March Hares
Walking to Union Station tonight, I found myself behind a man whom I thought was talking into a cell phone. I was walking through the park between the rear of the Russell Senate Office Building and D Street NE. The path cuts diagonally across the park from 1st street to D street.
The man in front of me was an African-American nondescriptly dressed in jeans (a little dirty) and work boots, a green parka, and a blue knit cap. He had a large blue duffel over one shoulder and was carrying a full plastic shopping bag in one hand. He could have been one of the construction workers on the Capitol Visitors Center project (which is now painfully over budget and past due to be finished).
When we parted ways a little later, I saw that his face was heavily bearded with dark, wiry hair that turned gray at the ends. Untamed beards are usually signs of homelessness.
I was walking perhaps ten paces behind him as he talked. I paid no attention at first.
Then suddenly, he burst out with, “Shot and killed! Shot and killed, Motherfucker!”
My gaze is usually fixed on the ground as I walk, a habit deeply ingrained since childhood, when I began looking on the ground for coins or anything of interest I might pick up. I also adopted the habit of looking at the ground in order to avoid people and so as not to draw attention to myself. It’s a way of hiding, really, and I do it to this day.
When I heard the man in front of me shout, I looked up. A well-dressed young man walking in front of him turned around sharply and looked warily for three long seconds at the man who had shouted.
Now it was clear that instead of a cell phone, he was just holding his hand up to his ear as if talking into it.
He repeated three times, loudly, “Shot and killed! Shot and killed! Shot and killed!” In preparation for a shout, he would stop walking and almost squat, as if to thrust the cry out of his body like a basketball player taking a foul shot. I had to stop when he stopped. I was unwilling to go around him because I was afraid to attract his attention.
After a pause, during which he resumed walking, he screamed, “Blood! It was blood, Goddamnit, blood!”
His pace quickened a little after this. He said nothing else, though he continued to hold his hand to his ear. A few moments after his outburst, we reached the corner of D Street NE and Delaware Ave. NE. He embarked down D St. NE while I crossed over and continued down Delaware Ave towards Union Station.
I had not walked one block before I saw another such fellow ahead of me, walking around in a circle and talking to himself in a loud voice.
He was considerably scruffier looking than the black man. He was white with several day’s growth of grizzled, gray beard. He was dressed in jeans and a lightweight blue coat. His tennis shoes were white and the toes of both shoes were cracked open, as if the shoes were ill fitting and he had slit them open at the end to allow more room.
As I approached, I could plainly hear what he was saying as he walked his circuit. It seemed like he was delivering a history lesson, and I briefly wondered if maybe he weren’t a new type of panhandler, offering passersby historical knowledge in exchange for spare coins like some down at heels sophist in the Athens Agora.
Here is a good recounting of what I heard him say:
“Richard Nixon bought two pandas for the National Zoo in 1972. Nixon ordered the bombing of Hanoi in 1972. Josef Stalin died. That was 1953. I wish they had killed me. I wish I had died in Vietnam. Eisenhower said “I will go to Korea in 1953.” In 1974, Richard Nixon resigned from office. He said, “I’ve got to get these leaches off me,” and then his chest exploded. I wish I had died in Vietnam. “John! John!” In 1960, John Kennedy sent the first advisers into Vietnam. I wish they had killed me. The pandas were named Ling Ling and Sing Sing.”
Not much history seems to have happened to this man beyond 1972. Perhaps that was the year he returned from Vietnam. I have seen him once before, months ago, on the island between Massachusetts Ave. NE and Columbus Circle. He was intoning the exact same bits of history then as this evening. I have also seen him standing there in front of Columbus fountain, badly improvising music on a child’s plastic flute, a dirty cap on the ground in front of him. I have never seen anyone give him so much as a penny.
In winter, the down and out mostly disappear from the streets and from our consciousness. Spring weather, however tenuous, brings them back like the crocuses furtively pushing up from the mulched “planting areas,” as the Architect of the Capitol calls the flower beds around the Capitol grounds. I rather welcome the intrusion. Otherwise, I would not have lifted my eyes from the ground for the entirety of my walk to the train station.
21 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Very nice. I like these walking0through-the-city blogs and miss them. . . is it my imagination, or are you vaguely echoing TS Eliot in the final par?
Comment by Todd — Monday, 14 March 2005 @ 9:27 pm
If so, very unconsciously.
But now that you mention it, I suppose I may have been echoing the beginning of the Waste Land. I’ll say yes, I was echoing Eliot. Oh Hell, might as well.
To be specific, I could have been echoing the “Stetson” passage at the end “Burial of the Dead.”
