Disgust and Desire (ch. 8)

Chapter 8

Photo by Mateus Maia on Unsplash

8.

Monday, Sam strolled lazily around the Sailboat Pond. It was bright and sunny and cool. Fall was his favorite time of year. Early September wasn’t too cold yet. Kids were out and about. Tourists in small numbers. It was too early for the white-clothed French jazz player. He didn’t come until around 3:30. They’d chatted a few times. He was a nice guy. Thick French accent. He had come to NYC from Marseille, a decade ago. He loved the international, metropolitan culture of Manhattan, how people came from all over the globe. It was the Paris of America, he said.

Sunlight beamed off the pond. The water was green and still. The Alice in Wonderland statue stood behind him. In the distance he heard a siren cutting through the air. By now he was used to not working. During Covid millions were in the same position. Many had lost their apartments. Some were on the streets. Or put up in hotels paid for by the city on the Upper West Side. Some had been released from jails and prisons due to the Pandemic with nowhere to go. It was a scary time. Luckily for Sam, he was used to homelessness.

He couldn’t get that woman off his mind. From yesterday. How she stopped, full period at the end of the sentence. How she just stared at him. Her hazel, intense eyes. The way he felt her gaze, stopped reading, looked up at her. The energy, which seemed to feel electric between them. She was otherworldly beautiful. He wondered what her name was. Who she was. Where she lived.

He sat down on one of the long curving green benches. The tree branches above him waved in the wind, the scuttling sound of leaves rattling. That increased his feeling that fall was coming. Which excited him. And made him simultaneously afraid. The cold. Cold was a homeless man’s enemy. He didn’t want to have to deal with the shelters again. He hated them. It felt like jail. He’d been to jail once. In South Dakota. On that three-week trip across country to New York, when he “escaped” from his fourth rehab. It was awful. He’d only been inside for five days, but that was enough. They’d picked him up for vagrancy and resisting arrest. In Vivian, a tiny town in the southern part of the state along the long vein that ran across America: Interstate-90.

He remembered the two giant white cops. They were mean. They were rough with him. They put the cold cuffs on his wrists too tight. Then he was in the jail, being booked, thumb-printed, his mug-shot taken. He felt like a piece of shit. They gave him a phone call. He didn’t call anyone. They threw him in a cell with four other guys. Two were white drunks. One was a Mexican guy on meth or something. The fourth seemed to be Native American. He just sat against the wall and talked quietly to himself and stared off into space. Two days later they moved Sam into a cell with one other guy. A twenty-two-year-old black guy. His name was Leon. They got along. They became friends. Told each other their life stories. Leon was in for armed robbery. A few days later Sam got released. They bumped fists.

“Stay safe out there,” Leon told him.

“Good luck, man,” Sam said. “Keep your chin up, brotha.”

And then Sam had been out, back on the road, thumbing east along I-90. He’d been scared but it was an adventure. Life was an adventure.

Twenty minutes later an older man in a gray jacket sat on the bench not too far away. He started reading a hardback book. Sam tried to see the cover but the man held it too low. The man had big yellow eyes and white curly hair. Must have been in his mid-sixties. As old as his own father.