There used to be a man named Farmer. He’s dead now. He died in a boating accident on Mirror Lake in Parkersville, Minnesota. He was fishing for bass. He was a good man. Fact. The obituary even said Farmer had been a good man. The priest said Farmer was a good man. Even the lawyers, when they added up what little Farmer had and calculated the mass of his influence on the world, said he was a good man. It is on those reports that I put this fact in this paper, because those documents made it true, affirmed it with cold calculations.

Once there had been a banner which hung over the Roman columns of the town hall in Parkersville. In big black bold letters it read, “God bless this sacred earth, and lead all men toward peace.” It’s not there anymore. On some cold October night a seventeen-year-old boy took it upon himself to climb to the top of the Roman columns and draw swastikas and poorly crafted parts of the male anatomy in dark blue paint. The boy was not a Nazi, and he was not an artist. The crime was committed for the simple reason that the boy had nothing better to do. They tore down the sign the next day. Nobody ever bothered to put a new sign back up.

There used to be a church in Parkersville. The people there used to be religious. But once they took that sign down, and once it was proven God could save souls but had no power when it came to mortgages, fires, speeding tickets, addiction, or elections, He was put to the side. People didn’t want something that was only going to play in one part of the sandbox. So now the church in Parkersville is an empty shell. The walls groan when the pipes freeze, and during dark nights there are strange echoes, noises like static from the opposite side of the cosmos.

There was a fence that ran in entirety around the perimeter of Parkersville. That fence is still there. Not to say that the fence hasn’t changed. In the old days, that is, the days of my grandfather, the fence was barbed wire. It had been set up by cattle ranchers long ago to divide the land. Somewhere between the time of my grandfather and the time of my father the fence changed again. They tore off the barbed wire and built a wooden fence all the way around. The wood was less menacing, and when they painted it with the finest coat of red paint, well, it looked pretty nice, too. In the days of my father, when romance was still real, young good-looking guys walked young good-looking girls the length of that fence, and when they would realize they had circumnavigated the entire fence and had therefore come to the end of their journey, they would share a kiss. People don’t walk around the fence anymore. People still kiss, just not around the fence.

In all its history, no adjective necessary (for it was not a glamorous history, nor a glorious history, nor a tragic history, nor a tame history, it was rather simply a history), the town of Parkersville, Minnesota had produced a total of three great criminals. There had been hundreds if not thousands of petty criminals. I’ve already mentioned one, but there were only three great criminals. The first was a man named Vince.

Vince was an electrician and had murdered his wife by rigging the toaster so when she put the English muffins into the slots, she got cooked more than the muffins. The funny thing was Vince went about his morning as usual. He put his singed wife into the chair next to his and ate his breakfast, toast, jam, eggs and everything. When his daughter came downstairs to go for school and she saw her mom all cooked at the kitchen table she started to scream. The screaming annoyed Vince, and he decided quickly how to return tranquility to the kitchen. There was a shotgun in the closet upstairs.

Krippin was not like Vince, but he was a criminal. He had once been convicted of breaking into a fine hotel in Chicago, tying up over twenty guests with rope and duct tape, and robbing over twenty thousand dollars in property and bills. The mistake Krippin made was duct taping everyone’s mouth but his own. Sometime in the midst of his great robbery he told the victims his name was Krippin. That was how the police found him. It’s hard to hide from your name.

The last criminal to come out of Parkersville was a man named Steven Sneaker. Steven became notorious for raping women and then beating them to death with his sneaker which he would then leave at the crime scene. Steven Sneaker, Vince and Krippin were criminals. Fact. The newspapers all said so. The juries did too. Justice had been paid to all the criminals of Parkersville. Vince got life, Krippin received twenty years and Steven Sneaker was put on death row. Justice had been fulfilled in Parkersville, but many people felt like justice was not enough. For many people, the streak of crimes seemed to have robbed Parkersville of its sense of decency.

