The Man Who Always Wins

By Jaron Summers

At our senior center, lunch is inexpensive. The adventures are included.

I met Stan there about three years ago. Most of us came for exercise, companionship, and something to eat. Stan brought material.

In his stories, trouble had a way of finding him. Fortunately, trouble never understood whom it was dealing with.

There was the stolen motorcycle.

According to Stan, someone took his bike, overlooking a tracking device that led him to a rough neighborhood in El Monte. Stan went to the address and confronted a younger man, who claimed he had merely found the motorcycle.

Stan did not accept this explanation.

He told my friend Pepper and me that he beat the man and warned him of further consequences should their paths cross again under similar circumstances.

Then Stan went home.

I have written crime stories for television. I appreciate a protagonist who solves his own problems. It saves introducing a detective.

Still, a friend who is a defense attorney later raised a practical question. If Stan drove there alone, how did he get both vehicles home?

There might have been a perfectly reasonable answer. I hadn’t asked how he traveled there or whether someone helped him afterward.

Writers call this a loose end. Life is full of them.

Then came a conversation that had nothing entertaining about it.

After my wife and I returned from Canada, I stopped at the center and found Stan looking deeply upset. He told me his son, about thirty, had died.

He said he had gone to his son’s apartment and discovered the body. He described a disturbing scene and showed me photographs I wish I had not seen. He also gave me an account of the police response that left me with questions I could not answer.

I felt sorry for him. Whatever I thought about his other stories, I had no reason to treat a father’s grief as a performance.

During that conversation, I brought up the motorcycle incident. In a clumsy attempt to connect his earlier toughness with his present helplessness, I suggested he might go after anyone who had harmed his son.

Stan said he would not.

When I reminded him of the motorcycle story, he denied it.

“That never happened.”

I could not tell whether he meant the beating had never happened or that he had never told us about it.

Later, I called Pepper. He remembered Stan telling the story much as I did.

That established something modest but important: we both remembered hearing it. It did not establish that a motorcycle had been stolen or that anyone had been beaten.

Now there were two stories to consider—the adventure and its disappearance.

On October 20, I went to the center for lunch and spoke with Patrick, a locksmith.

Patrick recounted another of Stan’s adventures. As I understood it, Stan had told him about an elderly woman being cheated by a furniture salesman.

The woman had supposedly paid thirty thousand dollars for furniture worth only a few thousand. Another order of roughly the same size was in the works.

The complication was that she liked the salesman. A friendship had developed alongside the invoices.

Enter Stan.

According to the account Patrick relayed, Stan confronted the man, who pulled a gun. Stan took it away, shot him in the stomach, then shot him in the head and killed him.

Patrick and I were skeptical.

I had not heard this account directly from Stan, and neither of us had verified it. We had no date, location, police report, or other independent evidence before us.

But I recognized the casting.

A vulnerable person. A villain. Stan arriving just in time.

The rest of us might call somebody, fill out a form, or spend forty minutes listening to recorded assurances that our call was important.

Stan’s stories moved considerably faster.

I began wondering what he wanted from his audience.

Admiration? Attention? A little room at the table?

I cannot know. I am a writer, which qualifies me to invent motives for people I have invented. Stan presents a more difficult assignment.

Nor can I diagnose him. An improbable story does not tell me whether its narrator is embellishing, misremembering, believing something untrue, or reporting an extraordinary event.

What I can describe is my own changing response.

At first, I listened to the adventures.

Then I listened for the gaps.

Now I find myself watching the man telling them.

There is something sad about the possibility that ordinary life no longer feels sufficient—that a man must repeatedly rescue someone, defeat someone, or survive something extraordinary to hold the attention of the people eating beside him.

But even that is my interpretation. Stan might reject it as firmly as he rejected the motorcycle story.

For now, I can offer courtesy without supplying belief. I can feel sympathy for his loss without pretending I understand its circumstances.

And I can remember that a good story earns attention.

The truth requires something more.