Freddie Allen

On cool January nights, when the rain was coming down in coughs and spurts, dripping a cupful here and a bucket there, Freddie Allen could be found downtown at the corner of 7th and Boston Avenue, sitting alone in his corner of Stella’s Lounge, hiding behind the cigarette smoke of the patrons and the graying blue of his faded suit and listening to the jazz sigh lazily across the room. He came on other nights too, of course- he wasn’t a sight exclusive to Januarys or raining nights only. In fact, he could be found there in his corner most any season, his feet up on the table as he leaned back into his booth, puffing slowly on his pipe and reading a book so old the cover was no longer identifiable. Maybe January seemed to be Freddie’s month because it followed just after December, and December was the only month of the year when Freddie was never seen back at his corner. The first day of the New Year always marked his return, and it was always a strange comfort whenever December ended and his familiar face rejoined the crowd of hazing eyes and smoky coughs.
No one knew exactly where Freddie went during that last month of the year. To tell the truth, no one knew where he went at any time of the year. Every evening he was born new and fresh in the doorway, his suit dusted and straight and his pipe clean and alive with the sweet aromatic smell of pure tobacco, born when the sun sank low to the West and the stars came out over the plains. And, every night when those stars grew tired of staring down on the sleepy city where nothing new ever happened and they too sank down towards the West, he would follow them out the door, and we would sweep up the cigarette butts and bread crumbs and go home to rest a little while before coming alive again the next evening.
I once asked Freddie where he went after he left us in the cold morning hours, but he just looked at me in that way a learned gentlemen has of looking at a curious child and said “It doesn’t matter where I go. What I am and what I do out there don’t make one bit a difference to who I am in here.” Only once did I ever see Freddie outside Stella’s. It was one of those beautiful nights so rare in this part of the world where the cold brushing your ears and nose makes you feel alive, without that ever present winter wind to come along and make you wish you were dead. I was walking along a downtown street, the department stores all alight in holiday finery and a lovely young lady by my side, cheerfully thinking of how truly wonderful life was at the moment, when I saw him. He was sitting on an old soda crate in a deserted alley hidden between a warm looking coffee shop and a shining department store, huddled in a ragged blanket, his hands sticking out like frozen antennae, feeling towards a dying fire of paper cups and broken chair legs. For a split second I stopped, not daring to believe it. It couldn’t be him, the suave and polished gentleman who every night entered like a king and spoke with all the air of a philosopher. But there was no mistaking his white beard or his dusty glasses. For a brief moment I considered going to him, offering to help and asking him what had happened. But just as quickly, I realized that the most I could do to help him would be to leave before he saw me. And so, with a pain like the wind had finally had enough of its waiting in the plains and had at last decided to swoop down and bite my flesh to the bone, I hurried on, and stepped to a window, pretending interest in another Christmas sale.