Top Dog, Homelessness, and Hamlet

I saw something last week, something that replays itself in my head on every street corner and subway platform. A gaunt black man with ears that smiled out of the side of his head, making up for his missing teeth, plopped on a milk crate in front of the local Top Dog.

From this advantageous position, he waved an empty coffee cup at scores of students, asking them to help a man out. Like our moms taught us (and their moms taught them), we walked past, eyes tucked safely in our pixels or stuck like gum to the pavement, anywhere but on his face.

I blushed violently when he asked our little group for change, grateful that I had tagged along without my wallet. It gave me leave to scorn the men and women who slipped by like so many fish and lied when they said they had no change – how do you put words to a man no one sees. People ignored him so resolutely that he was really talking to himself, like one of the crazy sermonizers on Telegraph, pleading his case to the empty jury, slowly losing his own belief in himself.

He might have ceased to exist; that he continued to assert his own being was madness. A modern Hamlet.

I was content to leave it there, with a cheap allusion to existentialism and a nod at the banality of evil. Someday, I thought, eighth graders from an advanced society will read about homelessness in America and shake their heads at us. They’ll imagine that they have evolved beyond our sinfulness, that they would never have stood by.

But even feeling their judgment, I didn’t cast myself as a cosmic revenger; who really breaks the rules, anyway? Then my friend leaned over – “Here, man, I’ve got a dollar”- and we were all robbed of our humanity.

I watched the vagabond’s grimy face crinkle like the meaty-fisted bill, decided not to follow my friend into the restaurant, and anchored myself in the door to watch him. He stripped out a bundle of tenderly smoothed bills from his pocket, and counted them compulsively before removing George Washington from his coffee cup and adding him to the stack.

He counted again.

I witnessed this performance, wondering what my friend would have thought of this trick, emptying out the coffee cup for effect, plying for the pity vote? Had he ever suspected that the homeless man would blow the change on cigarettes and booze?

And then I wondered – did he care? I leaned against the door with a sort of flustered theatricality. How to fake preoccupation, watch without starting, where others passed between the beggar and me like unanswered questions.

What was he doing with his life?

Did he have a name?

Was the smell of salt and grease oozing out of Top Dog going to drive him crazy?

He seemed to want me to say something, but I held back; I didn’t want to copy my friend. Kindness as a trend can’t be overdone or the second doer looks spineless and imitative. No, if I showed any kindness, it would be for effect. The minutes ticked by. My skin tightened around my bones, cold skin, shrinking.

Finally, he spoke. “You’re quiet tonight.”

Well thank God. “I’m just having a quiet moment,” I answered, not missing a beat.

He nodded. Liberated me. “Hey, man, what’s your name?”

“Tony.”

I was a bit of a coward then. “Jess.”

“Nice to meet you.”

We lapsed into silence, and my friends came out with their sausages, and I hoped they had heard me, and they hadn’t. “Nice to meet you, Tony,” I called as we left, showing off. See how one small kindness cows us into being better people?

I still wonder if Tony spent that dollar on a pack of Camels from 7-11, and I don’t know.

I don’t know that my friend was morally justified in handing him the bills. Maybe we should’ve given him a hot dog instead. That dollar could’ve fueled an addiction, hindered recovery. And I don’t know.

Funny thing is, it’s none of my business. The money never mattered. Maybe my friend was just buying off his conscience with smoke in some old guy’s lungs, but when he slipped the dollar into Tony’s cup with the familiarity of a handshake, it didn’t feel like that.

We can’t play God to the homeless, so maybe it is okay if they waste their cash. They live in a rut where they can’t even buy their own death if they want it, where they can only watch the world fade in shadows and hunger. The right to spend money well or badly is about being our own master. Homeless people don’t have that privilege.

Maybe we don’t have the right to withhold death from a willing buyer. Maybe we need to recognize someone’s humanity, and give them back that power. Maybe I’m an idealist, and maybe I’m swayed too easily by the people I respect, but I have never felt so called out as I did when my friend gave a buck to an old hobo outside of Top Dog.

These are not mad men talking to an empty stage; they speak to our humanity and give us the chance to step out of the banality that we would otherwise so willingly accept. In recognizing them, you could say we acknowledge ourselves too.