Local barfly Gerald Hermann, known amicably as Uncle Jerry, gets away with telling whatever story he wants about his amputated arm. Hermann is a regular at the Hut, a popular hipster hangout in a demographically changing area. Only a couple of bartenders have knowledge of Hermann’s backstory going back more than a few years. To everyone else who enters, Hermann is a perplexing anachronism, wearing clothes that go back to the early 1960s, donning insignia from numerous unions and veterans associations and speaking in a vernacular that does not readily identify him with a time or place. The only certainty about him is that you can find him at the end of the bar, tippling on whiskey, telling a new story about how he lost his arm.
His tales of the arm that once was are numerous. Be it out of sympathy, respect or sheer entertainment, nobody ever challenges him on the facts of his latest rendition. Some say there is no story: He was born without an arm, and that’s it. Some say the truth is a composite of parts of multiple stories. And others say he is an old man with alcoholic dementia who misremembers the details of his life and has lost his thoughts to streams of wild invention.
His record of service, if it exists at all, is unknown. In an oft-repeated tale, he saw his best friends blown up by the [redacted] in the war. The Squeaky Wheel will not print this word, as tonal context indicates that he is probably thinking of a different word and that this word is an ethnic slur.
Another leading rumor is that Hermann took too much acid in his youth and merely hallucinated his best friends blowing up, then lost his arm in a subsequent accident related to fighting an imaginary creature known as [redacted].
Other nights he dips off and moans the names of presumed ex loves. Bartenders have hinted that the story begins with tragic, unrequited romance and ends with leaving the state to dodge the 13 warrants issued for his arrest. But they never tell the whole truth, because they’ve never heard it. Like the arm itself, it is only for Hermann to know.