I had a long wait to have blood drawn at the hospital today.  I’d gone in for a consultation to schedule out-patient surgery to fix an umbilical hernia.  Didn’t realize they’d be drawing blood today, or doing an EKG either, but I found myself waiting for both. Sitting outside the phlebotomy room I penciled optimistic notes on the back of a Statement of Patients’ Rights.  I saw the bottoms of two crutches out of the corner of my eye, heard “excuse me” and moved over on the bench without looking up.  

“Thank you,” said the man with the crutches, sitting heavily beside me.  I grunted graciously and continued to draw and make notes of the simple animations I would do when I got home.  It’s amazing how all things seem possible, easy and wonderful too, when you are optimistically making notes.

I sensed that the man with the crutches was looking for conversation, but I wasn’t.  I glanced over my shoulder at his profile and recognized him at once.  He didn’t recognize me, but he had no reason to.

I recognized him as the man who’d been crying on Broadway near 204th Street many years ago.  He was crying, he explained, unsuccessfully trying to pull himself together, because he was from Boston, or perhaps Philadelphia, and he’d just been mugged, and then roughed up by the police, which is what really hurt, but he’d managed to hold on to some money hidden in his shoe, I think it was, and only needed $12 more dollars to get on the bus and go home.   A grown man, crying in the street, begging me for $12.  I may have given him a dollar, I don’t recall, it could have been fifty cents.

The reason I recognized him was that several days later, on another section of Broadway, near 115th Street, the same man began crying to me, trying unsuccessfully to pull himself together, launching into the same story about being mugged, and roughed up by the cops, and needing a certain sum to get out of this hellish town and back to wherever it was he claimed he was trying to get back to.  I glared at him that time, snarled nasty things at him, though I’m sure I was one of a hundred people who’d done that to him that day.  Perhaps that same number also gave him a buck or two, or a sandwich, or some sympathy the same day.  A salesman knows you win some and you lose even more; no reason to catalog the losses. 

“I’m a working man,” I heard him tell the old black woman he’d managed to corral a few seats away, “I’m a bricklayer, or at least I was until the economy went into the toilet and nobody is hiring American workers anymore,” he told her, with all the sincerity in the world.  “I grew up in this town, I’m a lifetime New Yorker,” he said, right after telling her he wasn’t drunk or anything when he broke his ankle, he’d tripped over his nephew, they’d been playing, and the ER doctor had sent him home with tylenol telling him it was just a sprain.  Which he believed until the leg grew more and more painful and finally swelled up like an elephant’s leg a few days later.  He was very grateful to have a good doctor now, and that’s who he was waiting to see.

As the old woman nodded politely he began to tell the story of an honest working man who remembered a time when even criminals in the projects where he grew up respected old people.  “Old people have wisdom, and I remember many times when I was young seeing hardened gangsters go after a kid who disrespected his elders,” the woman nodded, a forced smile fixed on her face.  “It’s not like that anymore, ma’am, sad to say,” he said with great sincerity, “nobody respects anybody anymore, least of all the senior citizens.  The first thing everybody does now is reach for a weapon.”

As I drew stick figures moving animatedly across the paper and imagined, in spite of everything, that I may still be becoming the change I want to see in the world, he went on in this vein, expressing his deep convictions about America, what needed to happen in society, and what had gone wrong.  I have to say, I didn’t disagree with much of what he said.  

I’d glance over at the old woman from time to time, look at the stiff, almost convincing smile on her nodding head and wonder if it she was agreeing too, or just understanding, with the wisdom and street smarts of the old and unwealthy, that whether she wanted to listen or not, she’d better keep nodding and smiling at the large, haranguing bullshit artist who needed so badly to talk.