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.
Okay, so I get it, I’m too ‘trusting’ — I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me that they would ‘judge’ me for my proclaimed Christ-like mentality. It just wasn’t popular.
It was then that my eye one night after class caught the sight of a black man, burdened by the bitterness of concrete metropolitan forces of nature, wearing raggedy clothes. There was something about him….
Here’s what it was all about: I kept seeing him on the same corner but without one of those characteristic signs. That’s right: he never held up a sign saying in so few words HELP ME WITH SOME CASH TO FUEL MY ADDICTION TO ALCOHOL OR METH.
Nope. He just stood there. Waiting for someone, it seemed. And it puzzled me.
Anyway, that night I had just picked up my car from the tow company, because of one too many parking tickets. You knew how it was in the Windy City. Remnants of one of those stickers on my driver’s side window hung on for dear life in the cold of November, but I wasn’t about to waste time trying to peel it all away.
I parked at the corner of Cumberland — seeing him in that same corner. Call me crazy, but I beckoned for him briskly, always feeling very sympathetic over the fact that here was a man who didn’t have nearly as much as I did, but managed to look stronger than I ever could. He had to be maybe ten years older than me.
The bum sauntered over, a smile revealing oddly shaped white teeth ( white, yes, and somehow miraculously not yellow and sickly) -
“How’re you doin’?” he said.
“Doing all right,” I responded. I wanted to give him something. Anything. “I — I don’t have much.”
He waved me off. “Oh, that’s all right, sir, no worries. I’ll be all right.”
“I have some chips?”
“That would be mighty fine.”
I had always learned that giving something was better than giving nothing. The man made his way to my driver’s side window; and at that moment, I heard all the pesky voices in my head about how one day I was going to get kidnapped, raped, robbed or ripped to shreds. It was nighttime, too, so there wasn’t anyone around to hear me scream.
….But I didn’t care.
He then pulled a razor blade out.
….Scratch those thoughts. Yep, call me crazy and dumb.
With the heart skipping faster than rabbits ready to be skinned alive, I was going to roll the window up fast and floor it until he made me blink with the words….
“Roll your window up, man,” he said.
He stood at my window with the razor blade. Motionless. He was still grinning, though.
“Uh…. Okay.” So I rolled my window up. All the way.
He then took the razor blade and pressed it into my window by the sticker remnants from the tow company, jabbing it under the paper to peel it all off. He then pulled out (not a gun or a knife) some Windex and a rag from inside his coat, wiping me down.
My jaw dropped.
After he was done, he motioned for me to open the window. I wanted to throw my chips at him gladly. I wasn’t hungry anyway. He actually reluctantly took them.
Something in my head told me that there was something even more important than chips to him. So I asked if he wanted what I was thinking:
“….What’s your name?” I asked.
He briefly looked down, and then met me with his eyes. Still grinning. “Fred. Homeless Fred.”
…. Nice to meet you.
Originally published at https://medium.com on March 3, 2020.
