Steve, the Silver Car, and Superman
I think anyone who has ever worked at a bar, restaurant, coffee shop, or anywhere, really, that the public is known to frequent, could name a couple of regular customers who stick in their memory and refuse to leave. Sometimes it’s the customer who never once looks at you, because he’s decided you’re beneath him. Maybe it’s the person who insists on showing you cat photos every time they come in because, well, those were yesterday’s cat photos that you saw and today is another thing entirely. Sometimes it’s the person who saw you with kindness and said something that kept you from breaking after six hours of serving beverages.
But sometimes, regulars are memorable because of what they show you. Not the cat photos. What they show you as a person. I don’t remember the first time I saw him, but I was seventeen and working at a coffee shop, and a man named Steve came in. He stood out immediately amongst the Lycra cyclists and the L.L. Bean fleeces and the families with gaggles of children. His daily uniform was a loose t-shirt and absurdly (almost scandalously) short running shorts, and a gleaming smile that he put forward without hesitation.
Steve. I’m not sure he ever purchased a single coffee in the couple of years I knew him. His routine was to enter, scan for an employee he knew, usually me, and hand them a bag of fresh fruit. He’d lean forward, conspiratorially, whispering. “Hey, I brought this for you. Peaches.” Inside the bag was indeed peaches, or apples, or pears. Usually bruised. Almost certainly purloined from the market down the block. I knew I couldn’t just accept the fruit for free. No. I’d reach into the drawer underneath the cash register, swiping through pens and lost cell phones and old receipts, and hand him a small stack of free drink coupons. He loved those coupons.
I’m not sure if I ever considered at the time why Steve had zeroed in on me. Most other employees ignored him, or saw him as something of a nuisance. Not I. He was fascinating to me because I didn’t understand a single thing about him. He didn’t fit into any of the categories of customers I had created in my mind. He wasn’t a commuter, or an employee of a nearby business, or a student, or a family man. He just was.
It was only when I saw his car did his mystery deepen. It might have been a Honda, or a Toyota, or maybe a Mazda. Was it a Datsun? It had been stripped of any badges, made anonymous, kind of like Steve. Someone, presumably he, had spray painted it completely silver. It was a decent job, not professional, but not shoddy, either. He called it his race car. He’d park it in front of the coffee shop, come in, do the fruit/coffee exchange, then sit out in his car with his small coffee and just…be there. He wasn’t reading, nor did he seem to have a phone. But the car was part of Steve. Impossible to miss. Utterly unique. If you saw the silver car, Steve was close.
—
Breaks at the coffee shop were precious. You’d get two ten minute breaks, usually spent sitting on an overturned milk crate in the back, staring at the wall and letting your feet throb. But the thirty minute lunch? You could do anything. The best choice was to lay on the couch in the back room. It was made with a mercifully dark fabric and it smelled, like everything and everyone in the building, of coffee. I liked to escape the coffee fumes and go out and buy a sandwich and walk around. I’d sit in the square across the way and pretend I was just a person who wasn’t working. And that’s when my relationship with Steve became more than customer/employee. I no longer had the protection of the granite counter, or of my apron. We were equals.
He’d ask how I was doing, and I’d ask him too. He was always “great” with a big smile, and I’m pretty sure that was actually true. Over many of our conversations, it became apparent to me that I had no idea if Steve had a permanent living situation. It was quite possible he was sleeping in his car. He told me about how he would only be in town for the summer. In the fall and winter he’d go down to Mexico (though I think once, it was to Thailand) and enjoy the warm weather there. It made a lot of sense. After all, the man only ever wore running shorts. He wasn’t built for the cold. At one point he mentioned a girlfriend, and I was incredibly intrigued to meet her, but never did.
Now, twenty years later, it’s clear to me why Steve, a man in his 50s, itinerant, with an odd way of being, came to see me, the seventeen-year-old barista. It wasn’t anything creepy or predatory. It was because I listened. That was it. No one wanted to hear him ramble, and no one wanted to accept his fruit. I did both. Not out of charity (okay, well, maybe I didn’t want the fruit that much), but I listened to him because he was interesting. And, even more so, he was interested.
It wasn’t just the content of what he said that was interesting to me. It was the way that big smile would drop a little too quickly, and his eyes would squint, and they’d widen and I’d see sadness, almost a confusion. It sounds trite. The happy guy isn’t happy – he’s secretly sad. I don’t think that was it. He carried both, but in the confines of my teenage brain and the thirty minute lunch, I simply was not equipped to understand why he was sad.
One day, Steve came in and handed me a bag of fruit. He leaned in, as always, but this time he didn’t ask for coffee cards. He said, “I need to tell you something.” His whisper was quieter than usual, and he eyeballed the customers next to him. Would they hear? He leaned in further. “I am Zod,” he said, then stood back and watched my face. I’m pretty sure I didn’t react at all except for a polite nod. I had no idea who Zod was, but I gathered that he was some sort of supreme being, something not of Earth. His secret shared, Steve smiled again, and he was gone.
Zod. I went home and looked it up. My X-Men lore was, at best, at a B+ level. My Superman lore? Solid F. I knew about Superman and Lois Lane. Something about more powerful than a locomotive. That summed up my Superman knowledge in the year 2000. It’s not much better today. But I learned that Zod was an extremely powerful adversary of Superman. Like Superman, he was from Krypton. He had all the usual powers: flight, super strength, invulnerability. I didn’t know what to make of this. Does Steve actually think he’s Zod? He seemed serious. I knew about delusions of grandeur and psychosis. But Steve didn’t seem psychotic to me. He seemed kind, and like just another person moving through the world. Steve was at the whims of the weather and of seventeen-year-olds with coffee cards, and presumably, a produce section worker with their rejected fruit. He wasn’t powerful, or invulnerable, nor could he fly.
I talked to Steve many times after that, and he never again shared his secret with me. Why would he? I already knew, and I had accepted the secret respectfully, and kept it to myself. It wasn’t mine to share. The secret wasn’t funny, or pitiable, or absurd. No one would understand, anyway. It was just Steve.
A few months before my 19th birthday, I moved away, and I didn’t get to say goodbye to Steve. It was winter, and he wasn’t going to be in town. Over the years, I came back home a few times, and always, when it was summer, I would drive downtown, telling myself it was just to look around or see what had changed. Mostly, I was just looking for Steve. A few times, I found him. He had the same smile, the same lean-and-whisper, the same kindness. He wanted to know where I had gone and what I was doing in my life. He hardly knew anything about me, but when you’re nineteen and 9/11 happened and you dropped out of college, a man like Steve asking me how I was? It meant a lot. The few times I went back in my twenties, I always looked, but never saw him. I told myself he’d probably moved to Mexico. Maybe he could get the warm weather year round without the hassle. I wondered if his name had even been Steve, or if it even mattered.
I’ll be going to my hometown again next month. It’s been close to twenty years since I’ve seen him and his silver car. My parents are gone, and our house was sold years ago. But I’m going home to see what’s changed, and to look around and check things out. But mostly, I’ll just be looking for Steve.