Unexpected Expectations

He entered and wasn't what I expected. His clothes were wrinkled, hair a mess or what he had left up there was defying gravity, a smell of whisky wisped off his breath and an old typewriter teetered under his arm. It was the fact that he only had one arm, an eye patch, and a wooden leg that threw me off. How could he write with one arm? I welcomed him in and he hobbled over to my couch, threw himself down, and placed his typewriter on his lap. He slurred a story about his days in Nam, and began to fumble with a series of papers folded in his jacket. He needed to get some writing done before he met his editor tomorrow.

Slumping back into the kitchen, I dialed the phone.

"Mary, you won't believe this but Tyson Wilson is here."

"The Tyson Wilson?"

"Yes and he's not what I expected," I said. "He's a drunk."

"Got any food?" he yelled from the living room.

I covered the phone with my hand. "I'll make something," I yelled back, and then whispered into the phone. "He's a mess. Got-to-go. He's coming."

He limped into the kitchen and opened the fridge. After rummaging around the back recesses, he pulled out a jar of mayonnaise and pickles and walked past me without a word. I wanted to follow him to see what he was going to do with that combination, but I leaned on the counter and wondered what have I gotten myself into. After the second reverberating belch, he came back into the kitchen and began to open the cabinets.

“Can I help you with anything?” I replied with a bit of agitation.

“Do you have anything to drink?” he asked. “I didn’t see a liquor cabinet.”

“I don’t drink.”

He laughed as if it were a joke. When he noticed that I was serious, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “To each their own.”

How could this man write such glorious prose. He made me cry at the end of Capricorn’s Dream. He went back to his typewriter and pounded away at the keys. I’ve toiled over years of writing, holding his work like it was from a living god, and he’s a mess, someone I wouldn’t lend a dollar to if I saw him on the street. Another belch erupted from the room. Was I fooled? I was determined to dig deeper and went into the living room. He was sprawled on the couch, typewriter balancing on his potbelly, and a pickle with mayonnaise draped at its end dangled in his mouth like a cigar.

“What are you working on?” I asked.

“The last bit of Leo’s Revelation,” he answered and reached for another pickle. He knocked over a stack of papers and they scattered on the floor.

Bending over, I helped gather them. The writing was a mess, spelling errors, run on sentences, words that didn’t exist littered the pages. He snatched them from my hand.

“No one and I mean no one reads my writing before it is complete,” he said and stared at me. I began to feel nervous and backed away. He swallowed the last of the pickle, slurped the juice from his index finger and went back to the couch.

“I’m going to bed,” I said and went up the stairs.

Shutting the bedroom door, I listened to him pound on the keys. I then went to the closet and dug under the dirty clothes on the floor for a brown paper bag. This guy wasn’t going to get the best of me, not under my roof. I found what I was looking for and placed it on my lap. I cracked my knuckles, slid in a blank sheet of paper, and began to type