There were some in Parkerville who thought that the last shot at decency the town had was a small diner located at the corner of Main St. and Central Avenue. Mr. Flipiano ran the local diner. His diner was decent. Fact. The reviews had said exactly that. The critic who had come to Mr. Flipiano’s restaurant said the food was good, the atmosphere was pleasant and the service fine. Nothing was great about Mr. Flipiano’s diner, but it was decent, and for a town like Parkersville where common decency was becoming harder and harder to come by, a decent place was all anybody really wanted.

***

When poets speak of winter they will often speak to its angry heart, and now in Parkersville was when February reared its venom spirited soul. The snow fell in torrents, the wind howled like werewolves morning the loss of their lover to the moon. And the cold! The cold was that kind of cold that has teeth and can tear at flesh to the point where it draws blood; that cold that made electricity stand still, fires die, and made the wet custom-fit jeans of a man who was stopping by Mr. Flipiano’s restaurant freeze to the seat of his car.

The man was hardly a man at all. His physique said he was one, but his youthful stride disagreed. The man-boy moved through the falling snow with bounce and a carefree zest. His thumbs dug into the upper lips of his frayed pockets. He strolled through the wild winter storm calmly, coolly, letting the blowing wind direct which way his body leaned. The man-boy had only stopped in the middle of the winter storm to get a quick bite to eat. He didn’t know the town of Parkersville well, and the place he found seemed decent enough.

The diner sat separate from the rest of the strip mall which had been built around it over the years. The building was older. It carried a more authentic look. The diner had been built before they covered the fronts of commercial buildings with concrete substitute they used in place of old fashioned bricks or clay siding. The siding of the diner was the same sheet metal it had been built with back in the fifties, and the painted aqua blue stripes that ran over the door and adorned the roof were the same stripes with the same coat of paint that had first been there over forty years before. The diner had risen out of the storm like a figure emerging from a burning house. It had stood out in the antique town as an established place. The diner was one of those revered places time had chewed around the edges but hadn’t had the stomach to finish off.

There was a bell on Mr. Flipiano’s door. The bell served as a prelude, the introductory note hinting at the melody ahead. First there was the bell, and then came the pork fumes, the simmer of greasy chicken skin in vats of fat oil, the sight of stripped beef propped up on silver stakes, all of these things guarded by the middle-aged man with five o’clock shadow laboring behind the glimmer of the metallic counter.

Over the years Mr. Flipiano had grown accustomed to his bell which had been there before he had ever set up shop in that store, but customers like the old man who sat snuggled at the corner of the shining counter with his hands wrapped tight around a cold cup of coffee found the high pitched ringing reminiscent of the school house horror of nails on the black board, or giving off the same skin crinkling feeling that rubbing styrofoam across your face gave. The old man wouldn’t tell Mr. Flipiano that though. Just like he wouldn’t tell him he had seen his son smoking dope behind the school the other day, or point out that his wife spent a lot of time at the video store when there were no videos to buy. The old man had some ideas why, but he wouldn’t tell them to Mr. Flipiano. No way. Nobody was going to say anything about that because that would have been a hard thing to say, and real conversation had died before the old man was even born.

“Can I help you?” Mr. Flipiano asked the kid. With the man-boy’s entrance, there were only the three of them in the restaurant. The rest of the world might not have existed.

“Uh, ya man, but I just came in for a bite, you know, and then I’m heading out again.”

“Aren’t you worried about the storm?”

“No way, man. I got four-wheel drive. I can drive in this shit.”

“Hah,” the old man laughed. “You kids and your four-wheel drive. You think God cares what kind of wheels you have.”

“Hey old man, I don’t care what kind of wheels I have,” the man-boy laughed. “I just like have ‘em, you know. And because I do, I can drive in any kind of shit God decides to throw at me.”

