by Seth Turman.
So there was this guy at the dog park. He didn’t have a dog. He had a backpack and a bad haircut. It looked like he had cut it as close as possible with a cheap pair of scissors, blindfolded. Patches stuck out randomly. I noticed him quickly. He was out of place, even for the dog park. He had large-framed, awkward-looking glasses, and he was talking to people and gesturing with his hands at his ears.
“I’m sorry, I’m deaf. I can’t hear you!” he said loudly. “Some guy boxed my ears. I’m learning to read lips.” He had a bedroll strapped to the top of his pack, and a ripe odor. He walked like he was drunk. He explained that his balance was off, due to his ears. For being deaf, he sure spoke perfectly. But hey, maybe he was only mostly deaf. He used to not be until about 8 months before, he said.
Eventually he made his way over to us, gave us the routine. Our dog, Rosie, sniffed his crotch. My wife, Claire, gave him the look of death, and he moved on. At least he wasn’t blind. Claire’s from New York, and prides herself on her exceptional homeless-man deflection skills.
“This guy’s a real piece of work,” she said.
“Do you think he’s lying?” I asked.
“Do you really think he’s deaf? Look at him.”
“I suppose not,” I said, watching him explain his story to someone new.
“I bet that’s not iced tea in his thermos, either.”
He walked around and talked to people. He didn’t ask for money, at least not that I heard. Usually if you’re homeless and telling people there’s something wrong with you, it’s because the other shoe is about to drop. But it never did.
It was a crisp fall day in Minneapolis, light as a leaf, and the park’s canine recreation was in full swing. A cool breeze was blowing off the lake, bringing promises of many apocalyptic winter days, and the leaves were just beginning to explode off the branches, raining down like sparks around the people and their happy dogs.
Claire saw a Great Dane and wandered over to it. She likes to pet their long faces because they remind her of horses.
The bum made his way back over to Rosie and I, attracted, I’m sure, by her gregarious nature. He told me he used to have a dog, but someone at another dog park called the police on him and they took it away. “Can you believe that?” he asked. “Just because I’m homeless.”
“Yeah, I mean, no,” I said. “That’s too bad.” I tried to imagine what he could have done to get his dog taken away: maybe he got drunk and tried to get fresh with some rich lady’s Airedale.
“What? I’m deaf, I can’t hear you. I have to see your lips.” He had been petting Rosie.
“I said that’s too bad.” I was about done with this guy.
“Yeah, so I like to come here and see the dogs.” There was a silence. I may have nodded. Then he threw the ball as far as he could for Rosie, and it plopped down just a few feet away. His body moved stiff and rickety, like an old man’s. “C’mon, Rosie, c’mon! Bring it on back home!” he said. She charged back toward us with the tennis ball in jaws, and flew past him and ran right up to me. I let him throw it for her a few more times. She’ll run and get the ball a hundred times, no matter who’s throwing it. She’s a Schipperke. They’re a vermin hunting, boat-guarding breed from Belgium that look like a little black wolf without a tail. No one ever knows what they are, and they have an even harder time understanding the name. This guy thought she was a baby Labrador, which, if you know Schipperkes, is understandable, so I let him think it.
After a few minutes he clumsily sat down, exaggerated like a clown, and let her climb all over him and lick his face. Within a few minutes she and I both got tired of him and wandered off. He just moved on to the next person or dog. As long as he was blabbing to someone and playing for an uncomfortably long time their dog, he didn’t care who it was.
Claire and I saw him a few more times that fall. We tried to avoid him. You can only hear the same bit so many times. He wandered around the park and did his thing, only after a month or so it seemed he wasn’t deaf anymore. Claire was right. “Or maybe his ears just got better,” I said.
“Or his story just changed,” she replied.
“Maybe he just likes dogs. He said he used to have one.”
“Could be,” Claire said.
One day I saw him speaking with a couple of attractive, middle-aged dog park women. “You’ve just got to know how to speak their language,” he said. “People here are always telling me they just can’t control their dogs, and they don’t know what to do with them. But I know how to communicate with them. In a few minutes, I’ll have them sitting on command and doing tricks. One guy got mad the other day because in two minutes I had done what he couldn’t in two years. You’ve just gotta connect with them. Here, c’mere you,” he said, gesturing at some beagle mix. The pup dutifully came over.
Well, I thought, maybe we’ve got a real dog whisperer on our hands.
“Here, sit, boy. Sit.” The dog looked back happily, and wagged its tail. “C’mon, sit,” he said again, waving his hand above its speckled head like a magician. It jumped up on two legs, licked him, and then dashed away.
He looked scorned. He turned away. The ladies were ignoring him. He walked down to the tree line at the edge of the park and looked up at the sky as if it held an answer.
Eventually we stopped seeing him around.
*
Four and a half months later the cold was settled into the ground like super-glue. Nothing moved outside but the northern wind. Ten below for two weeks straight. It was the coldest winter in Minneapolis in years.
It was a Saturday night at the restaurant. Christmas was two weeks prior, but it was still busy, and I was running around at the whims and commands of our guests, trying to earn money. I work at a very nice restaurant, just off Downtown Minneapolis on a lovely old park called Loring. It’s in a historical building, has grand high ceilings with chandeliers that drip down like crystal sap, and a panoramic view of the park through giant glass windows. It’s a wonderful place of fine dining, and our clients are often wealthy.
