It had been a long day of travel and I was tired. I wanted nothing more than to find sleep early. Instead, I lay on my cot listening to the stories from the other room.
They’d introduced themselves when I arrived. There were a couple of kids from Norway – they’d bought the Budweiser I’d been offered when I entered; their naiveté apparent from their choice of beer. There were a couple of young kids playing at being hippies. Later on there were a couple of girls.
And there was Zephyr. He was in his mid-forties, soft around the middle, with a doughy face that might have once been attractive. It was a punchable face. He commanded the room with the authority of his bold proclamations and his years.
From my place on the cot, I could hear the respect in the hushed voices of his young audience as he told them of his participating in the Occupy movement, of how hard it was living in tents on the streets but how he’d found a beautiful woman who was crazy about sex and they’d made the best of it. He used ‘we’ a lot, implying he had played an important role in the planning of the movement.
There was amazement in the reverential tone of the questions and comments of these kids trying to experience some part of the world. It made my stomach turn.
Zephyr’s story was planned from the time he sat down. He’d asked leading questions of the Norwegian kids about their travel plans, maybe he’d shaken them down for the information earlier. Their answers led to New York, which led him into his story.
To hear him revel in his telling was to understand the insecurity of aging and why the movement had failed.