The man-boy joined the old man at the counter, slamming his hands down onto the metal, drumming out an adolescent beat. A sliver coated butane lighter dropped from the palm of his hand clinging as it struck the counter. The man-boy slid a pack of Camels from his coat pocket as Mr. Flipiano handed him a menu. The man-boy glanced out the corner of his eyes at the old man’s plate. He had a very dry looking pot roast, the remnants of redskin mash potatoes, and stale bread. The old man had finished eating almost an hour before the man-boy got there, had remained drinking his coffee and engaging in small talk with Mr. Flipiano. The man-boy had interrupted.

“It doesn’t snow like it used to, Mr. Flipiano.” The old man sighed, glancing out the window. “In the good old days it knew how to snow. Big flakes. They were the kinds of flakes you could see a design in. Those were the days when it used to really snow. It hasn’t snowed like that in, what, twenty, thirty years. I remember you used to be able to stand in the midst of those big falling flakes for the longest time, and no matter how long you stood, only one would ever land directly on your nose. Sometimes the one came really fast, and other times you had to wait and wait and wait, but no matter how long you were out there, one flake would only ever land on your nose. Nowadays all we get is this goddamn blowing freckle snow. That’s not real snow.”

“I agree with you old man. There hasn’t been a real snow in a while.”

The old man suffered from one of his flashes right then. Speculation. I do not know if this occurred, but I am able to speculate with some certainty to its occurrence because I have verified that the old man suffered from these flashes from time to time, and now, while reminiscing about the snow, I speculate he might have suffered one right then. It’s a fact that with each passing day the flashes seemed to be becoming more frequent. This particular flash was stronger than usual. During a typical attack the old man might be able to smell the scene that had suddenly shot to the forefront of his conscious memory. Smell only. He might capture a hint of the Queen Anne’s Lace flower that grew so well in the summer sun, a whiff of smoked, pork rubbed in Caribbean spices. But today there were more than smells. There were sounds. Like a blind man he groped the memory that attacked him with such vigor. What the memory was exactly, he was never sure. Life that had passed. That was all the memory revealed. He was an old man with memories that attacked without warning. Just as brutally as it had come on, the memory receded, and the old man took a long sip of his coffee.

“Can I have the Rueben,” the man-boy asked Mr. Flipiano as he handed back his menu. Mr. Flipiano went behind the counter while the man-boy waited for his meal. The old man sat in silence for a moment, staring into the bottom of his empty cup of coffee as if trying to read what the leftover residue had to say about his future.

“The world has all gone to shit Mr. Flipiano,” he groaned.

“Oh come on old man. It mustn’t be that bad.”

“But it is. Have you gone to the movies lately? Have you seen the kind of slime balls that hang around there, and not to mention the crap they actually make. Back when I was a kid they didn’t bother making crap because they knew no one had the stomach for it. That’s how the world has changed since I was a kid Mr. Flipiano. People have no problem eating crap anymore. They shovel shit in by the mouthful.”

Mr. Flipiano gave the man-kid his sandwich and silently refilled the old man’s cup. When he put it back in front of the old man, the old man wrapped his hand around the mug graciously and continued to sip and then stare at the pit of black liquid until his eyes crossed. The old man was old. Opinion. I can’t find in any newspaper the fact that the old man was old. There is no set age for when a man passes from simply being a man to being an old man. I say he was an old man because his skin was like a wrinkled paper bag, and his eyes were set back in his skull. I say he was old because he talked about a past nobody remembered, and nobody could say for certain whether that past he spoke of was true. And having such a multitude of unverifiable stories made the man pitiful and weak.

“So kid, where you going?” Mr. Flipiano asked. The man-boy slid a cigarette out of the pack. With a graceful flick of the wrist he lit up. The steam of the old man’s cup and the smoke from the cigarette combined, dancing in the air like vaporous ghouls. The old man took out his own pack of cigarettes. Pretty soon both young and old men were smoking. Mr. Flipiano sat back inhaling the toxic fumes of the kitchen grease pits.

“Ah, you know, there’s a big party just a few miles north of here. This girl I hooked up with last week is going to be there. She was like fucking hot, you know.” A cloud of smoke engulfed Mr. Flipiano’s head.

“Big party? Isn’t it a little late? It must be getting on to midnight,” he said sucking in the smoke.

