Someone I Met Once.

"This country man, it ain't right. Thea ain't much that is. I worked my whole life, that damn govment been takin' my money till it left me on the streets. My whole life been like that, now I'm he'a on the streets with nothin but shit grins from people who think it was drugs or sex brought me to it.

"I ain't nevah asked for nuttin but what is fair. Now they keep me on the line for hours just to get a bit of cash that they gonna take away when they damn well please. Where you boys from?"

"Boston."

"Boston. Shit! Good place you got thea. Them Kennedy's was the best thing to ever happen to this country. They knew you can't screw the people cuz that is what we is. People, country, all of it. We's just people, all of us. Fuck man I gotta sleep on the pavement and I'm gettin damn sick and tired for it. If them Kennedy's didn't all croak too soon we'd be's in a better place, and I don't like to think about if they hadn't been around at all. Or if they's was like every other politician, God, makes me shudda."

The man was staring through me. His eyes were glossed over like they had seen too much and didn't feel like looking anymore. His hands were rough and when I shook it felt like cold concrete. He was wearing a tattered plaid shirt and black jeans, a baseball cap and old Reebok's tearing in the toes. When we walked by him I thought about what put him there. What decisions or events had dominoed to this moment, this fifty year old tired shell of a human has awakened each day before this. Every line in his face and rip in his clothes a story - or too many smiles or nights on the ground. It might have been drugs.

It wasn't that he had an audience to complain. It wasn't that he thought we could do something for him. He didn't speak pationately about anything. You could hear it in his voice. It was a concession and just another moment - a conversation to pass the time. He wasn't mad in his demeanor. I suppose he was convinced it is the way it is like a fish believes the sun is on the surface of the water. It doesn't have to be like anything, I thought. It can be like anything, I thought.

I looked at Brandon and reached in my pocket. I don't always give money to people but sometimes I do. I don't know if he died that night of a heroine overdose and I never will. I never caught his name, and his face I couldn't pick from a crowd. It was more a recognition of something and it may have been inside me. Time is cruel how it goes but right now I am not on the ground because of the bad decisions I have made. That is enough for now.