Dusty bronze bells ring as he pushed his way through the door and I looked up to see this man in his mid-forties with disheveled hair, eyes peeled, stirred and shaken.
Business casual, I said my hello - “let me know if you need a hand with anything” - and casually requested that he leave his bag up front. It was liquor store plastic, the usual black, and stuffed with papers.
He complied, I handed him a ticket, then he aimlessly walked across the counter, through half the store, before he returned to the front desk.
“What,” he stammered, “ do I need to open a rental account?”
“An ID,” I say, “and a full cash deposit, or you can leave a credit card on file.”
Before I got into the finer points of the rental policy, that it’s only to prevent negligence, he cut in, scratching the side of his head - a small white wrist band was dangling above his forearm.
“Well, I… don’t have one.”
He pointed to the wrist band, which from what I saw read “Behavioral Health” and then he said, “I have this. This is really me, and I have an American Express Platinum card with no limit.”
“Well,” I said, “it is a requirement - the ID - so you’re more than welcome to return when you get one.”
He did not complain - nor did he demand any leniency or special favor. He did not demand to see the manager; nor did he call me any sort of obscenity. All he did was acknowledge the Rule of Law, nodding his head, before he sheepishly asked if he could continue browsing. I nodded back, but watched him closely as he returned to the back of the store to shuffle through videos he most certainly would never see.
I could tell that something was wrong with him - not morally wrong, nothing damnable, nothing evil, but unquiet, stirred, amiss. His eyes bled restlessness and sleep deprivation from their corners, like a man spent, exhausted, from a near-eternal, rampant chase through hell. He would walk by, whispering to himself beneath his breath, but he did not disturb anybody or anything, and everything that he took from the shelves he returned with great care. Really, he was more courteous and considerate than most in his condition.
Still, this man walked with so much weight in his steps I thought the sewer lines would explode.
Finally, he returned from the back of the store and said, “OK - I’ll get out of your hair.”
“No problem,” I said.
He fumbled through his pockets, searching for his ticket, and drew a blank. I picked it up and handed it to him anyway, particular as he was.
“You trust me?”
“I guess so,” I said.
He thanked me and left, calmer, it seemed, than he was when he entered, and I told him to take care.
Well, he came back today, this rainy, windy, uncharacteristically May day. This time he looked like hammered shit - still a bundle a nerves, still unsettled, but almost thoroughly abused. I recognized him immediately despite the fact that his hands, his face, his clothing - rain-specked - looked as if he was dragged across the street and beaten.
No bag, no wrist band - just weary, wild eyes, and a dirty napkin pressed against a busted lip.
“Can I just get warm? I swear I won‘t bother anybody.”
This heart rarely bleeds, and when it does, it dries long before it trickles. I battle a demon that speaks the filthiest of all truths - I alone cannot save the world. Still, I could not summon the nerve to say ‘no.’ Before he could get an answer out of me, on-site security approached him and escorted him outside. It would have ended there, if he did not try and flag down a car in the parking lot. Security made the move to remove him from the premises, but he found his way back inside and did the worst thing he could possibly do: succumb to desperation.
He had taken a business card and scrawled “Do Anything - $ - Joe Outside” on the back.
I swallowed the lump in my throat, biting my tongue to keep from asking him why he would stoop so low - but I didn’t - I knew why. And now I had to follow the letter of the unforgiving law. He was long gone before the authorities arrived, but I knew that he was no better off. At least, if he had been arrested, he might have wound up back at the mental health clinic.
Were he so lucky.
Instead, I knew that, from today and on, “Joe” would become like thousands of others - derelict and hungry, lost and objectified, stumbling against the backdrop of endless night into living, senseless and otherwise unjustifiable perdition. Whatever humanity he had left, whoever he was, that name, that person, is somewhere, like his wrist band: lost - lying at the fringe of the unforgiving streets.
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