Also the “Tiresias” monologue in “The Fire Sermon.” All of it. Now write a standard five paragraph essay on these associations. Turn it in to me by next Monday.
Comment by Matthew — Monday, 14 March 2005 @ 9:37 pm
Eliot aside, I cannot imagine the distructive horrors this vet lived through. We have a few in Houston that are as disturbed and never ask for money. I often wonder how these men live from day to day.
Comment by Brandi — Monday, 14 March 2005 @ 9:42 pm
Incidentally, there was a volume of Eliot’s early verse published in the mid-nineties called Inventions of the March Hare. I’m surprised you didn’t think of that as a possible source, Todd.
These veterans ae disturbed. I wonder how they get by as well. I’ve seen a homeless person take half-eaten food right out of a garbage can and stuff it greedily in his mouth like he was dining at the Ritz. Maybe we don’t really want to know how they get by.
Comment by Matthew — Monday, 14 March 2005 @ 9:48 pm
I remember seeing a man a couple of years ago kill a pigeon with his bare hands and consume it. However, he would not take my offer to buy him some food. I will never forget that.
Comment by Brandi — Monday, 14 March 2005 @ 9:51 pm
Ugh. I would think eating raw pigeon meat would be quite dangerous. Even the French cook their squab.
Comment by Matthew — Monday, 14 March 2005 @ 9:54 pm
I cannot say that it looked appealing to me. I have difficutly in eating sushi myself!
Comment by Brandi — Monday, 14 March 2005 @ 10:01 pm
Matt, I was thinking of the Stetson passage…I have a few such menories ingrained in my memory as well. I should blog on that subject actually. These are good reminders of the world outside of our heads….
Comment by Todd — Monday, 14 March 2005 @ 10:04 pm
There is really a world outside of our heads?
Comment by Brandi — Monday, 14 March 2005 @ 10:09 pm
“Is all our life, then, but a dream?”
That’s Lewis Caroll, though, not Eliot. But given the March Hare reference, I think it’s in keeping with this post.
Sometimes I think I am an odd person magnet, especially when out in public, alone. While waiting for barbecue a couple weeks ago, this older black man just started talking to me. And talking. And talking. He (we, though he talked most, I mostly smiled, nodded, and affirmed him) talked for 45 minutes at least (the barbecue took WAY too long–had I known they had to make more baked beans for my order . . .) and by the end of it I had heard about his daughter who works at White Castle, and this story about how he went to the hospital thinking he was having a heart attack, but it turned out to be gas–really, really bad gas. Going in, he pleaded, “God, don’t take away my beer,” and he was scared he was going to die. He was in the hospital three days! I was the first person he’d told about this, he said, and it just felt so good to share it with somebody, to “be kickin’ it with somebody, like you and me is doin’, like we’re homeys.” I don’t think I caught even half of what he said during all that time, but before it was all over I pretty much believed him when he said, “God meant for me to talk to you tonight.”
And then there’s the stranger I met in New Orleans who played a broom, who’s mother called him Satan, who was responsible for the success of the likes of Michael Jackson and Punky Brewster, who kissed Dustin Hoffman on the cheek and told Marlon Brando that Brando was his “last tango,” who unsettled me with insights about me. But that encounter, well, that one will be the basis of a book someday. I still haven’t fully recovered from meeting Louis Charles. I doubt I ever will . . .
Comment by Dawn — Monday, 14 March 2005 @ 11:17 pm
Louis Charles…did he pronounce his name the French way? I think “Louis Charles” was the name of one of the Bourbon kings of France. I know there was one named Louis Phillipe.
I don’t attract these people, but as the weather warms up they become unavoidable. I don’t know where they go in winter. I have also seen the crone I have written about in earlier entries. She walks about town and sometimes rides the buses carrying a stick she picked up off the ground and decorated with plastic ribbons from work zones and crime scenes. She talks to herself and steps out into traffic with no concern for her safety at all. I saw her one day last week poking around the Metro entrance at Union Station.
Comment by Matthew — Tuesday, 15 March 2005 @ 7:20 am
He pronounced his name the plain ol’ American way, though it probably would have been more interesting had he thought himself a French king. Still, he was such a multitude of other oddities, I didn’t need another. Encounters with strange strangers really fascinate me, even if they also unsettle me (I’m not sure LC was crazy, by the way, though he’d tend to ramble crazily for awhile and then be quite lucid).
Perhaps it’s better just to observe from a distance and wonder about them. At any rate, I enjoy your descriptions from a distance.
