Most days you can find, on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Carroll Street, a tall, thin, African-American beggar of indeterminate age. Sitting on an upturned box opposite the entrance to the Key Foods supermarket, he jiggles a cup with a few coins on the bottom. They’d make a pleasant sound, a bit like castanets, were not their associations so bleak. He was sitting there last Thursday as I was making the rounds of my pre-Shabbat purchases.
I was surprised to see him because he told me the week before that he was going away for four weeks. He’d be at the Downtown Medical Center for a psychiatric evaluation. He needed one in order to receive a social security disability pension. But there were no beds for him, he told me on Thursday, speaking surprisingly distinctly for a man with more gaps between his teeth than teeth. He could have gone to the VA hospital at Ft. Hamilton, he said shuddering, but he’d never go there. The waiting list’s for Downstate’s not long, he said.
When he’s admitted, he told me, “I’ll say I hear voices and I’ll jump up and down and hide under tables, until they think I belong in a loony bin.” I said nothing, thinking that his scheme was not right. Perhaps he read my mind because he continued, “I hear my mother saying right now, ‘that’s not God’s Will. Thou shalt not steal.’ But will a few hundred dollars a month break the government? Some of my buddies’ve done it. I should’ve done it in 1968, when I came home from Viet Nam.”
He’s entitled to a social security pension of over $800 a month, he told me, but he’s not enrolled in the system. Once he’s at Downstate, though, the administration there will register him, so even if the psychiatrists see through his parody of insanity, he’ll still receive a pension. They might not, of course, see through it, presuming that all the patients there are a bit nuts. Besides, he probably is a bit nuts. Service in Viet Nam left a lot of emotionally damaged vets.
So maybe his charade will not really be a charade. But even if it is, who am I to criticize him for it? It’s easy to feel morally superior when you’re in a superior material position, when you’re not driven to desperate straits, when you've been given every advantage, possess a private income, and feel financially secure.
“Hey, that’s a nice shirt,” he said, reaching out and fingering the blue and white fabric covering my arm. “It would match my shoes.” He raised his right leg to show me the blue-trimmed gym shoe on his foot. “If you have one of those for me, you can leave it at Palma’s.” That’s the drug store across the street on the next corner. “That’s where people leave clothes for me.”
He may or not be crazy, but there's no question he's smart. I gave him a dollar and wished him good luck.
2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved
No comments:
Post a Comment