“Ah, come on, man, the night is young, and that girl was like fucking out of this world.”

“Was she?”

“I mean, I don’t like remember much about her. I don’t remember much of anything from that night. A lot of drinking going on, you know.”

This was a drastic understatement. Fact. There are eyewitness accounts of the man-boy’s antics from that night. The man-boy had so much to drink that he had taken a shower at the house the party was at, shaved, and made himself a blueberry and ham sandwich before he had hooked up with the girl he spoke about now. He had broken a chair, someone had cut off their finger, and clothes went off and on like lights during a thunderstorm. That had been the kind of party it was, and that was the kind of drinker the man-boy was. Sometime during the course of the night the man-boy had stood up and announced to the party, “I’m not like a relationship guy. I just like hookups. So anyone else who wants to get this thing on, let’s go!”

“But this girl was like real nice from what I remember,” the man-boy continued. “And sexy as hell. Brown hair. Real long brown hair. Uh, slim, ya you know, slim. Nice body. I mean a nice fucking body.” The old man let out a grunt. The man-boy laughed before saying, “I suppose you’re like some sort of fag, right old man.”

“I’ve only ever appreciated one girl, kid, and you had better show her some goddamn respect.” The old man hadn’t knocked his cigarette yet, and the ember burned a deep shade of orange.

“Hey old man, you’ve been shooting your mouth off about me ever since I walked in. Are we going to have like a problem here?”

“Cool it kid,” Mr. Flipiano said. “The old man’s right. He did only care about one girl. Loreen, isn’t that right old man? Loreen was your girl.”
The old man squinted at the warped oak ceiling. He counted back on his fingers. “She died fifteen years ago next Thursday,” the old man said solemnly. “She was the only girl I ever have loved,” he sipped his coffee, “and the only girl I ever will love.” He chuckled an old man kind of chuckle, the kind that rises up from deep in the abdomen from another time and place. “Think about that Mr. Flipiano. Only one person in an entire lifetime was ever the right match for me. That’s pretty amazing. All the people in all the world, and there has only ever been one to go with me. Kind of makes you think, doesn’t it? What are the odds that we should have met? If we went back and did it all again would we be so lucky? Say our paths had never crossed. Where would I be? Would I be sitting here alone in this diner around midnight talking with you?”

The old man’s question faded into the cold night air. The physical sound itself died away and was buried in that graveyard where rhetorical questions and angry prayers went to lay in peace, but the old man’s message remained, and it rang in Mr. Flipiano’s head like the bell over his door. Only this ringing was not a sound one could grow accustomed to after years of listening. The ringing in his head was a composition composed by demons, a torturous sort of melody that refused to relinquish or provide a softer answer. It was not the idea of where the old man might be that scared Mr. Flipiano, but rather where the old man was. He was there, in that diner as he said. For the old man that wasn’t a bad fate. Surely a man who has lived through wars, natural disasters, what we call life, can imagine a worse place to be than a cozy diner in the middle of a wintry night.

The problem was that Mr. Flipiano could have thought of so many better places to be. This is speculation. I have sources who have said that Mr. Flipiano’s family ties are strained, so I speculate that he could picture himself curled next to his wife on their bed, lying there peacefully, listening to the secret sound of falling snow. Or perhaps he would be sitting on the couch watching Leno when his son would walk through the door, and they would sit together for an hour or so just talking. How lovely it would be to talk with his son. Just talk. About anything. He would be glad to hold any sort of conversation. It didn’t even have to be conversation. A look would be nice. His son walking into the room, and giving the confirmative nod, the lucrative wink that told his father that as the lights had dimmed in the crowded movie theater that night he had interlocked his fingers with the girl sitting next to him. That look that confirmed that as the hero was being beaten by the ambivalent forces on screen, his son had slid his arm around the girl to console her further, to remind her that she was sitting safely in a theater next to him, and how before the credits rolled, when all was good on the silver screen, he had leaned in and kissed her. And inside the sons look was the memory of those lips, their…realism…real lips.
Tender, yes, but still chapped, still having worn the brunt of everyday life. Mr. Flipiano dreamed of the day his son would come home and look at his father that was reminiscent of kissing real lips, grasping at love in a deperate moment before the credits came to the screen. That would be nice.

