1
"How's your chair doing?"
I am sitting in a wheelchair in a bookstore reading about what's wrong with Obamacare. I look up to see a man about my age with black hair and a goatee. He is dressed in all black in the middle of the summer. His clothes are a couple of sizes too big.
"It's good." I respond.
"Most of my friends are in chairs due to extreme sports." he says. " I'm the last survivor."
"What extreme sports?" I ask.
"Well, extreme sports, and . . . heroin. . . . I start every day at the coroner's office and I see who's there." His manner is that of a street counselor. The kind who appoint themselves to take care of other disenfranchised people. His voice has the cadence of sixties. I can almost hear a "man" at the end of each sentence. He says something I don't get about people smoking ice. Mercurially he switches to disclosing his age. "I'm pushing sixty."
"You don't look it." I reply, truthfully,
"This beard was white this morning." he says, pointing to his black goatee.
Subject changes issue out of thin air. Next he's onto the handcrafted necklace around his neck. Necklaces like that are made of materials gathered on the shore here. In the seventies they were popular with people who spent a lot of time at the beach. Fingering the necklace, he says, "This thing is worth more than my house." I'm thinking he doesn't seem like the kind of person who has a house here, which costs about a million dollars. "When I go to [a rough area] in my black mustang, this keeps my car from getting taken apart."
"Cause they know you're from here?" I ask.
"Yeah. . . . How's your chair cause you got your feet taped up."
"It's personal." I say.
"I like your hair."
"It's . . . .um . . . I let it go. . . thanks." I mumble. [I have six inch undyed roots but I know what he means.]
"You got someone looking out for you?"
I laugh. "It's just me." I'm in a very nice mall in a nice part of town.
"You got to have someone lookin' out for you, especially with the bookstore closing." It's an hour before closing. I don't know if he means that, or the bookstore location going out of business, which it eventually did. I live in a place unsuited to me and have been wanting help. I spend so much time outside my home and my grooming has suffered such that some people think I'm homeless. In that case, I wasn't sure what help he'd have to give and under what conditions. I also didn't want to think he had taken me for homeless. That felt too humiliating. I answer as though he is offering to walk me to my car.
"I'm not worried about it." I say.
I like this guy, but having a man I don't know escort me to my car doesn't seem like an improvement. In this large city people scan each other for delusions and mental illness routinely. I do that with him, while appreciating the friendliness. His judgement doesn't intersect with consensus reality as often as it could. His thoughts may follow a trail no one else can see. He and his friends seem to be reeling from self-created dramas.
An extremely industrious bookstore employee starts shelving books next to us. Maybe he seems disapproving. If men chat me up people around sometimes look like they are seeing something wrong because I use a wheelchair. Either way the book shelving juggernaut broke up the energy. We part ways.
Overall, I appreciated the solidarity. It seems like a lot of people in this neighborhood don't even want me to pet their fluffy white dogs. As Men In Black encounters go this one was better than usual.
