The homeless are outside my window, plucking out used coffee cups from the trash and emptying the spent fluids into the bushes. They take in the coffee cups and pay the 50 cent refill price, which the barristas give them...they've been there most of the morning, thumbing through the old newspapers that are stuffed into the racks, so the counter people can never really tell if they bought the original drink at full price. Just another way of getting by, I guess.
I'm sketching just inside to their little circle outside on the patio. There used to be an old lady who collected the used newspapers in brown paper sacks. She was so old, so shrunken. She didn't have a tooth in her head and she flicked her tongue out in quick, repetitive jabs like a gecko sensing its surroundings...flick, flick, flick. And, damn it if she didn't clean out the used papers just before I got to them.
I heard a rumor that firemen had to clean out her apartment because she had created this labyrinthine maze with walls made out of towering newspaper stacks. I like to think that she created this mythical persona, like the Minotaur in her maze of yellowing pages...I like to think she was just eccentric...but it's more like senility or madness or old age and loneliness that create these fringe impulses.
One of the old timers is fishing about for cigarette butts in the ash cans outside. He's collected three that seem to have several puffs of smoke left in them. He arranges them by size, one next to the other, rolling them under his fingers lovingly as if he doesn't know yet which of his beloved children he wants to smoke first. He is long in choosing. Then he smokes one and the ecstasy on his face is exquisite...everything quiets down and he is content for that one second.
I used to romanticize about what it would be like to be homeless. Like Jules, the Samuel L. Jackson character in Pulp Fiction, I fantasized about "Walking the earth"...about traveling from place to place, meeting people and having adventures with my sketchbook in tow, living on the bum. But the reality of life on the streets hits me starkly, especially when I carve out a chunk of my day to sit down and draw. The homeless are always here, not by choice, but by necessity...to find that clean, well-lighted place and to feel safe and connected to decent people living decent lives and to meet their friends at a coffeehouse where there is cheap coffee and free smokes and a free, previously read newspaper if you can find one.