“Fuck man! You’ve only laid one girl in your entire life?” the man-boy exclaimed at the old man who was under attack by another memory. This one a memory of how his one girl had smelled like fresh strawberries and how her back felt like ripe peach fuzz. “Good god man! You were deprived. I don’t know how many girls I’ve laid over the years, and there’s at least like 11 women I could see myself marrying someday. Maybe I’ll marry one, get like tired of her, you know, and move on and marry the next one. I’m not too worried about it right now.”

“You’re just a punk,” the old man said.

The man-boy looked at Mr. Flipiano for some defense, but Mr. Flipiano, angered by his own situation at the diner said, “He’s right kid, you are a punk.”

Mr. Flipiano was washing a plate by the sink. In the reflection of the plate he saw a man come to the door, look in, see the old man, the man-boy, and himself, and slowly turn away. Surely he had been hoping at such a late hour, and in such inclement conditions, to be the only one out for a bite to eat. Many people prefer solitude. Many people would rather be alone than find themselves with bad company. It is those people who take no risk who the rest of us call lonely. The man was lonely. Opinion.

“I’m not a punk,” the man-boy said.

He knew then that he had picked the wrong diner to stop by late that night. Speculation. I have only the rudimentary facts of the young man who stopped by Mr. Flipiano’s diner that night, only the facts I have been provided by those who saw him. From those facts I have gathered that the man-boy may have been more than he seemed. I speculate that he had purposely chosen not to drive through Taco Bell or Wendy’s. He had meant to look for a homey looking place—a warm place. Perhaps his goal that night had been to find a place a step above the abysmal, dirty atmosphere of the fast food venue. He could recall so many nights sitting alone at a filthy table, flies hovering around the soda machine, open ketchup packets smeared along the silver countertops, the minutes creeping by like a passing shadow that you are not even sure is real or merely a figment of your mind as the blinding white of the bare wall forces you to blink.

Those were the nights when it didn’t matter what sort of party you had come from or what sort of wild adventure you were heading for, the night was still night. Black, absorbing, omnipotent, total and complete. That was night. The man-boy recalled a party when he had been lying with a girl in a brightly lit room. They had been lying there, shirts off, buttons open, and the lights, they were glaring as bright as the sun in mid-July. But the sun began to fade as the man-boy laid there with his girl.

At first he had thought somebody was turning down the lights, but then he realized it was not the room that was getting darker, but his own mind. He could feel his brain slowly shutting down, winding to a frightening still. His neurons slowed as if his synapses were slowly turning into a thick paste. He reached out for the girl next to him and she was not there. He sat up and fell down. The world darkened. And there was this light and then it wasn’t there. Black. Dark. An eclipsing shadow, an empty vacuum. Like space. The man-boy pictured opening the door to an empty room where the walls are painted black, opening a window to a starless night, opening a mailbox without mail. He tried to scream. But there was only silence, a piercing silence which reverberated off the black walls and made the airless atmosphere shrill.

Slowly the darkness retreated. Like a shifting tectonic plate, the room slid back into view. There was the girl. There was the party. There was the light and its stinging brightness. There was the diner. There was the old man staring at him. He had come to the diner looking for peace, looking for a way out of that darkness, that vanity. Why did they judge him? Didn’t they know he only wanted peace? Didn’t they know he was only seeking some means of gentle salvation? Didn’t they know? Didn’t they know that he wasn’t a punk? He wasn’t a kid. He was a man. Why didn’t they treat him like a man? But these thoughts, of course, are nothing more than speculation.

