Who Is Steve, and What Did He Do?

Steve came up again on Tuesday. He always does. Someone on the block will be mid-sentence about the weather, and then it's “well, you know, after what Steve did,” and everyone nods like they were there. This author was not there. This author has never met Steve.

We started where any serious inquiry starts: the corner of Passyunk, where a man eating a cheesesteak told us Steve moved the cones. Whose cones, we asked. He looked at us like we'd asked what water is. Everyone knows the cones. The cones were savesies. Steve, allegedly, did not respect the savesies.

Two rowhomes down, a different account. Here it was not the parking spot at all but a trash can — specifically, a trash can that ended up in front of the wrong house on a windy Thursday, and stayed there, and was never claimed, and is somehow Steve's fault. A woman watering her step swore the can “had his energy.”

The group chat tells a third story. We were shown one hundred and forty unread messages, most of them the eyes emoji. Around message sixty, someone typed “is anyone going to say something to Steve or not,” and the chat simply moved on to who was bringing folding tables. Steve was never addressed. Steve is never addressed.

Then there is the block party. Nobody will speak on the record about the block party. A man near Broad Street began to explain, stopped, looked both ways, and said only that “the situation was resolved, but not by Steve, and not for Steve.” He then went inside and did not come back out.

We have theories. We have no Steve. We have a neighborhood that agrees, completely and without exception, that something happened, and disagrees on every single detail of it. Somewhere south of Snyder, the cones are still out. The can is still there. And Steve, whoever he is, is still going to hear about it.