Homeless Fred
by P.K. Winterway
People aren’t always what they seem, and honestly we all just want to be seen and known. I say that not because I didn’t or don’t know it all in my life, but because I experienced it on the daily without any trepidation, back in the day when I was a budding college student in downtown Chicago.
It wasn’t easy seeing them out there on the street — shuffling through trash, skin peeling, eyes glazed over, struggling to maintain faculties and keep the faith. Pure souls, we would call them, although there were days when I felt like I was the only one who saw them that way.
You’d think that it would get the best of me, though. One day a bum would take advantage, slice my throat with a razor blade at the corner of Wabash, steal my money and car, and leave me for dead. And a lot of people (parents, girlfriend and friends included) would remind me of that fact in droves — tick, tock, tick, tock, like a metronome — droning in and out of my ears, like a broken record, broken record, broken record.