“You’re a punk just like all the punks who live in this town now,” the old man said. “I don’t know where you all came from. It’s like you landed in a ship and you invaded. All you punks are all alike. You all carry the same disease. You have the natural ability to make beautiful things ugly. I kissed Loreen for the first time next to the fence around the town. Look at that fence now, all covered in graffiti. That fence used to be a place where people could love, but they won’t get near it now. When Loreen died I put flowers all around her grave, and I would go every night and light candles. Loreen loved candles. I don’t know how many damn candles I have in boxes now. The problem was we never had enough candlesticks. Candles are cheaper than candlesticks. I learned that trying to keep up with the number of candles Loreen would collect. One night some punk like you showed up and decided to use the candles to burn designs in the grass. It’s hard to see now, but it’s there. Oh, it’s there. Over my wife’s grave, in burnt grass, there are the words, ‘Fuck you.’ That’s what you punks like to do. You make beautiful things ugly.”

“Hey, man, I’m not the punk who messed up your wife’s grave old man.”

“But you agree now, you are a punk.”

“Hey guys, settle down will ya,” Mr. Flipiano said angrily. He was usually one to enjoy conversation, but it was his personal pet peeve when people became angry. He hated anger, and tried to avoid it as often as possible. In an effort to diffuse the situation, he took one of the man-boy’s cigarettes. When the old man spoke again there were three different clouds of smoke swirling, intertwining like lovers in the air.

“Alright, I’m sorry kid. I don’t mean to judge you, it’s just that…well…the world is changing, don’t you think Mr. Flipiano?”

“I think Bob Dylan is from your time old man, and he already sang about that, you know,” the man-boy said, sarcastically.

“No, old man,” Mr. Flipiano said, “the world is…”

“Dead.”

“Growing.”

“Dying.”

The three people sat in silence considering the three words thrown onto the table to describe the condition of the world. The smoke cloud rising from the three engulfed the room.

“The world isn’t dead. We think up new shit every day. We like know more now than we like did before, you know. The world is booming, man.”

“No, punk, the world is dead. Remember that church, Mr. Flipiano?

“I do.”

“That used to be a fine church. What is it now, Mr. Flipiano?”

“That church is dead, old man.”

“That’s right. The shutters are closed on every window, and the door is nailed shut. The people ran away from God, and religion in this world died. People always take note of when other people die. They never notice when the big things go.”

“The problem is that there are no more good people left in this world,” Mr. Flipiano said.

“Ah, there’s a fine point. All we’ve got are these punks, Mr. Flipiano. They aren’t making this world any better. Just listen to the way he talks. Not that he has anything to say, but they can’t even talk anymore. That’s just a shame that is.”

“I can like talk just fine old man.”

“Farmer. He was the last good man,” Mr. Flipiano announced. “Do you remember Farmer?”

“Oh yes. How can you not remember Farmer? You’re right, Mr. Flipiano. He was the last good man. After he went,” the old man waved his hand through the air, “everything started to go. As soon as he was gone the crime started. Remember that awful streak of crime? This town has blood on its hands. That never should have happened. I guess it took a man like Farmer to keep things in check.” The man-boy stood up from the table. He had left all the crust like a child.

“You two are crazy,” he said, stomping out his cigarette on the metal counter. “You talk about one man like he was a king, you know. You fucking talk about the past as if it was like the now. The past is over you fags. This is the future, you know. You can’t like cling to the fucking past. You have to move like the fuck on. You only think the world is dying because you’ve never fucking lived. You’ve never like been to one of the parties I’m on my way to. You’ve never been with some of the chicks I’ve been with. You’ve never gotten to know the present world, you know. That’s why you’re so like fucking depressed. You don’t like know what we have out there now.”

“Sin,” the old man peeped out in almost a whisper as he too smashed down his cigarette.

“I’ve had enough of this shit,” the man-boy announced. “I’m going to my party now.” He threw his coat over his shoulders and stormed out. He left the silver butane lighter and pack of cigarettes behind on the counter.

“He left his cigs on the counter,” the old man grumbled.

Mr. Flipiano took one last long drag before tossing his smoke into the sink. “I’ll take it to him,” he said.

