A Brief Compendium of Our Encounters With the Homeless

One day the dishwasher Noah was taking out the trash. When he got to the dumpster there was the man who carried around an electric guitar case and had a mouth full of rotten teeth. He stood there eating from a bag that he had torn open. The food that we threw out compacted itself and was always very wet, so the man was eating a handful of food that no longer resembling its original form. He looked at Noah and growled with his mouth full of mush.

Sleepytime Andrew was also known as The Gatekeeper. You’d see him leaning against a pillar when you emerged from the 4th Avenue underpass. Night after night he would stand there with his hands in the crotch of his pants. After a time we let him sleep in the restaurant (we were 24 hours) because of the lot, he was the most harmless and by far the most timid. Someone told me they once saw him lying on a pile of rubble under a full moon illuminated by a bluish light getting blown by a hooker while he was completely naked. He had a high-pitched voice and ingratiated himself to everyone who worked at the restaurant. He had a manner similar to an abused child who was taken in by a family that didn’t beat the shit out of him. The inside of one of his bags that he carried around was lined with pens and he’d always offer me one if I needed it. I don’t know what happened to him after the restaurant closed its doors for good.

There was the guy who would stand outside the front of the restaurant, asking for change, his voice barely audible. We’d have to keep going outside to tell him to leave. Sometimes he would come inside, go up to tables and ask people for money. He’d threaten us when we told him to leave but he was far from capable of actually hurting anyone who worked at the restaurant. One night I was standing out front, late at night, smoking a cigarette and talking with someone when the front doors flew open and a short, muscular man had the homeless man in a headlock and threw him against his truck which was parked directly in front of the restaurant. Another night he was in his usual spot, asking people for money and cigarettes, and I repeatedly asked him to leave. He pulled a small fold-up knife on me and the other two people who were there, Jake, a waiter who worked at the restaurant, and Skye, a bouncer at a bar down the street. Skye pulled out a baton and Jake pulled out a large knife he kept on himself at all times. The homeless man looked at his knife and looked at the two guys holding much bigger weapons and ambled away. Jake ran after him while he was on the phone with the cops so he could provide them with an accurate description. The cops told him to stop following the man so he came back. Less than an hour later we were back out there taking a cigarette break when the man came back around the corner and asked us for a cigarette, as if the events of the last hour had never happened.

Cool Breeze was the most problematic that I can remember. He had just enough lucidity in him to try and engage in some logical defense of why he should be allowed to stay whenever you tried to kick him out. One afternoon he walked in, opened his trench coat and a pigeon flew out. It took us forever to get that pigeon out of the restaurant. One night during a drunken tear down 4th Avenue and downtown I spotted Breeze on the street and started following him, yelling about how horrible and shitty and how much of a problem he was to everyone who worked at the restaurant. A man and woman saw me doing this and the man told me to stop harassing the poor homeless guy and I told him that Breeze was way more of a problem than I could ever be. That was the first and maybe only time I had seen Breeze as the agitated and not the agitator.

Greyhound was nicknamed Greyhound because he would amble along at a leisurely pace but when he needed to he was able to run away and his speed was like that of a greyhound dog. One morning a couple of cooks from the restaurant saw him walking through the business district of downtown. People in suits walked by him on their way to offices while he was walking around, his penis hanging out, pissing as he went along. I once saw someone grab his head and smash it against a window. The window had a huge crack in it and he walked away as if nothing happened. He was rumored to have died in a dumpster.

There was the homeless man who always asked everyone for 75 cents. One night, quite recently, I was back home and walking through downtown. Two guys were walking ahead of me in conversation when they were approached by a homeless man. I didn’t recognize anyone, but when he started asking his question one of the guys cut him off “Yeah, I know. I don’t have 75 cents”: I witnessed a person unknown share in this sacred cult knowledge I thought only few of us were indoctrinated to. I recently heard that he had died as well but I’m not sure how exactly that would be known.

I met Crazy Joe when I was fifteen. He wasn’t known as Crazy Joe back then, that name came later. His mother owned or rented out a small one bedroom upstairs apartment that upwards of five or six kids were living in with him at the time. For his birthday one year someone gave him a meat hook. He hooked it on the transom and hung from it until it couldn’t bear his weight any longer, broke, and he fell, the heavy metal hook smacking him on the forehead. I’ve often heard schizophrenia likened to being on LSD, all different parts of your brain working in conjunction with one another. After Joe did LSD for the first time he started to unravel and never came back. From that point on he was referred to as Crazy Joe. We’d see him from time to time at the cafe we frequented but he disappeared to the margins and we’d refer to him in conversation, afraid that saying his name would conjure him to our presence (it happened once which was more than enough for us). The last time I heard anything about him an old friend told me there was rumor he had died after being trapped in a fire. We may never know unless we all get together again and say his name.