Yesterday, Crazy Guy, with a three inch diaper pin through his nose and a Elmo hand-puppet on his hand, said a most friendly "Good morning, how are you today," as I walked by his morning post at Lincoln Place and Eighth Avenue next to the Montauk Club.
My dear friend and office mate wrote, "Crazy Guy says hello to me as well. He waved to me today as if we were
friends. I’m afraid to talk to him, though. I say hello back but
quickly look away so he won’t be compelled to say anything more to me."
And he never does.
I wonder how many people are aware of Crazy Guy. Surely the morning commuters on their run-walk to the Grand Army Plaza station notice him. He must be part of that daily blur of people that we see our way to the places we need to be.
They are part of our mental landscape, in the periphery like the cast iron indians on the Montauk Club fence. We may focus on them for a moment but then, just as quickly, we put them out of our mind.
The Scholarly Homeless Guy was sitting near Joe’s Pizza yesterday highlighting paragraphs in a dense academic textbook. He looks pretty good lately; his rumpled preppy clothes are relatively clean, his face clean shaven. I get the sense that he vascilates between various states of mental illness. Sometimes he looks almost functional and coherent. Other times he is definitely lost in his own world. Sometimes I have to resist saying hello to him. "Hey, what are you reading?" But I stop myself from an easy familiarity with someone I don’t know, who doesn’t know me.
It’s been ages since I’ve seen William Burroughs, the older man who sits on a step next to Starbucks. "Can you spare some change?" He asks in a deep whisper. Sometimes I don’t register it until I’ve walked by. With his dirty trenchcoat and mournful face, he’s been in the neighborhood as long as I have.
I like to think that Park Slope is a hospitable place for this small community of vagabonds. They seem to stick around for a long, long time. Part of the scenery, you might say. Crazy Guy never asks for anything. Nor does Scholarly Homeless Guy. William Burroughs obviously needs some help to get by, as does Smiling Man who panhandles on the corner of Berkeley Place and Seventh Avenue.
They’re part of this community, too.
“William Burroughs”‘s real name is Bob. He lives in a 4th-floor walkup studio next to my house in Garfield Place btwn 7th/8th. Doesn’t make it out too much except to panhandle. When he’s sick he tries to get me to run down to the corner for cigarettes for him. He also makes passersby carry up his groceries from Key Food. Once he came inside and played a few bars on my piano. He says he’s on disability of some kind. One unusual habit is that he never deposits his trash in the rubbish bins in front of his own house… always takes it to some other house on the block; unclear why.
Is Crazy Guy the one who ALWAYS says “nice earrings” when I pass by him on Lincoln Place?
Smiling Man, whose name is Jake, was featured a few months back in an article in a local neighborhood publication (I forget what it’s called), and on weekends likes to play doorman at the Citibank branch on the corner of President and Seventh. Sometimes in the morning, as I’m heading to the subway on Flatbush, I pass him coming out of the subway. Guess he commutes to work every day, too.
There’s another Smiling Man who stations himself at the B/Q train exit on Flatbush, and another very friendly guy who stands outside of the recently-much-improved Korean grocery next to the subway.
For the most part, our local vagabonds, as you call them, make me feel safe rather than menaced. I like to think Jake would come to my rescue if I was threatened in his vicinity, though I could be wrong.