The Pope

We could barely understand each other.
His spouted slurred sentence after slurred sentence with such a thick Irish accent, that it was almost as if he was speaking in a different language altogether. I had to read his lips and violent hand gestures to try to piece together the story he was trying to convey.
His teeth were all but rotted away except for the two or three that stood triumphantly in his lower gums. They rattled in his crooked mouth, as his sermon echoed through the quiet night. The words leaped from his ugly face and bounced around the narrow street of row homes and parked cars, and I thought about asking him to speak in a lower volume but didn't want to offend him.
He was older, much older, and it was clear that his stories, fiction or not, were no match for anything I had to offer. He made it a point to cut me off at every attempt to change the subject.
Pulling a joint from his shirt pocket, he began telling me another story. A story of which was not pertinent to the current conversation in any way.
The yellowish light from the nearest telephone pole shined down on us like a spotlight; both of our bodies swaying on the edge of the curb threatening to topple. The wind was stagnant and I had run out of money for beer and I wanted to go home to bed, but the Irishman was the first honest person I had talked to in several days and I didn't want to rush our time together. I listened and responded to him intently. I could see that he was drunk, and I am sure he knew that I was as well. We probably looked and sounded like maniacs. We didn't mind.
"I'm a fuckin' skinhead, ya kno?" He abruptly mentioned while pointing down to his red Doc Martin boots.
"Oh, yea?" I offered rhetorically.
"Yea, I hate fuckin' racists tho, right. . . I became a skin in 1971. . . shaved my head, me and my lads."
He went on to tell me something about how the British were truly scum, and how lucky I was to not go through the hell that he had come from. I could understand some of the words, but some I could not, so I filled in his sentences on my own in my head.
"Yea, the fuckin British Army gotta fuck-load of us in those days. We once used a stolen forklift and an abandoned car as a barricade in a roit. Twenty of us beatin' em down, while three hundred others stood watch. One man would get tired of fightin' and another man would jump in. I'm tellin' ya. we would raid beer factories... a whole fuckin' mob of us."
I could hardly believe what he ways saying me. He demonstrated pining a British officer to the ground and pounding him with his fists, and boots and we both laughed out loud. His gestures were very quick and straight forward and being in his fifties, and at least one hundred pounds less than me, I was still certain that he could have killed me if he wanted to.
A few cars, and homeless people entered and exited my peripheral vision, but I was so locked in his eyes, and so enthralled in his war stories that I forgotten where i was where I was.
After he had finished his tightly wrapped joint and snuffed it with his boot he motioned towards the door as if to indicate that he was done talking to me. I didn't beg him to stay, but a part of me wanted to. I hung out for a while and stared at the miles and miles of black wire between the massive telephone poles. Where did the endless miles of rubber and wires lead to? New Jersey? Ireland?
The young men and women chatted and played with their cell phones in their metal chairs outside of the bar. They were my age, and I could hear two males talking about shoes. A group of attractive girls came to sit with them. I tried to block out their conversations and sit with the night, but couldn't. They were with me all the way. The doomed generation that Hunter warned us about. I sat on the stoop and thought about the my strengths and weaknesses as a man. I was ashamed again.
We were not hungry. We were not at war, we were not desperate to live, or ready to die. We were the plans and fine calculations of soulless parents. There were no oppressors or tyrants to force feeding us gasoline and burning our homes and families in the middle of the street. We would never riot, or rally together to defy an establishment. There would be no growl in our guts, spite in our eyes, or blood on our hands. Rather, we will go to bed, as always, as the unappreciative hypocrites we are, and let our comforts swoon us to sleep.