beholders.org

I met a man on the subway today. Actually, I didn’t really meet him. I observed him, and beyond two nods, a look and a faint “Uhum”, there was very little interaction.
NYC is one of those places that can harden you to homelessness. I can’t really blame my personal reaction to it to NYC, since I had already been toughened by watching homeless children in the streets of Brazil, where I grew up, but it did make me keep some of those coping mechanisms in place.

I have made friends with many homeless people in the past several years, and have hurt from watching some of them spin into a hole they don't seem to be able to climb out of and have heard from others the circumstances that brought them there. I have though, also watched the way that pain gets covered up with drug and alcohol use, and how far some people will go to never have to hear those voices in their own heads. I have one rule in relation to people begging, which is, do anything that shows me you still remember who you really, truly are and I’ll give you money without wandering in guilt if I am contributing to your self destruction. Even if it’s by singing some 80’s song, telling a bad joke or hitting a stick to a can. I don’t care how bad it is. Just show me life is still traveling through your veins and that we can hear or see it, not matter how faintly.

So this petit man walks in, with very fair skin, dark brown, long and unkempt hair and an old fashioned mustache that made him look like a character from a Charlie Chaplin movie, and starts talking. I was ready to look down at some random object, incapable of uttering my usual “Sorry, not tonight.” while looking him in the eyes.

He started speaking in the sort of stumbling manner that usually translates as drug usage, but there was something about his demeanor that didn’t match the inner disconnect between words and emotions drug stupor tends to sound like.

He started to say that even if he were sleeping on the streets, cold, hungry, owning nothing and even with no one to love him and no one who cared what happened to him, that he would still be happy. Happy he was not on a hospital bed dying, or imprisoned for some crime he didn’t commit. That there are people who fail to see what the good things in their lives are and only focus on what's not working out. That he was still happy and lucky but that if someone gave him a granola bar or 3 cents, that it would make his life a little bit easier.

I had fearfully expected him to have ended his sentence with “… and if no one cares I’ll just go out and kill myself…”, almost as  if I had heard his inner thoughts, so I was very surprised and relieved by the positive words that came out instead.

Someone offered him some yogurt, which was met with: “Yippee! I like yogurt”, without a drop of cynicism. And while he was collecting his donations (about $4 including my own), one girl asked him what his name was. His reply was: “Luke. Do you want to know what happened to me?” A question full of desperate desire to talk to people who showed to him he wasn’t invisible.

Luke explained, in an interesting way, that some people can’t handle it when hard things happen to them. That they hurt their pinky and their daughter gets a fever, then they lose their mother and they can’t handle it. That he had lost his mother, his aunt and his grandmother one right after the other and, all of a sudden, his world was different and he just couldn’t handle it. That he had given away 137 thousand dollars to people who have a sink and some spare bedrooms but who, now that he is out of money; hang on up him when he calls during the holidays between happy… and New Year.

He finished his story explaining that we should be mentally strong in times of struggle, and that it was very important not to forget that.

Many of his words seemed to have come to him from outside sources, like he needed to repeat them to remind himself to still be thankful for being alive, but they were truly meant. People were paying attention to his story and looking at him as if to acknowledge that rare moment when someone’s personal truth gets uttered out loud.
I’m still not completely sure if he was truly clear-headed. If the way he spoke was simply the sound a fragmented mind makes, but I still had no doubts about handing him that dollar. His words were, as a reminder of moments we easily overlook, the most valuable thing that dollar could ever have bought.

By Taty Sena