by Tom Upton

Created on: May 21, 2008   Last Updated: February 09, 2009

The Last Great Original

I sat on one of the benches near the river that ran through the park, and watched the guy cast his line in the water. Nothing was right about him. It wasn't just that he didn't appear to know what he was doing, whipping the fishing pole oddly off his shoulder, like a side-arm pitcher. Well, I might have been wrong about that; I knew nothing about fishing, really, and so he might have been an expert angler, though it certainly didn't look right. The way he was dressed was definitely all wrong; he was wearing a slick black poncho, although there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and his knee-high rubber boots would never get wet because it was considered trespassing if you actually stood in the water- a state law, as I understood- and so the high boots were entirely unnecessary. The most ridiculous thing he wore, though, was the white captain's hat- the kind worn by yachtsmen- which seemed to be a couple sizes too large, pushing his ears out to the sides and leaving only a narrow strip of ruddy skin showing between the bottom of the cap and the top of the poncho.

All in all, I decided, he was the strangest character I had seen in awhile, and that would include the bag-lady- the only bag-lady the small town of Clayton had ever known- who routinely flashed her dirty breasts at any police officer that crossed her path. So far she had not been arrested, each offended officer reacting to her flashing the same way: first grimacing, then wagging his head, then pretending nothing had happened so that he didn't have to be the one who finally hauled her into the station, where she would be locked in a holding cell, from where she could flash cops left and right through the little wire mesh window of the door.

I watched people all the time, then, when I was twenty-seven years old and found myself suddenly and inexplicably homeless. There really wasn't much else to do, excepting the fruitless activities of trying to find a job without an address, searching out a place to live when I had almost no money, or wondering how I'd become displaced in the first place.

Being homeless, I had learned, wasn't so bad at times. At other times, though, it was even worse than it sounded, unimaginably worse. It all depended upon the weather or some other basic thing, like whether you could find a public bathroom when you needed one. The latter issue was really a thorny one, because I suffered from high blood pressure and had to take a water pill every day and at times there

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