“Why I’m here…”¹

By the corner of 14^th and Commerce, he’s just stepped out of the Rockefeller Hotel. He stops and sits on the bench and continues smoking a bit of Bob. He looks up at the sunlight hitting the building across the street, watches it play off the music instruments in the windows and smiles to himself. He’s made it all the way out here. He takes another puff and lets the colour of the light change, bringing out new details.

He says he’s from California or back out East; sometimes he can’t remember:

“I’m so happy to be here, but they ain’t exactly rolling out the red carpet. I’m an artist and disabled² and I just had to live out here in beautiful Astoria.”

His eyes are small and seem to suck the light in, letting nothing out. The hands are rough and the fingernails are thickened and varnished a nicotine yellow. He’s shown me several of his paintings. They’re all brightly colored tending towards the purple/fuchsia spectrum which I’m not neurologically wired to immediately find pleasant.

If you stare at his paintings or at him for more than a minute, he starts getting uncomfortable and starts patting himself on the chest and wheezes. Paradoxically, this is some sort of defense mechanism in which the point is to convince the predator—you—that the prey is too sick to kill and eat and will only make you gut-wrenchingly sick and so not worth the effort that it would actually take .

But you certainly are the predator in this case and he certainly is the prey even if it looks like he’s scamming the system (which he is) but if you pause and try to learn anything about where he lives and whom he has to live next to and minimally interact with,³ then you might find that taking dissociative and memory-impairing cannabinoids are not only a commonly accepted way of life, but in fact may be a necessary⁴ requirement to survive.

1. an exercise in fiction. [↩]
2. He maintains his disability, like a real-life Zoyd Wheeler, by purposefully exacerbating his emphysema so badly that he ends up in the ER for a few hours, maintaining the illusion he’s too sick to work, but by the weekend he’s back at the art gallery openings, noshing on free goodies. [↩]
3. Prostitutes, meth heads, pedophiles, umedicated/unmediated schizophrenics—both the unyoked young men and the dishearteningly old women; unrepentant alcoholics, grifters, the hopelessly poor—again both young and old—and this is his reward for scamming the system, mind you. Just think about all that effort to remain at such a base level of existence. [↩]
4. and not merely sufficient [↩]