize you’re not supposed to be together.”

“Plus, I’m a good actor,” he said, snapping out of serious and back into playful. “I reinvented myself every year I was in college. One year I was one thing, next year I was a jock, year after I was a hippie.”

We finished eating and I asked him if he would be in Northampton later that week. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m here every day. I gotta get out, ya know? Every day I come into town, get some coffee, see some people, and play my guitar.”