Crazy Guy had all his friends with him today: Elmo, the Beanie Baby with the gold angel wings, the Lambchop puppet, the gooey, space alien finger puppets, and the green velvet frog with the long legs. Next to the entourage, there was a coffee mug and buttered roll on a napkin on the Montauk Club gate. I gather the man in the silver coffee cart gives him breakfast. "Hello, how you doing?" he said in his Miles Davis voice.
No surprisingly, Tuesday’s Postcard about Crazy Guy elicited quite a flurry of interesting information from readers of OTBKB:
"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."
Recently, I took issue with Smiling Man. I too read the article in that local neighborhood publication about Smiling Man (AKA Jake) and developed a really soft spot for him as a result. For a few weeks I was giving him semi-large sums of money because in the article it said that he needs $20 a day to eat and stay at a residential hotel somewhere in Brooklyn. One day, I gave him $10 and he thanked me warmly and smiled. Not ten minutes later I ran into him in a food store on Seventh Avenue and he asked me AGAIN like he’d never seen me before. I told him that’d I’d just given him $10 and he apologized. An honest mistake, I guess, but it sort of ruined Smiling Man for me.
Another reader shared information about the man I call "William Burroughs, whose 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.
Now I’m curious what William Burroughs played on the piano. Clearly, I’m not the only one who is aware of these neighborhood fixtures. They are so much a part of life on Seventh Avenue.
Like the guy who used to sit on a fruit crate in front of the Apple Market on Garfield Place. "Remember to read a book. Can you spare some change?" he would say to my son and daughter as we walked by. I thought it was a nice message and my kids always tried to give him a little something.
Familiarity with the homeless is all part and parcel of growing up in a big city. I grew up on the Upper West Side when that neighborhood was filled with refugees from the state mental hospitals. It was a madhouse on Upper Broadway, literally, with insane people who were homeless too, running wild, doing, well, crazy things. My father called them our "Neighborhood Nuts, the "Local Fruits." I would invent little stories about their lives and how they ended up that way.
And I guess I’m still doing that in my way. Some things never change.