Five beers

I walk into Lewis’ apartment carrying the last box from my car. The way it jangles weirdly when shifted piques my curiosity. His door is propped open with a paperback book. It looks like Ender’s Game, one of the few books that Lewis ever liked enough to want to talk about. I extract the book and close the door.

Lewis sits on his yellow thrift store sofa, drinking a beer after a hard day of work. Next to him is a stack of all the boxes. I wonder how long they are going to sit there. From the side of the sofa he slides out a small cooler. He plucks a can of beer out and tosses it to me. I catch it and take a seat next to him. He already has four empties thrown into an open box in front of us.

“What’s in this one?” I ask, kicking the jangling box. He slide it close and opens it. “All my Wildcat shit!” He pulls out a football trophy and holds it high. He grabs another, stands up and sets them on either side of the TV. Horribly tacky, but vanity recognize vanity. I prefer mirrors, myself.

He returns to the memory box and pulls out a red and yellow pennant, and after five beers, decides putting it on a giant blank wall before all the furniture is in makes perfect design sense.

“It really pulls the room together,” I say.

“Damn right,” He laughs, picking up the empty cooler and goes to refill it in the kitchen.

Lewis’ greatest achievement in life was high school football. He was a strong player and the Wildcats did really well. Then he dropped out of school and things went south for a while. Now that his life is smoothing out, and his buzz is kicking in, he is at high risk for retelling football stories. I need to gently steer us onto another topic.

“Hey.... Remember how bad we crushed the Ravens in the playoffs?” He asks with a belch, referring to his last year. The Wildcats and Ravens are intense rivals. The Ravens are from the local private school. That year the regular season was coming out to a draw between the two. It was causing a stir in town and the local papers really played it up. When they finally faced off in the playoffs, Lewis was involved in many of the key plays that won the day. He was a minor town celebrity.

“How could I forget?” I reply. Lewis hands me another beer. He opens his sixth. “The parties were great that year.” I originally met Lewis at a party. We didn’t share many friends, but we started hanging out outside of school, especially if there was a party in town. If it was happening, he knew about it.

We recount party stories for the next couple hours, managing to unpack none of the boxes. When I am seriously buzzed, and Lewis is pretty tanked, he gets a strange look on his face and starts to tell a story I haven’t heard before.