Out of my car window, he caught my eye. I watched him squinting up at the chilly blue sky, slouched over the cold metal roundabout seat burdened with dirty baggage. I was afraid he would see me. I waited for the light to change. But he did not turn my way; he did not move. He was sagged stone, the object of concern now only to vandals.

The light changed.

Don’t judge me too harshly. Tom Meany would try your patience, too. I remembered him when he was the office snake. But even so, I felt a twinge of pity for him, and a bit of fear. What happened to him shouldn’t happen to…but there you go. This is our world; we make it so.

Several years ago I lucked into a cozy job with a local branch of the Department of Defense. I collated contract documents for auditors. When Uncle Sugar had issues about the glut of money he was sending out to the grubbing hands of the military industrial complex, he kicked the contracts down to our slovenly, soviet-like department. A contract could disappear for a decade. Or more. The Washington Post sent a hit team down on us once. I believe their lead began, “You wouldn’t want your phone bill to be paid here, let alone…”

Now The Post has its hand out too. The Old Gray Mare doesn’t seem too good for a payout herself.

Uncle had low standards for his “auditors” anyway, but how Tom Meany made the cut I don’t know. Tom wouldn’t have made it with any real firm. He was dopey, dumpy, and his white shirts were edged in yellow, with a brown grease mark where his hair hit the collar. He had a sloppy walrus moustache and an indolent look. He didn’t bathe too hard, an olfactory distress set in italics by his habit of sharing his bed with two large Great Danes.

Tom was one of those guys who respirated offense. He couldn’t be in your radius for ten minutes without a casual racially charged remark, without a snipe at feminine ability. Without some whacko interpretation of history. I am convinced he was not aiming thereabouts—it was, as they say, just his way. But, as you know, that way does not wash.

And then there were the crazy bits. Tom Meany, as nuts often do, had an object of fixation which no one else shared, yet he insisted that they must. His hink was the Cleveland Indians ball team. Tom would walk up and offer you endless critiques of their playing, of the reception to their playing, of the potentialities realized and unrealized. He would rebut the opinions of sportscasters and AM radio chat hobbyists. Saying you weren’t up on it at all did not help. Telling him to cease did not stop it. He buzzed on and on, sucking you up like a venomous vampire tsetse fly.

Then he started claiming that the players were using his financial advice. He was doing the whole team’s taxes, you see, and they had invited him on some of their end-of-season cruises, but he was too tied up to go. As of late the coach was seeking his strategic advice, but the fool wasn’t using it. And—oh yes—the Great Danes were just as excited this season as he was; they had learned all the pitching signals, and would bark their approval at smart plays.

This started out as a bit of harmlessness, but it all turned rancid as he slid into personal decline. He was getting written up for his hygiene. He was getting warned about his chatter. So he started making up things about the others, so that he might inform on them.

I was maybe the last person speaking to him, because he hadn’t made a stab at me. But the day came.

It won’t take much background to explain what an audit consists of, not even a government audit. Something has been paid wrong. The auditor researches the payment history of the contract. The auditor finds where the payments were wrongly applied. The auditor prepares a report which shows how the payments should have been made. In the end, the error, or variance, adds up to zero—because the payment issues are balanced.

Tom Meany turned in a contract with a million dollar variance. Folks, that is not close enough for government work, either. Tom was pulled in to explain himself. He blamed me. “I asked him for all the 9-adjustment documents, and he refused to pull them.”

Nice try—except everyone above him also knew that 9 adjustments rarely have any saved documentation, and what is there is handwritten and useless. I’ll stop there—this will get tedious soon enough. I once was riding to lunch with a group of my coworkers and after a half-hour conversation about HAT ACRNs and split-service overseas pays, I realized that we were speaking an entirely alien language, and of entirely alien concerns.

You might think Tom Meany could have been fired on the spot, but I lost my job before he did. Oh, how they loved me—big farewell party at Applebee’s and all—but the term of my appointment was up, and could not be again extended. So I was out.

About a year later, Tom Meany was fired. Sexual harassment, of course. Anybody could see that one coming.

Tom Meany figured one night that his lawyer had failed him. So he went down to the lawyer’s office and put a brick through the office window. When the police found him, he was tearing through files looking for justice.

I later saw Tom Meany in the library, going through the free reference law books. He was sour-faced and his fat was gone—the skin hung in ringers off his cheeks. He looked rough—his belongings next to him in a cardboard box. I walked away before he looked up. Later, I heard that he was living in the downtown men’s shelter.

Did I mention that when I saw him this last, waiting on the bus but perhaps not really waiting on the bus, that he was outside of the “justice” building? He looked lobotomized. He looked empty.

I wondered what had happened to those two Great Danes, the intelligent dogs that could call pitching plays. I wondered what happened to the cockatoo that Meany also claimed to have owned—stress on claimed. I imagined they were lost, as must have been almost everything else, when their master had lost his mind.

What happened to Meany shouldn’t happen to a dog—or anyone. But it did happen, and it was self-inflicted, just as might have been a gunshot wound or a rash of sleeping pills. But he slipped from our fingers. We turned away. I turned away. I would like to think that some wiser society would have found a place for Tom Meany.

But are any other of us more secure? A loss of income, and the things we care about are taken from us. When do you stop being an annoying crank and become a Person of Interest?

When I was a boy, I read a quote from William James; he had some sort of hallucination of a leprous wretch, and came away saying, “That shape am I, potentially.” It shook him; reading it a century later, it shook me.

We could all be Tom Meany.

This chilly night reminds me of that, when I think of our tenuous positions, our slender resources, and the all-too-real texture of the October streets.