How local lunatics color communities.
Warning: This is a self-indulgent nostalgia post. If you came here expecting a bleeding-heart screed on the tragedy of homelessness, you’re going to hate this.
There’s something like Christmas morning when you return to your hometown after being gone awhile. Passing through all the old haunts, wowed or depressed by all the little changes. Where once there stood rotting a tantalizing old ruin of a factory, now there stands a Taco Bell Cantina. The coffee spot you once lazed around for hours with your friends like it was an opium den is still there, full of weird faces. Your old friends all privately tucked away with their young families or the addictions they’ve cultivated. The colorful bums once regarded as neighborhood “characters” have been replaced with spastic tweakers yelling at their busted women to push the junk cart faster.
I got hung up on the lost schizos recently for no reason. Just happened to be going down the stairs thinking about a particular neighborhood, and with each step down their names flashed into my consciousness like neon. Rune1, Wimpy Wellington2, Mouse/Streetfighter3. Some of their names chosen and some given, no one knew who they were born as. They wore the same kooky get-ups every day, maybe adding a boa in the Fall or a sombrero in the Summer. You and your peers swapped details of their backstories over some weed in the park, little bits of stupid lore that passed the time and served as cautionary tales against getting too into smoking weed in the park, lest you find yourself living in it fifteen years down the line.
There are obvious reasons for why they disappear from public life. They’re chronically nuts, after all, and most had destructive lifestyles. Death comes sooner for many. Besides that, I no longer spend afternoons in parks smoking weed and politely listening to the ramblings of crazy people. That was an activity for the young and the restless, for people living in their childhood home or a dorm while earning the kind of piddly part-time income most make between the ages of 18 and 22. We sought out free loitering spots, like the rest of the degenerates. And we walked or biked to get to them because the cars we had if we had them were usually leaking or grinding something. Walking comes with a zoomed in view of a cityscape. Surprise lurks around every corner, and it can be great or terrible.
I don’t know why I care about this. I got hung up recently on an idea about the meaning of “a sense of community” versus living in a city and going to places where you consume things around other people that you likely won’t directly socialize with. Paying to crowd up with strangers to watch a musician whose performance grows hazy in your memory with every day that passes versus the enduring memory of the day you helped your friend rip out their basement floor after their plumbing exploded, the whole gang coming with their shovels, high on camaraderie.
Not sure how the schizo bums I used to see around factor in here, either. But they do haunt me, a bit. Maybe their outrageousness is part of the spice mélange that makes a place feel so special. It’s not like any of us cared about them or liked them. They were just around all the time, we traded stories about seeing them tilting at their windmills and commiserated on our odd inescapable interactions with them. In short, they were objects of free entertainment at best, nuisances we could put up with at worst. Their particular blends of mental instability wasn’t scary, like other street dwellers, it was just funny. In a way, they could add a bit of adventure to a plain day. I can’t really say I’d be joyed to run into them in the presently, either. Or that I wouldn’t chase them off my lawn with a big stick. They’re like libraries. I never want to engage with them, but I’m sorta glad they’re out there somewhere.
Maybe it’s because when I think of “community” I think of the home I knew best and how I remember it from my tender years when every pocket of it felt so uniquely its own, and everywhere you went you ran into friends. The world was big and timeless, except that it wasn’t. Time moves on and businesses get painted gray and sold to another gray colored business. Fabulous hobos get exorcized once new signs go up naming districts things like Northern (Noun), The Salt-(Something). It seems so impossible that one giant condo building can get enough people to live in it, let alone justify an endless sky-blocking stretch of them, in the place where you used to watch your boyfriend and his chums skateboard badly while rubbing elbows with the freakiest freaks. But there they are, selling out faster than they get built.
It’s stupid to think a community never changes as you age, I know. It just feels like it won’t when you’re in the moment. The people coming to your parties will always be coming to your parties, and your parties will never end. Until they do, until people move away, til they die, til you’ve grown sick of each other or sick of this empty living. In a way there is no grand community, only a series of social spheres that we float into until some life event comes along and pulls your focus down so deeply you forget who you were, what you were doing, and who you were doing it with. We drop the torch, and we only start to care that it fell when we stand on a street we’ve been on a hundred thousand times and feel like the stranger in a strange land.
- Rune may have been the most notable of the bums because he was only a few years older than us. He didn’t seem to have the patina of a street person. Probably because he had a home, or his parents did at least, so he didn’t have to live like a bridge troll. His one outfit was a black t-shirt over tan Dickies, with a Berkley School of Music hoodie (we weren’t in California) thrown on in the cold months. He was a very tiny man who hung out with two giant dumb dudes I always thought of as his goons. No one knew them, they never spoke. The three of them spent all day walking from one coffee shop to another in pursuit of bummed cigarettes.
His backstory was that he was kind of musical genius who got a scholarship to Berkley. He attended the school for a couple years and picked up a ketamine dependency that turned him into Rune. He either flunked out or gave up school and returned to his home city to spend his days wandering around, intermittently breakdancing very badly in the grass. Occasionally he’d give people a CD he’d recorded his mumbly rap songs on. I never would have guessed that the dude was ahead of his time.
↩︎ - Wimpy Wellington was what we, the people he harassed from his milk crate, called him. His real name would eventually come out in a local newspaper expose. J. Wellington Wimpy was the name of the Popeye character who did the “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today,” bit. A fancy man who never had the cash to pay for his own burgers. He was basically a wino but for hamburgers instead of booze. Wimpy Wellington was a fat old man who panhandled outside the McDonalds in the city’s most expensive shopping district. He plopped down on a milk crate and asked anyone who passed to give him a dollar for a cheeseburger. To anyone who ignored him he hurled a quick insult, to anyone who gave him money he never said thanks. He was infamous because he was such an ogre. Far as I know, no one ever witnessed him actually buying a cheeseburger with his alms.
The guy must have eventually insulted the wrong small-time journalist because one day his whole scam was exposed in the local free paper. It wasn’t a publication of great renown, but occasionally they’d bother to dig into some niche local thing and everyone would be talking about it for a while. All the writer did was perch in the parking garage across the street to spy on Wimpy Wellington until he picked up his milk crate and headed for the bridges. But it wasn’t the bridges he was really headed for. It was a shiny Lincoln Town & Country, with a driver who idled it on the edge of the district waiting to pick up old Wimpy every single day. Afterward, he was driven to his stately manor, where he presumably dumped out his ill-gotten gains into a swimming pool of gold coins that he promptly dove into while cackling at his own genius.
↩︎ - Every city seems to have some very visible schizo dude running around in a makeshift cape. Mouse/Streetfighter lived like a goblin in the limestone rock wall of a small park in the middle of a hiply historic part of town. Sit in that park long enough, and he would pop up like an opera phantom to show off his gangly kung fu and beg for weed. He was somehow ever-present in that park, yet also everywhere else. Always lurking, watching, waiting, while also jumping a mile over to incoherently argue with the Black Hebrew Israelites. He was the most mysterious of all. No one knew his any of his actual backstory. Only that he called himself Mouse until he started donning his cape, after that he became Streetfighter. We really do write the poetry of our own lives. ↩︎
If you liked reading this, consider leaving a tip.
The Normal Times 
Leave a comment