Sometime around 8 o’clock in the evening I noticed our general manager, Angie, talking with my wife. Claire is a manager there as well, and yes, she kind of got me the gig, but that’s beside the point. Claire seemed upset, so after Angie left, I walked over and asked her if she was ok.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s just that there was this homeless guy trying to come inside the restaurant, and Angie had to ask him to leave. He said he just wanted to come in and get warm for a minute, but she couldn’t let him in.”
“It’s so cold,” I said.
“She feels bad, I can tell, but it’s still awful. His hands were all crumpled up and frost bitten, and he was holding them out to her all funny, and he said ‘Please, I think my hands are falling off.’” Claire started to tear up. “He tried to push his way in towards the warmth of the room.”
“And she made him leave?”
“She told him she was sorry, but this wasn’t a hospital, and she ushered him back outside. And he was totally respectful, you know? He just turned around and walked back down the steps. I think he’s sitting outside on the stoop right next door.”
“Why don’t you give him my gloves?” I suggested. My parents had gotten me a new pair of leather gloves for Christmas that were lined with some space-age material, and were quite warm.
“Are you sure?”
“He’s freezing. I can drive home without gloves for one night. I’ll just pull out my old ones later.”
“Ok, honey. Thank you!” She rushed off, and I went back to work, serving our well-dressed guests expensive wines and delicate, warm, fatty meats. I thought about the man outside, and how upset Claire was. Once she gets upset, I turn into mush. Before long I was thinking about how he was once someone’s child, and how they must have loved and cherished him. I thought that I should go get my new scarf as well, because he was outside freezing, and I was warm, had a job, was without mental illness as far as I knew, and had stolen it from the lost and found anyway. But I was soon busy again, and one of our not-so-young, but not quite elderly patrons was waving me over to her table.
“It is ab-solutely freezing in here,” she said to me sternly.
“Yes, I’m so sorry. The space is so large that it’s sometimes hard to keep warm. Maybe we can move you.”
“Well yes, I mean it’s freezing in here, isn’t it Saul?” Her elderly husband grunted and looked at her from his menu. He seemed confused. She brought her focus back to me. “Do you even pay your heating bill? My God!”
“Just give me a moment, and I’ll see what I can do.” I frantically looked for somewhere to move them, but saw nothing. It was a full house, and I was now getting looks from other guests in my section. I was going down. I saw Claire. The lighthouse!
“Claire, this lady at table 15 is really cold. She wants to move, but there’s nowhere.”
“She’s cold?”
“Yeah, I think there’s a draft from the window.”
“Ok. Grab a big table linen and stuff it down by the edge of the window. That will usually stop the draft. I’ll go by in a sec and apologize.”
“Right.” Big table linen, why didn’t I think of that? “Hey, did you give the guy my gloves?”
“Not yet. Angie went outside to give him some hot coffee, so we may not need to,” she called over her shoulder as she walked briskly down the hall with a plate of ahi tuna.
That’s good, I thought. Maybe that would be enough.
I snagged a big linen and apologized profusely while my angry lady shook her head and debated whether or not to go somewhere else. I didn’t hear her husband utter a word, so it must have been a personal debate. I crouched under the table and covered the area where the draft was coming from until the cold air was gone. I felt like a lion tamer, beating back the beast.
By the time I got out of the weeds it had been several minutes. I saw the lights of an ambulance flashing through the window. Claire was rushing over. “Angie decided to go outside and give him your gloves, and he asked her to call 9-1-1. I looked out the window, and he had put the gloves on, but he was just holding his hands out in front of him like they were dead. He was passing out, and sliding down the stoop onto the sidewalk.”
“It might be too late. He may lose some fingers.”
“Oh my God, I feel awful.”
“Me too.” I thought for a moment, and said, “I know it’s dumb, but I kind of wish I had my gloves back.”
“Why?” Claire looked at me, confused.
“Because now he’s going to the hospital, and he won’t need them anymore, and they were brand new.”
“He can use them when he gets out of the hospital.”
“If he has any fingers left. I hope he doesn’t lose any.”
“Well he might, but he can still use gloves, can’t he? Just use less fingers.”
“He might just sell them, too. I hope he keeps them.”
“What he’ll probably do is wear them through the winter and sell them afterwards, if he can get anything for them.”
“I hope that’s what he does. I had this picture in my head of him wandering off into the night with warm hands and being ok because I helped him. Is that selfish?”
“Yes, but it’s a good kind of selfish.”
“And now that that’s not what’s happening, I want them back because they were new and I liked them. God, I’m a piece of crap.”
“Honey, don’t feel bad. You did a good thing. And I fell in love with you all over again when you told me to give him your gloves.” She squeezed my hand.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
I smiled and felt good, even though my good deeds were sometimes selfish.
I walked down to the window by table 63 and stood looking out. Some of the guests were looking too. I saw the paramedics walk the man towards the ambulance. At least he was up and walking. He held out his hands with my gloves, strangely, like Claire had said, as if they were dead. The paramedics hadn’t given him any kind of blanket or cover yet. His pants were hanging down around his ass, and I could see his butt crack. As he approached the ambulance I saw his face and had a surge of recognition. It was our dog park homeless guy. His glasses were gone, and he had a long beard, but it was him. Suddenly I didn’t care if I ever saw those gloves again. He could have them. I watched him get into the ambulance. Then I turned from the window. The angry woman was standing behind me.
“We’re leaving. This is atrocious. I just wanted you to know.”
“I’m sorry. I know.”