D in the McDonald’s

D had his nook in the McDonald’s, a small table in the back near the bathroom where he spent the day squinting at a laptop. Late at night he slept in his truck in a corner of the parking lot.

When I mentioned to the morning coffee group that I had once studied math I was told that I should talk to D, “He is a math professor who is homeless. Originally from around here, left to go out west, but came back to care for his father. He is homeless now. Nice guy. Smart guy.” Here was a small town off the interstate.

D was stand-offish and defensive, although polite, when I went to say hello. When I told him I had a PhD in Physics, he shifted, smiling, “Oh, I love Physics.”

Me: You used to be a professor I was told.

D: Not exactly, although that’s what the guys in town call me. I worked in the computer business and taught at community colleges. Math. All sorts of math.

Me: Not anymore?

D: I tutor students now when I can find them. I advertise on Craig’s list. I get a few, but not many people need math help now.

Me: You stay here?

D: I live here in the McDonald’s. I don’t like to talk about it much because, well, I have a good relationship with the people here (pointing towards the counter) and I don’t want to jeopardize that.

Me: You from around here?

D: I was born in this town. One of eight kids. I was always good at math and so I went to the University of A, then went out west and worked with computers. Lived there for close to thirty years.

Me: And you came back?

D: Yes, I came back here to take care of my father. I came because I was the only one who would help. He died in 2013. Then I fell on hard times.

Me: Your Mom alive?

D: Yes. But my mom is just nasty

Me: Sorry to ask, but have you get messed up in drugs?

D: No. I haven’t smoked a joint since the early ‘90s.

Me: Do you have kids?

D: No. Thank god. I wouldn’t want to bring them into this.

Me: Can I help you out?

D: No thank you. No. I don’t like help. I can get by. I eat when I can, if I have the money. Otherwise I just skip.

I hand him a $20, forcing him to take it, and he puts it under his computer, “Ok. This will be coffee money.”

For the next hour we sit talking about math and physics. I talk about my PhD thesis, something I haven’t talked about in twenty years, talking about it with a man living in his truck.

We talk about Higgs bosons, and Feynman diagrams, and Neutrinos, and then Topology, and Riemannian Geometry and Solitons and on and on. We compare notes about what it was like to grow up in a small town and loving math, and then going to college and discover there are others who see beauty in math. He smiles when I mention my spark started with Real Analysis, “Yes. Same for me, a light bulb went off in my head for Real Analysis. Number theory was just so beautiful. So beautiful.”

After an hour we both are a bit shocked, neither of us expected this conversation. Certainly not me. I often run across people who read pop science books and use them as a springboard for building their own theories of the world, one speckled with buzzwords and wrapped in Buddhism or the Bible. I have spoken to addicts who watched Science Channel documentaries in jail who pepper me with questions about Quarks and God and atoms and the big bang. I have sat in drug traps and listened as someone high on this or that tells me their own cosmology — a concoction of science, mythology, and insanity. D is not that, he is not crazy, not a quack, not a novice, not a pretender, not a man thinking he knows these things. He knows theoretical physics well. Neither is he an arrogant know-it-all who talks down to everyone.

D asks me questions about grad school and then tells me I was very lucky to have been able to go. I agree and tell him it was the best years of my life, getting paid $8,000 a year to study the universe, play softball, and drink beer. He is shocked to find out I was paid, saying, “You must have been a genius at math” I explain I wasn’t that good, certainly not compared to those who made a lifetime career out of it. I was being honest. I wasn’t that good at physics and math, just dedicated to it. I explain almost all PhD programs in Physics and Math pay their students. He looks confused. He confesses he didn’t know that.

I knew they did because I went to a college that expected its students to go to grad school. It was a small state college but it fancied itself as an honors program. Also both my parents had PhD’s and my father was a professor for 45 years.

I had come from the front row, D had not. He was from a back row family in a back row town and then went to a back row college. He simply didn’t know what was available.

Despite being polite, despite not complaining, D was clearly depressed and seemed resigned to being homeless. He had accepted that this, living in a truck in a McDonald’s parking lot, was where he would end up. There was a fatalism coupled with a passivity that made him resigned to it. He also didn’t want help, and was very clear about that. When I ask him again if I there is anything I can do to help, he just shrugs, and begins to get irritated. It is the only time I see anything even approaching anger in him. I stop asking, not wanting to keep highlighting his situation.

When I do ask him, awkwardly, if he is depressed, he just shrugs again, “No, but I am not particularly happy.”

As I leave I try to quietly put a $100 on the table, but he pushes it back, with the slightest flash of anger, enough that I get that I am again insulting him. I get up, shake his hand, and ask him if I can write about him, maybe post his picture, and he says sure, but please wait awhile and don’t give away the location, reminding me for the third time that he doesn’t “want to jeopardize my situation with this McDonald’s.”

As I drive away I think I must be missing something, some simple explanation for why D is homeless, some reason why a man who worked with computers for 30 years is living in a truck. I spend lots of time with homeless people and I usually can say within a few seconds a glib reason for them being on the streets. It is usually mental illness, or drugs, or a physical handicap, or aggression, or a lifetime of jails and prison. Or all of that. With D there is no obvious simple explanation.

I keep thinking I am missing something and I keep feeling awful for thinking that. We all want pat answers to explain people’s situations. We want to look at someone who society says has failed and we want to assign it to drugs, stupidity, deviance, or laziness. It is simpler that way. We rarely want to assign it to luck, chance, a lack of proper information, a series of benign choices that spins negative, or accidents beyond our control. Success is easier to live with if it comes with an explanation that involves morality.

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I have a book out called Dignity