Comment by Dawn — Tuesday, 15 March 2005 @ 8:11 am
These are my favorite of your blog entries too…I can totally imagine walking behind these people seeing what you see…I also think that writing like this does help us remember that these people have a complex history and can never just be written off…
Comment by Bronwen — Tuesday, 15 March 2005 @ 11:48 am
Thank you. I enjoy writing them, but I do wonder if people don’t think I’m a little obsessed. It’s not just that these people provide good material to write about. To me, it’s the fact that these are the people we so often (myself included) refuse to look at.
There’s another woman I often see sitting at Columbus fountain. Once as I gave her a dollar, I asked her for her name, just to be friendly. She said her name was Norma. When I see her now, I usually give her a dollar and she will say something about the weather. Sometimes I don’t feel like I have a dollar to spare for her, and I guiltily skirt around her hoping she won’t see me. I make up excuses in my head not to give her any money. I say, “I’ve given her money in the past; I can’t afford it today.” Or even worse, I say, “If I give her a dollar, I will be short tomorrow morning when I stop at Starbucks for my coffee.” Nevermind that I always have my debit card. I feel guilty that these excuses often work. Having even a little bit of a personal association with her makes it difficult to just pass on by.
I haven’t seen Norma all winter, but now that the weather is better I expect she will resume her place sitting there on the ground at the base of the fountain. Next time I see her, I want to ask where she is from. Has she lived in Washington all her life? I wonder about these things. Her face is covered in Polynesian tattoos and she wears dark sunglasses, which makes her doubly interesting. The first time I saw her, I found her a little frightening because she looked as if she were wearing a mask, like the boy in that old Cher movie from the eighties. But since beginning to talk to her, I have found her very friendly.
Comment by Matthew — Tuesday, 15 March 2005 @ 11:57 am
Sad, and beautiful.
Comment by Mel B. — Tuesday, 15 March 2005 @ 12:40 pm
Back when I was in grad school at MSU, I used to take homeless people out to lunch. That made sure the money went to food and I got to enjoy their conversation/viewpoints on the world. It seemed a pretty fair trade, except its tough forming personal relationships with people in those sorts of situations.
dlw
Comment by dlw — Tuesday, 15 March 2005 @ 12:47 pm
I had a similar experience today in line at the grocery during lunch. A black man with a scraggly and graying beard was talking and talking and talking. He didn’t have a cell phone and he wasn’t looking at anyone in particular when he talked. I kept my eyes poised on the newspaper I was buying and tried to strain my ears to hear the particulars of his conversation. But alas, he mumbled. Now, I’m sitting at work wondering what was so important.
Comment by shel — Tuesday, 15 March 2005 @ 2:12 pm
I hate it when they mumble! Sometimes when they talk plainly, they are still unintelligble, however. If the words don’t connect to form even irrational meaning, then our minds cannot process and remember the words.
It’s a debatable issue whether to give them money or not. I respect someone who would actually take a homeless person out to dinner, because I don’t think I could bring myself to do that. I especially don’t think I would bring Mr. “Shot and killed, Motherfucker!” to dinner.
That said, I do give them money, and I don’t particularly care what they do with it. That’s their choice. My choice is whether to give them money or not. Presuming they might use the money for ill is just an excuse or a rationalization not to give them anything. To draw an analogy, when my son is a teenager, if I give him thirty bucks to take a girl on a date, he might use that money for all sorts of unintended purposes. He might buy condoms with some of the money so that he and the girl can have sex (not necessarily a reprehensible use of the money, by the way). Worse, he might use it to buy alcohol. What’s more, I may not necessarily ever know about any of the uses to which he has put the money I gave him. If I am totally ignorant of any wrongdoing he has planned, was I wrong to give him money in the first place? I don’t think so. There is a place for trust in human relationships. Unless I have seen a particular homeless person drunk with a bottle of Smirnoff in his hand, I don’t think it’s any business of mine to assume the worst of them. I’ll continue giving a dollar to Norma now and then, and to others I meet as well.
Comment by Matthew — Tuesday, 15 March 2005 @ 3:43 pm
When you’re in an ongoing social relationship with someone you can trust each other and communicate about what the purpose of transfers are for.
I’m guessing the homeless at MSU were quite tame relative to the ones in WashDC. Perhaps you could buy them something from a vendor…
dlw
Comment by dlw — Tuesday, 15 March 2005 @ 5:42 pm
I know this is really off of the subject, but on Sunday you had a Chaucer motif for your blog. I just wanted to let you know that it was really neat! How did you do that?
Now, the ballpoint pen motif reminds me too much of working at the office!
Comment by Brandi — Tuesday, 15 March 2005 @ 6:51 pm
party poker signup bonusYou can also take a look at the pages in the field of free party poker bonus codes games
Comment by party poker signup bonus — Thursday, 1 September 2005 @ 10:44 pm