Some blocks to the west in Hell’s Kitchen, a man born in Florida sat under a scaffold hemming a ritzy apartment building. Cardboard, a rosé box broken down and folded, kept his body from the cold cement. A serge coat he’d found in a church basement covered him. He wouldn’t have said stolen, but he didn’t recount much anymore to living people. He knew the truth and no-one else not associated with his past needed to. His black boots were similarly gifted, but, hardly new so many months ago, they were now busted and the backs of his toes had been filed into a coarse, rope-like material from poking through and touching the city streets repeatedly. They also had fifty-cent-piece-sized holes in the arches. These breakdowns kept him from walking at times, but he’d long ago decided he’d walked enough—once going most of the way from the Mexican border to Monterey on foot. He couldn’t catalogue his blue jeans or the sleeping bag smeared with road tar. It had warmed him through the winter and brought him to the doorstep of April. It had his smell or he had its—a question only for forensics.
His smell was wherever he was and he was his smell more than anything—a mixture of piss, pus, creosote, scalp, sperm, lint, pits, ass. All of which amounted to a cocktail served as his most complex and best feature—even a black bear would go bounding away from it. But his body was all he had. Long ago he’d curtailed the ache to bottle, label, and subsequently drink his pee. His body changed then, his mind too—self-sufficiency can fuck over man’s humane impulses. But at least he respected life enough not to kill or kill himself. Sixty-some years and he could still breathe: not bothering to bitch, not cognizant enough to worry (except short prayers about weather); not loved, loving, or expected to love back. If truly beheld by citizens, they’d see all seasons in him, all that is mercurial and saturnine adding up to a zero point—unaccommodated man. Because his penis rose nightly he averred he could produce, but it rose not at the unmasking of a body or intimacy with one he once liked to look at. It was a gradient of some miasma he couldn’t conceive or at least a reaction against the cold, blood pooling to create another extension of warmth, or something representative of the urge to spray out what he drank—that of a regal diet preferring soda over water, espresso over coffee.
The scaffold had a leak and he felt the side of his left leg getting unreasonably wet. He pulled himself up and swung over, cuddling the fat blue metal tube though a large bolt bit into his ribcage—wetness always worse than pain.
Someone had been speaking to him for the last few minutes and he kept nodding his head in silence, opening his mouth in a stab at an answer, but surrounded by a forest of silvery salty hair no-one could see it. For years, he hadn’t either. Maybe his tongue had lost its color along with its musculature, moving from side to side like a slug he didn’t recognize. Maybe—he couldn’t feel it. The person had a high voice, but he believed it to be a man, though he hadn’t looked closely. They were certainly talking to him about him, but what could he add as counter? The subject held no interest. He never asked for money but sometimes woke up showered in singles, fives, and the odd twenty. Most times there were bags of food, often leftovers from restaurants, specifically pastas with rich sauces from the plethora of Italian establishments in the neighborhood. It tasted the same, same as his mother made growing up. The same as two wives made—and even no better than the Safeway brands once tasted; stuff hardened, oversalted, and coagulated, that stuck to one’s teeth, even if only ninety minutes from scratch.
The man who stood before him stopped talking and he knew he could look up because he could feel when someone’s eyes left him. He was someone in uniform but not the ubiquitous doorman, rather someone who had other things to do, but stopped out of some feeling, not obligation. A great angst in those clean hands that wrung themselves.
He wished to be monkish in the face of kindness, but such sanctity could clog his rectum, which had recently begun working properly after a few harrowing years. He had nothing to say—weren’t there monks like that? Anything the stranger could offer couldn’t help the person who really needed help and a person with nothing can only give a lesson. He couldn’t tell him that his caring was kind but misplaced—some monks would say that. Should he bring his palms together? The fresh-faced man required a sign or else he wouldn’t leave—or worse, he’d call the City. He raised a hand. When the young man turned on his way from one of his fussy involutions, going at squirrel speed from phone to reality to phone and back, gesticulating to someone who couldn’t see him, he saw that real hand down there and seemed to understand its deeper meanings, even the cautionary, Stop. The young man soon said goodbye and the man’s eyes cantered to the ground in reflex where a few dollars were held together by a paperclip.