The Brown Man

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He sits on the curb and everything about him is brown: from his dirt-covered corduroys, to his leathery skin, to his mange-matted hair. It’s as if the summer has baked him like dead grass. Too dry; starving. He sees me coming and stands up, checks to make sure his cardboard sign is pointing the right direction, and then asks me if I could spare a buck or two when I get close to the door. I tell him sorry, and put my hands in my pockets, as if that emphasizes my not having any cash.

“God bless you,” he says.

I push open the glass door and step inside and a blast of air conditioned wind feels good on my face. I look back and see that his sign reads, “Smile.” I do.

I’m in one of the meetings that we work through instead of taking actual lunches and a crowd begins to form at a window just outside the conference room. People are leaning over each other, trying to get a glimpse out the window. I join them. Somewhere between a guy from sales who needs a shower and a woman from accounting who wears too much perfume, I am able to get a view of the scuffle on the sidewalk below.

The police have the brown man pinned down, his face pressed to the cement. One cop has his knee in the man’s back, pressing this twisted arm up into his shoulder-blades. The brown man has lost a shoe and the cops leave it when they shove him into the car. They talk to the building superintendent. His clothes are sharp and clean: a deep red polo, khaki slacks, white hair. He nods at the cop and gesticulates when he talks. They shake hands and then the cops drive off.

I am back in the conference room. Everyone would rather talk about the homeless problem. But not the problem of people being homeless, of schizophrenics who live in terror without medication, of abused women who leave without somewhere to go, of children that sleep under freeway overpasses. Instead, they talk about being trapped indoors. They worry about being stalked, hunted, assailed by mobs of “aggressive panhandlers.” The ones that dare ask them for some change, or a dollar.

I say, “I give them change when I have it.” Everyone glares with disgusted snarls.

“You are part of the problem. If you give them a little, they keep coming back.”

“They aren’t animals,” I say. “They are people.”

“Barely,” someone says under their breath and the room bursts into a cacophony. More stories about being ambushed and trapped. There is agreement on where the homeless waste their money. I am lectured that I shouldn’t encourage them. I’m verbally beaten down until I agree. An hour goes by like this, but we still have work to do. We end up staying late, and then later.

The sun is going down and I walk toward the subway station and I see the brown man’s shoe. Only one. It’s in the middle of the sidewalk and people just step over it without even seeing it. No one kicks it. No one looks down at it.

The next day when I get close to the door I see the shoe is still there, dewy with morning air. People are still stepping over it. I sit on the curb before going inside and find the brown man’s sign between my feet in the gutter. I hold it up for the cars passing by and wave. It makes me smile. The superintendent comes out of the door shouting at me.

“I thought we made it clear you can’t stand out here. Do I need to call the—Oh, what are you doing with that?” The hate washes away from his face when he recognizes me.