“You don’t have to,” the old man argued. “I mean, there’s no need. He wants to be careless, fine. Let him be careless.”

Mr. Flipiano didn’t answer. He snatched up the abandoned items and chased the man-boy out the door. The freezing air hit his skin like a wall of hot knifes falling on his body, and when he sucked in to call the man-boy back the wind numbed his lungs. His spit froze.

But the man boy had trudged too far for Mr. Flipiano’s voice to cover in the storm, and so Mr. Flipiano followed the deep tracks in his worn down sneakers and stained chef’s apron until he found the man-boy’s Jeep parked high on a snow bank. The front lights flickered as the engine wailed against the fury of the storm. Mr. Flipiano rapped his knuckles against the window. Man-boy opened the door and stuck his head out.

“What?”

“You left these,” Mr. Flipiano said.

“Oh.” The man-boy looked at the cigarettes. “Thanks.” He took the cigarettes, gave Mr. Flipiano a little half wave and shut the door. He drove off, the red tail lights illuminating the snow tossed up by the wheels like hot sparks.

Mr. Flipiano returned to the diner. He knocked his sneakers on the old walls before going back behind the counter and taking the old man’s plate.

“You didn’t have to do that,” the old man said.

“Nobody has to do anything, old man, but sometimes we do the things that aren’t necessary. Sometimes it’s just the right thing to do.”

The old man nodded before saying, “Oh, Mr. Flipiano, I don’t know what to do anymore. There is no place for us in a world like this.”

“I know. I know.”

“Do you think those old days will ever come back Mr. Flipiano? Do you think there will ever be a man like Farmer again, or a church we can all pray at, or a fence we can kiss our true loves around? Do you think those things will ever come back?”

“With punks like that leading the world? I don’t think so. But don’t worry old man. I always keep one positive thought in my head.”

“What’s that Mr. Flipiano?”

“It’s this. No matter how many Farmers die, no matter how many churches are abandoned, no matter how many men murder, no matter how many fences rot, no matter how many signs are vandalized, no matter how man punks are out there throwing this life away, I always am proud that I have been myself. I have this one pleasant thought that I feel has kept me alive to this point. I have tried to be, for the most part, a decent man.” The old man nodded his head. His cup was empty once again.

“You are a decent man Mr. Flipiano. That’s a fact. I say it is.”

“Thank you, old man. You’re not so bad yourself.”

The conversation died down. The old man didn’t ask for his cup to be refilled. For a while they both sat listening to the wind whistle as it blew through the cracks that had formed in the corners of the diner after so many years. Mr. Flipiano dimmed the lights. He had a home. He had a family. But they wouldn’t miss him. He would stay as long as the old man wanted to stay.

“What time is it?” the old man asked.

“Probably getting past midnight by now.”

“Well, I guess I’ll be going then. Wouldn’t want to keep you here all night.”

“No, wouldn’t want that. Goodnight, old man.”

The old man nodded his head and walked out. It was a fact that the old man had walked out of hundreds of thousands of doors in his life. This fact had been recorded by an array of acquaintances, friends and strangers. They were doors of all types, tall doors, short doors, doors with crystal handles and doors with ornate knockers. There were metaphoric doors and doors that had really meant to be windows. Tonight the Mr. Flipiano added one more door to the list as the old man walked out of the diner. Just another door. Just another memory. Just another…

Mr. Flipiano sat down on a stool. The lights were off now and the walls reflected the silvery glimmer of the fresh snow. The frost turned the windows blue and made the floor so cold he began to feel the chill in the soles of his shoes. That was when he left the diner. Opinion. There were no people present to give a firsthand account of Mr. Flipiano’s exodus from the diner that night. Had he left then and shown up at his home, his wife and son would not have reported the fact, and so I am left only to assume that wherever Mr. Flipiano went, when he left the diner he was at least able to say with absolute certainty that if he should die right then, at his funeral, in his obituary, the journalist who would report the facts of the case, would conclude from the facts present that Mr. Flipiano had been a decent man.