Carlos

I know this guy named Carlos, see, and he's homeless. He lives, if you can call it that, in the vicinity of my apartment, and I pass him most days, as I'm walking to the grocery store or racing to move my car from a restricted parking spot (street sweeping, expired meter, 2 hour zone - you name it, I've got it). He's drunk a lot of times, guzzling malt liquor by 11am, head nodding as he struggles to keep from passing out on the curb. Like most homeless men, his clothes are dirty, his beard his long, and his nails are horribly long and packed with dirt (and god-knows-what-else). And I pity him. I know the connotations of that term, and yes that is exactly what I mean.

I've offered to help him a few times, by driving him to the free clinic (he claimed to be diabetic and have swollen legs, illustrating it by making a show of having trouble standing up), before I saw him walking and getting around just fine the over the course of the next few days. I've talked to him, at length, 15 minutes or more. I've prayed with him. I give him money sometimes, from the little that I myself possess. But mostly, I pity him, and I don't know what to do with that feeling. Or, more accurately, I don't know how to do what I know I should do, as a good human being. Help him. Get him to a shelter. Distinguish myself from the herds, who pass people like him every day on the street without even acknowledging their presence. But I don't. I am one of them, and until I take action I'm no better, and I know that.

What makes me perhaps even more guilty is that I've actually stopped to learn things about him and yet still fail to act. I know his name. I know he grew up on the street I now live on. I know he's gay, and was ostracized by his family as a teenager because of it. I know he once got railroaded into becoming a street prostitute, in a story he told me months ago while falling-down drunk at two in the afternoon, his speech slurred, his gaze unsteady. I know he worked as a waiter at a restaurant where Sally Field was a regular, and that one time she offered to give him a job as an extra in one of her movies (revenge thriller "Eye for an Eye" from '96). I know that he's always cold, even when it's 89 degrees outside. I know he's been in and out of shelters for the majority of his adult life. And possibly, that he's mentally ill (as many homeless people are).

And also, sometimes, I'm repulsed by him. It's not easy to say. But it's true. Those long nails, so unbelievably long, grotesque even. The untrimmed nose hairs. The filth on his clothes. The way he leers at me, drunkenly. How I flinch when he reaches his hand out to grab mine, or when he asks me for a hug. These are things I do not refuse him, but things that nevertheless make me cringe. And I don't think I'm a bad person for it. I think it makes me human.

The other day he asked if I was gay, and I told him yes. He asked if I'd be his boyfriend, when he got all cleaned up. I changed the subject. At one point, he reached out his hand, like he normally does, and against my better judgment I offered him my own. As he interlocked his fingers around mine I could feel one of those long nails, scratching against my palm - a lascivious gesture, an invitation. I finally managed to pull away and beat a hasty retreat back home, the orange juice I'd just bought at the store sweating in the heat, but not before having to forcibly remove my hand from his grip. It would almost be comical if it weren't so sad.

So he'll be there, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Wasting away what hasn't already been wasted, baking in the summer sun but still shivering, emptying bottles down his throat. Gazing at the street, and the passing cars, and all the bustle, the world literally passing him by.

Why do I feel so powerless to change it?