Thanks to all of you who paid for a subscription after reading the last couple of posts about people who live downtown by day and wherever they can by night. It’s inspired me to talk to some whom I’ve never spent time with before. I’ll keep giving half of new subscriptions to them.
A few days ago, I came back (from court, but that’s another story) to find Isaiah sitting on my stoop. Isaiah always looks pretty strung out, his girlfriend Melissa even more so. Their houndog Jupiter1 howls so loudly I can hear him in the far back of my apartment, which is three stories up and 50 feet on the other side of the building. Jupiter’s been quieter lately. Isaiah says he’s training him.
Isaiah usually looks down- (literally) and-out and seems almost sheepish about it. Melissa looks really strung out and painfully sad. One time, a few years ago, when I saw her in front of the Coop, she smiled a little, so I gave her a few dollars and told her how nice it was to see her smile. In retrospect, that seems condescending. Maybe it was embarrassing for her. Regardless, she didn’t looked at me again until the other day.
The day before I saw Isaiah on the stoop I’d run into him on my way to get coffee at Amy’s, the bakery a few doors down, so I instinctively offered to buy him a cup (with your money). When I went in to get it for him (black with honey)—he couldn’t go in with Jupiter—Melissa was coming out holding an iced coffee and talking with Amy, who I guess lets her wash up there. She did look a little cleaner and brighter.
After she left, I asked Amy their names, which I had never known, and we agreed that Melissa looked a little better than usual. She also told me that it was Melissa’s birthday the next day. So, that evening, when I came home and saw them a few doors down, I went over and said happy birthday to Melissa and gave both of them a few dollars.
It was the next afternoon that Isaiah set up shop on my stoop, using salvaged copper wire and stones he’d found by the river to make pendants like the ones shown above. I didn’t particularly want one, and definitely not two, but he wanted me to take advantage of his “half-off-the-second-pendant deal” so I traded him some money for both.
We talked for a while about what he and Melissa were doing in town. Where they were from. How he used to have an antique business. How they’d had to leave the last house they were in when the owners sold it. Where they were camping. How their tent had been ruined in the rains and then his sneaker had come off at some point and he’d tried to follow it floating along the brook and, just after it disappeared, he came upon two perfectly good tents. So, he’d lost a sneaker, but at least they had good shelter again—except for the rats that had found their way in the night before—and he was selling the pendants to make a little money.
While we were talking, Melissa came over and struggled to give me a grateful look before wiring her cardboard sign to the railing. I couldn’t read the whole thing but it said it was her birthday, asked for whatever you could spare and, most likely, offered God’s blessing which she is easily as qualified to dispense as any cleric or rabbi.
I took my pendants and went upstairs to do a couple of things before going out for dinner. Ten minutes later, when I walked back outside, they were gone: Isaiah, Melissa, Jupiter, the copper wire, and the assortment of stones. Later I ran into Isaiah again by the parking garage and when I asked how they’d all vanished so fast he said something about how somehow the money I’d given him had been stolen. He couldn’t understand it. Neither could I. But I gave him a few more bucks.
The next day, I ran into my friend Kenny—who is highly educated and equally manic—and asked about them. Kenny knows everything about everyone on the street and is right much of the time. He said that they are really good people and are really in love—that Isaiah’s OK but Melissa’s an addict and every dollar I give them goes into her arm.
The names are all pseudonyms, even Jupiter’s.