Stash’s Last Stand

“Go fuck yourself, Steve,” he said as he reached the top stair, under his breath to make sure they junk man couldn’t hear him.

It was true: You could be beyond things. Beyond sad, hurt, wanting to say what you were never allowed to say. Things the junk man’s son no longer felt.

In that beyond, at the start of another life, he took back his name. He was no longer the junk man’s son. He was Stan, just turned eighteen. His ham-radio buddies and the guys at the scrapyard called him Stash. His mother used to call him Stanislaus, sometimes Stashu.

He gave his scrap-metal-scrounging father his name back, too. He was now just Steve, born Stefan, named by his mother Sophie, who followed her husband, Stefan the elder, from Poland to New York City before the Great War. But in America, everyone called him Steve.

---

There they stood, Stash and Steve, looking across the living room of the basement apartment at each other. Stash hovered by the door to the staircase that led up and outside to his future.

For the first time in Stash’s years with the junk man—swimming in it every day, every month, in all weather, the dirty, sweaty, freezing scrap-picking life—he felt nothing.

None of the nauseating tension when the junk man gave him The Look after he said or did something wrong.

None of the shame when he stated his opinions about the various goings-on in the world and his father said, “What? Are you a fucking idiot?”

None of the shaky hands when the junk man shouted, “Hurry up, will you for Christ’s sake?”

---

Stash moved intently. A box of books. The iron weight of the old Underwood manual typewriter. His ham-radio gear. A trash bag of clothing, cold-weather boots slung over one shoulder.

On each pass, he avoided Steve’s gaze, his eyes darting around the room taking inventory. The dirty sheets on Steve’s bed against one wall. A TV tray in front of Steve’s easy chair with the Long Island Newsday crossword puzzle half finished. A layer of newspaper covered the surface of the side table, the same way his grandmother used to cover the dinner table because they were too poor to buy tablecloths.

“Okay, that’s all of it,” Stash said. “I’m going now.”

Steve looked up. His face sagged, his mouth drooped. The flab in his upper arms where biceps once bulged. It was something Stash had never seen. The last six-week stint at the VA Hospital in Northport after the heart attack had really knocked the shit out of him.

Stash didn’t care. He just wanted to get the fuck out of there and follow his girlfriend from the Bronx north to the college he couldn’t even get into.

---

“You don’t have to go. You can stay. Go to school at Stonybrook,” Steve said. “You don’t have to work during the week anymore.”

Stash felt the anger rise. The fucking balls on this guy. Months of nothing—just The Look and silence—after he fell and hurt his back and the junk man accused him of faking it, of being a lazy bum looking for an excuse to get out of working. No rides to school. No words. Just a seething resentment over something he didn’t even do. After years of freezing and sweating, hauling scrap in all weather, picking through trash at the town dump—though at first, it had felt like an adventure. But lazy?

He didn’t answer. He turned. His right foot crossed the transom: old life. His left foot planted on the first step: new life.

Steve’s eyes narrowed on his back. Defiant I-don’t-need-you eyes. “Go ahead. Run back to your mother’s house.”

Stash hadn’t seen her in three years. What would she call him today, when she and his stepfather showed up? Stan, Stanislaus, or Stashu?

“Go fuck yourself, Steve,” he said as he reached the top stair, under his breath to make sure they junk man couldn’t hear him. Maybe he wasn’t beyond it all just yet.