The truth is often embarrassing, so I am ashamed to admit that I almost didn’t want to make eye contact with the towering, dark, long-haired figure before me outside a hotel on an empty Newark street near the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.
The man walked uneasily; his lips were fast with a “hello,” coupled with the hopeful look of a person beginning to ask for money. And in the instant of his hopeful and proud “hello,” I remembered when my father would say, “Don’t look.”
We would be walking, father and son, and suddenly I’d feel his coarse skin and bones tighten at my arm whenever a person with tattered clothes, sullied face or shuffling gait approached, hands outstretched. He’d quicken his pace and say, “Don’t look.”
He said the same thing when we landed in Albania’s airport, the throngs of Gypsy children smiling and chatting while attempting to pry the bag from your back to carry to your car for some change. I listened to him then; on those occasions I’d always obey him.
But not this time.
I replied to his “hello” with one of my own, and even added a trifle: “Beautiful weather, yeah?”
I looked to the trees across the street from the soft white lights just beginning to shimmer in the dark pink sky. When I turned back to face him, he was scratching his nose between his thumb and pointer in anticipation of his question.
All I heard was “… and I’m really hungry.”
I couldn’t help but notice this would be a man my parents would fear. He was taller than me, at least 6-foot-5, with the weight to match the intimidating height. He looked Brazilian. His face was strong, with defined jawbones and an aquiline nose.
His beard grew in a short tuft, “mini-hair tornadoes” as my friend would say. His thick hair was done into dun and dingy dreadlocks, more like the Predator monster’s than Bob Marley’s. His dreads didn’t cover his face though: They were brought back behind his forehead and displayed clear, flushed skin.
I envied the bulging veins in his arms, wondering to myself what exercises he did to make his forearms so big.
“You’re hungry?”
“Yeah, man.”
“Then come with me.”
I said it so casually, and turned around so thoughtlessly, that I surprised myself by the time I sat in the car. My honesty caught me off-guard.
“I only have $43, and I need $20 for gas,” I said. “The rest is yours, but I want to spend it on you, instead of just giving it to you. No offense.”
He leaned his seat back and switched the AC to off, then switched it back on.
“I’m sorry, man, do you mind?”
I rolled down the windows and switched the AC back off.
“That better?”
“Yeah, man.”
He wanted Burger King. I offered him something else, even to take him to a restaurant, but he refused.
“Turn over here, man.”
“But the Burger King’s over there.”
I became my mother for a second, thinking of the worst horror-movie scenario:
Strangled in a back alley.
Beat to death with a shoe.
Stabbed repeatedly with a box cutter.
Massive brain trauma from his enormous calloused fists pounding my skull.
“You can’t get in that way, brother. That’s the exit.”
He said it softly as he exhaled a newly lit cigarette. I exhaled as well and wondered how he paid for smokes.
My old car crept around the drive-through. He wanted a small burger meal.
As I reached out to grab the bag from the pickup window, he said he usually didn’t eat this “stuff.” I handed it to him and drove back to the street where we met.
In between bites of his sandwich, I learned about his life.
He said he wasn’t always homeless, that life wasn’t always this way. He said he worked with a musician and mentioned a famous dance DJ.
I still can’t recall the name, but I believed him and still believe him today.
He looked confident when he told me he knew things would change for the better. He was sure that God had a special plan for him that involved only him.
We were parked by now, right across the street from the hotel. He repeated his belief that things would change. He didn’t look at me when he said this. He looked right through the bricks of the Performing Arts Center, right through to the sky. “It’ll all get better.”
He pulled out another mentholated cigarette, and I lit it for him, noticing his left eye was the same color as the green on the tobacco paper.
He needed only a few more dollars to get for aspirin and a room for the night.
“I hate asking because you were so good to me, but if I pair this with the other money I got today, I could get a room here tonight. The guy inside will hook me up.” He showed me the other money he saved for the day.
I didn’t want to think he’d use it for drugs; he didn’t look like a drug addict. Then again, all I know of addicts is from movies and television.
He shuffled his feet around after I handed him the money and shook his head.
“Why can’t more people be like you?”
“It’s not that big of a deal, I’m trying to get better, just like you.”
I made a promise to come back the next Sunday and bring him a bag with:
a) deodorant
b) soap
c) a notebook and pens (so he could write his life story)
d) hopefully some more money, and
e) a towel
After that, he hugged me. I worried that he’d stink, because I felt the perspiration from his clothes dampening my own white T-shirt, but he didn’t. He smelled of incense, of the basement of my old house at night when my father and grandmother prayed for some money to pay back the debt for the house where we squatted, or to put the electricity back on, or the hot water.
I let go of him and walked to the Performing Arts Center, nearly forgetting why I was there. I had to give a friend some money for a cell phone. I wanted to run and give my new acquaintance the $150 in my other pocket, but it wasn’t mine to give.
I told myself I’d go back Sunday and find him in front of that hotel with $40 more and that backpack full of necessities. But I never did.
Mustafa Gatollari is a Rutgers-Newark student. Posted January 2008.
