Originally Posted by
manker
For a short while, I was a landlord of a pub when I was 22 and training to be an accountant.
There was this unemployed guy, a few years older than me, who used to come in several hours before it got busy and we'd chat. I remembered him from school, he used to date this gorgeous girl who lived above the local shop. He was fucking her, the 14 year old me wished I could. So there was that we had in common.
He'd tell me stories about stuff and he had this unusually earnest way of looking at you while you were talking. You'd finish and he'd be incredibly interested in the periphery details of your tale. You daren't embellish anything as he'd want explanations of the different facets of everything you told him. He told me some great tales about the local girls, I doubted their veracity but upon my tentative enquiries, they appeared to be completely true.
The python machine (the mechanism which makes all of the beer pumps dispense beer) broke. I didn't know how to fix it, the brewery told me to wait til Monday and I didn't have any money to call out someone. This guy, Dean, went down to the cellar and fixed it in about ten minutes. He'd never seen a python machine before but it transpired that he did eighteen months of an engineering degree - so then we got talking about his life; he'd been kicked off the course for fighting with a lecturer and between then and now been declared unfit for further education or employment and was living off benefits.
They'd put him on medication and warned him that if he got into further trouble, they'd increase the dose. I didn't really think anything of it at the time. I talked to him most days, I'd tell him about something I was having a hard time with and he'd usually come up with a solution which was completely outside my thinking, his brain worked completely differently - probably better - than my own. He got friendly with my friends and came out with us. But he kept getting into fights. He just loved fighting, which wasn't a problem as everyone has fights where I live. No one has guns or knives.
So, very interesting guy. Great to talk to, very clever, quirky and different.
He eventually got arrested, they sent him off to some asylum and when I saw him next, he couldn't remember my name. Now he weighs about 25 stone and still can't remember my name.
He seems happy, though.
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