Scary Stephen

I met Scary Stephen in a hostel in Sydney. For the record, that’s not his real name. I don’t want to use his real name because Scary Stephen scared the fucking shit out of me and I don’t want him to find me and rip my head off. Not that I think he’s one of the four readers of this blog. But, still, I’m taking no chances.

So, Scary Stephen.

I was in Manly, Sydney, to see a friend. I booked two nights at the cheapest hostel I could find online. There were options to stay in large dorms but I paid a little extra and went for a shared two-bedroom dorm in the hopes that I would have the room to myself. As you can guess, I didn’t have the room to myself. I was sharing with Scary Stephen.

When I checked in, the woman at reception said, “You’re in room 114 and you’ll be sharing with Stephen.” Immediately, alarm bells went off in my head. It was the way she said his name. “Stephen.” She exhaled it. I could tell that Stephen was a regular fixture at the hostel, and I began to wonder why.

As I climbed the creaky hostel staircase I started concocting a mental vision of Stephen. I told myself that he was probably homeless and stayed at the hostel whenever he could afford it. I imagined that maybe he was annoying, or regularly had run-ins with the staff, which is why the woman at reception didn’t sound so enthusiastic when she spoke his name. But then I stopped making assumptions because I felt like an arsehole.

I got to the room and opened the door. As expected, the room was really shit, which is what you get for $30 dollars a night. There were two small single beds side by side and two cheap blue wardrobes against the wall. Sitting on one of the beds was Stephen. Scary Stephen. And he looked scary as fuck.

Scary Stephen was huge. He must have been six foot five and about twenty stone of pure muscle. His biceps were like bowling balls. They were so big I reckoned he couldn’t touch his own back or wipe his arse. He looked like a WWE wrestler, or an overgrown anthropomorphised British bulldog.

Scary Stephen was bald and covered in tattoos that ran up his arms, neck and the back of his head. He wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Louis Theroux documentary about hardened criminals. Basically, he was the sort of person you don’t want to make eye contact with.

Scary Stephen stood up and introduced himself and shook my hand, which disappeared inside his. Scary Stephen’s voice was strangely high-pitched and he had a very pronounced stammer. It was like meeting a white Mike Tyson. If his real name was actually Scary Stephen, he would have pronounced it, “Thary Thephen.”

I quickly glanced around the room and noticed the lack of suitcase or backpack, confirming that Scary Stephen lived in this room. He also had food like salt, pepper, oats, cereals and tins of tuna on a shelf – things travelers don’t usually have. Beside his bed, Scary Stephen had black construction boots, workout equipment, a giant bucket of protein, and lots of little bottles of pills; pre-workout, ZMAs, amino acids, creatine and other brightly coloured bottles with various combinations of letters and numbers on them. He also had three books; two were biographies of Pablo Escobar and the third was titled The 48 Laws of Power.

Stephen wasn’t homeless, I told myself, he was most likely a recently released prisoner. (I just googled The 48 Laws of Power. The opening paragraph about it on Wikipedia says it’s “popular with prison inmates.”)

“What are you doing here?” Scary Stephen asked me.

“Just visiting a friend,” I replied.

He nodded his head. Maybe it was his resting hard bastard face, but my answer didn’t seem to please him. Clearly, visiting friends was something a little bitch does. Friends are for pussies, I gathered. I immediately regretted having friends. Friends get you killed.

Scary Stephen sat back down on his bed. I put my bag down on my bed, which was worryingly close to Scary Stephen’s. I knew it was going to be a rough night’s sleep lying next to this absolute unit of a man. An image flashed through my head of me as the little spoon and Scary Stephen as the big spoon. My arse cheeks tightened. I really didn’t want to be his bitch. Scenes from Shawshank Redemption replayed in my mind.

“I wish I could tell you Andy Dufresne fought the good fight and the sisters left him be. I wish I could tell you that. But prison aint no fairy-tale place…”

Scary Stephen reached under his pillow then pulled out a A4 writing pad and a pen and began crossing items off a checklist of some sort. Probably people he had killed and was planning to kill next now that he was back on the outside. The writing pad looked like a little police officer’s notebook in Scary Stephen’s baseball glove hands, the standard Bic biro like a bookie’s pen.

“Any plans for the night?” Scary Stephen asked me.

“Trying not to get shanked or raped by you. The usual.”

That’s not what I said. I told Scary Stephen I was going to take a walk and then get food and a drink somewhere with my friend. He nodded again disapprovingly, or so it seemed. Stupid answer. How could I have forgotten so quickly that friends are for pussies.

I didn’t bother unpacking. I told Scary Stephen I was going to look for the bathroom. He told me where they were. I didn’t go to the toilet. I left the hostel and breathed a sigh of relief.

That night I went for dinner with my friend, who left to go home at about ten o’clock. There was no way I was going back to the bedroom while Scary Stephen was still there, awake, being all fucking scary. So, I went for a couple of pints and then walked around for a bit. By midnight I decided I had lived a long and happy life and went back to my room and almost certain death.

Thankfully, Scary Stephen was asleep. He looked peaceful, like a sedated bull. I tried to imagine what he was dreaming about that made him seem so calm. Drowning puppies or burning down an orphanage maybe. Possibly both.

I got into bed with all my clothes on. It’s harder to rape a fully clothed person, I reasoned. Thanks to the drink I slipped off to sleep within seconds.

“FUCK! AAAARGGGHHH!”

I woke up suddenly to loud banging and shouting. It was bright out but only just. Scary Stephen was standing at his wardrobe, ferociously looking for something. He was slamming the wardrobe door repeatedly. Then he stormed across the room and started pulling drawers open in a rage and angrily rummaging through them. Whatever Scary Stephen was looking for, he really fucking wanted to find it, but couldn’t.

I tried to lie still but it was impossible to pretend I wasn’t awake. Scary Stephen kept cursing to himself.

“What the fuck?! Fuck! Fucking fuck!”

I was absolutely terrified. He started looking under his bed but whatever he was looking for wasn’t there either, so he ripped the sheets of his bed and threw them back down. A reasonable reaction. Then he pivoted to search the other side of the room again and kicked my bed on his way.

“Sorry mate. NNNNrrrgh!”

Scary Stephen took one last look in his wardrobe but didn’t find whatever he needed so slammed the door again. What the fuck was he looking for? I wondered. But to be honest I didn’t want to know. With a final slam of the wardrobe door, Scary Stephen ripped open our bedroom door and disappeared down the hallway.

I got out of bed as quick as I could, still with all my clothes on. I grabbed my small bag and made a break for it. It was 6:30 in the morning so reception wasn’t open. Even though I had paid for two nights I left my key on the counter and hurried out the door.

I checked into somewhere else and got a private room. For the rest of the day and night I hoped I wouldn’t bump into Scary Stephen.

Later that night, safe and sound in my private bed, I snuggled into the sheets, unclenched my arse cheeks and googled Scary Stephen’s real name with buzz words like “murder” “prison” “Sydney” “gangster.” I scrolled through Images wondering if his face would come up. But it didn’t. So, I put my phone away and opened my laptop and watched Mindhunter on Netflix – the Charles Manson episode – and slept peacefully.

*All photos of my room with Scary Stephen were taken in a rush as I fled for my life.