Although I'm not proud of many of the daily choices that I made in El Paso, I'm deeply proud of one. I reached out to a homeless man, Robert. I'm reluctant to use the title "The Village Idiot" for this post because of idiot's current meaning, "stupid." However, originally idiot meant a "private person". I use it that way here, as does Van Morrison, in his song "The Village Idiot". The song honors someone like Robert, which is my intension here, and so, despite its common meaning, it is the perfect title.
I first saw Robert sitting on the curb outside the copying service I worked at on north Mesa Street, which I'll call All Night Rapid Fire Copies. I left work, and there he was sitting on the curb, bent over, long black hair, dangling over his face, almost touching the wet pavement at his feet. He had a stick and was drawing an invisible something on the ground. He wore a dark green trench coat and reeked something awful. It was winter; there was a cold mist that gathered around him, the pavement wet enough to reflect back the city lights in streaks of color and for the passing traffic to make soft, swooshing sounds. I wondered why he sat there getting soggy instead of finding shelter under the awning. And then I walked past and got in my car.
I was headed to Burger King just up Mesa Street to get my dinner. I must have been tired because I went through the drive-through, which was not my thing. At the last moment, I decided to get two meals instead of one. On the way home, I stopped back at the store, parked, got out, and walked a meal over to the man I would later learn called himself Robert. He glanced up, parting his thick black hair from his eyes and smiled a missing-tooth smile as I handed him his dinner.
Then I drove home, ate mine, and sat at my kitchen table before my old Apple IIC computer, writing and watching the green text move across the monitor as the faucet dripped.
I don't remember what I wrote. I don't think it had anything to do with Robert. Yet, I know he was there. Not because he was homeless. Vagrants were common to my neighborhood. I'd pass them walking all of the time. Sometimes I stood with them and watched the sun set behind the Juarez mountains from the gravel lot across the street and up the steps of a hill to a foundation where once a house sat. I-10 would be roaring below, a stream of white in one direction, a stream of red in the other. The transients would offer me drink from the community bottle, which I would politely decline, and they'd tell me about the train route between El Paso and California. I wouldn't judge them, and they wouldn't judge me. Neither did we care about each other's fate.
Robert, however, was different. Something about him drew me in, made me care. I'm not sure what it was, but he would remain a small but significant part of my life over the next four years.
No comments:
Post a Comment