I was waiting for my bus to get to work at Arby’s this morning. A small white woman reading the new Stephen King book and listening to her ipod stood just outside the bus shelter as I was taking up most of the bench while eating my second scrambled eggs and bacon bagel. A black homeless man wandered down the street towards us. He stopped beside her and started to mumble incoherently. The woman looked uncomfortable but pulled her white earplug out and said, “Excuse me can you repeat that?” The man mumbled incoherently again. Her cheeks colored pink. She looked around, but I was the only other one there and she seemed not to think the fat woman in the Arby’s uniform staring curiously at her could help.
The man gestured wildly while spluttering and mumbling. He smelled like old poop. The white woman looked frightened. But I could tell she didn’t want to be nasty to him or just leave because that would be like admitting she is a privileged white woman who doesn’t care about a black homeless man. The man gruphed and harrumphed and coughed. She looked down at her Stephen King, but that only seemed to irritate him further. “I’m sorry. I don’t have any change,” she said. The man scratched his crotch and the bus pulled up. The white woman said to the man "Happy Thanksgiving." She and I both got on the bus. The woman went to the back of the bus scratching her face looking very perturbed. The homeless man continued on down the sidewalk.I didn’t think to intervene because as Ronald Reagan said, “What we have found in this country, and maybe we're more aware of it now, is one problem that we've had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice.”
Yours and forever,
Iris Myandowski (The hand walking queer)
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