We don’t really know much about Nick “The Beardâ€. He showed up at a table at Jackrabbit Slim’s one day when myself, Dirk Hanky, Slip Risky and Jimbob Jim were sitting around drinking Lone Sparks. His zoot suit was noticeably disheveled, and a single tuft of his beard was missing, as though it had been pulled out by hand. “Cool if I sit with you guys for a minute, it’ll just be a minute,†he said, doing a respectable job of masking the Sicily-via-Newark accent that slowly unfurled as that minute stretched into a welcome round after round of Gibsons and Glenfiddich neats. We never really learned much about The Beard that night, and I think an unspoken membrane of ostrich-sand bliss has put it in our minds to this day that the blood on his impossibly tall Merovingianesque collar was the result of shaving.
Since then, none of us has ever seen The Beard in that or any suit again. No one has asked why he speaks Italian when he is drunk and says “FUCKING VERONA†like a Capulet. We don’t know how he ended up here, beyond the last little bit of passable sidewalk where Texas becomes Tejas; we know he has a past, but we all do. We are content to let The Beard live among us now in khakis and jeans and t’s that seem to befit him better with each passing day; with a life a bit more dusty than he seems used to. He’s lots of smiles, quick with a joke or to light up your smoke.
But once, I stood silently behind a palisade while he watched the sun rise east over a plantation. With both our irises burned by Ra, I couldn’t much make out if the glimmer on his cheek was the sad release of a homesick man or just the salt of work. “I used to have to look south to see this,†he turned to me and said, “I used to look to the south.â€
-Ryan Clark
