The homeless man beneath the ivy wants to know my name. I pass him the joint I rolled an hour earlier.

“Fred, man.” Pours out of my mouth, shrouded in smoke, hot to the beat of percussive spasmodic coughing.

“Freidman? You sound like a shrink.”

He eyes me like a shrink

“You a shrink?”

He passes the “j” back. Transported on worn fingers by tired eyes, Mary Jane returns from black-cracked lips and sunken cheek flesh stretched too tight.

I accept the joint while thinking I’ve had enough. 

Why press fate with all this man MUST be carrying? Christ, only a Ugandan Petri dish could be a better vector than this old black man living in the ivy beneath this cold slab of interstate overpass.

Light is fading. This joint, four inches long if its two, is a masterpiece, an ode to shaky hands and too fat thumbs. It [the joint] smokes, breathing—alive, between my thumb and index, a living doorway.

Look at this nameless old face, beneath his many tons of wet concrete and rebar: My brother, my humanity—

He stepped right through, unblinkingly. Did he consider the ramifications? The costs? Costs. What does he have to lose that he hasn't already lost?

My fear lives a lifetime between the passing of joint and my drawing of its smoke. It [my fear] matures, attends med school, (investing in its future) and then philosophizes. Its pondering is its undoing, logically—

     “I am fear, I exist to warn NOT control.”

The joint is wet when I place it between my lips, a single word: TRANSMISSION! — arcs across my brainpan, its echo fades as fast as it flashed...and I descend into my genie.

This Blackman and I chat: He’s concerned with the rain this year, too much and all the best sleeping spots remain soaked till fall. Maybe he should head farther south.

Per the norms of conversational combat my retaliation comes guised in my relating a story about the week I spent in an Asian jungle. A typhoon had come from nowhere; it swallowed us, the terrain, the trees—their canopy, the whole world.

For a week we didn’t exist. All our electronics failed, torrential sheets of warm rain erased and melted our waterproof maps. We slept beneath mudslides, caught water with our uniform bottoms, dosed it with iodine and swallowed it violently, our only form of revenge left.

A Rifle Company’s compliment of jarheads stricken from the records of existence, lost to all those who knew us, who loved us.

The helicopters never came. The typhoon consumed us completely; if we existed, we existed elsewhere.

The old man smiles (dental stereotypes abound) and part of me rolls my eyes at the part of me that cries.

He digs an old cowboy hat from somewhere deep within his shadow and then pulls it, two fisted, hard over his sloughing scalp.

The joint, burning continually, has been passed six times now. As is the nature: It grows smaller, we grow closer.

In the moment:

Soon, I know, it’ll grow dark. We’ll be well stoned and this man’s courage will grow. Other shadows and bushes will move and I’ll become hungry—

“When did you eat last?”

“This morning at the shelter.”

“One of the mission’s downtown?”

“Nuh-uh. The County Shop off 14th.”

“Any good?”

“Cafeteria or mess hall shit, same thing.”

I think about that: “Like cafeteria or mess hall.”

What crap. The two institutions [military & education] that require the very best performance and we feed them [students & soldiers] slop from the chem-vats of convenience. I ask—

“You think Einstein ever ate a personal pizza or lunch chalupa?”

“Huh? What?”

Such a disappointing response, so I project: I want you to say, “Not unless it was kosher.” I don’t say it aloud but I think it so hard I think maybe it could come true.

He wriggles beneath his urine soaked blankets in the ivy bushes beneath the overpass. Multiple layers of Friday night traffic squeals and roars somewhere high above us, everyone with everybody going nowhere, all of us, just going for the going.

The old cowboy hat smiles through its tattered brim when he asks me, "What you do man?"

“I’m a writer.”

He laughs.

“Look at this …”

HE THROWS back half his blankets, revealing a damp leg from a pair of ripped snow pants, circa 1987. This is the left leg, its been cut and knotted mid thigh.

Then he reaches down with both hands and lifts his stump nearly to his chest. Still smiling, he lets go.

The knotted snow pants protected leg-stump smacks the ground —THAAA-WHUMPT!— only half bouncing.

Stoned as I am, I’m fixated on the amputation. Unabashedly, as if the half-thigh were detached and separate from the man, I stare, completely entranced.

The day is no longer refreshing. Night has come; its chill dampness leaches my bones, my warmth fades. The spell of the thigh-stump is broken.

The homeless laugh.

“I can’t feel a thing.”

He tucks his amputation back beneath wet blankets—

“Lost it a few winters ago. I was staying warm with Listerine and paint, fell asleep somewhere and woke up in a hospital missing body parts. What you think about that?”

“And you can’t feel anything?”

He balls his left fist, pounds the same thigh three times, hard—

“Not a damn thing. Sometimes I wonder why I even bother to cover it.”

He says this laughing.

At the time it makes sense and I think to myself:

Of course! Why waste the blanket space? That’s a whole other wrap on the other leg, or arm, or belly. Maybe he’s got some food he needs to keep safe. That blanket space is more than ample enough to protect a few apples and some cheese. Maybe even some meat.

He laughs again—

 “Man I don’t even worry about.”

The KNIFE came from nowhere.

He was still smiling, still laughing. We were seated so close he needn’t even stand to lunge, to attack. He simply leaned closer, showed me that mouth-of-horrors, hissing wickedly his intent—

“I want everything … and your shoes.”

I laugh.

It poured out of me, spewing from that mean place deep inside. My special blind place, it knows only violence of action:

Inches from his face I swallow his soul—

“You want both of them or just the right one?”

AND THEN I HIT HIM AS HARD AS I CAN.

My open right hand connects with his lumpy left ear and then again, this time heel-of-palm to the bridge of his nose. Something gave —schtungKT! schtuKT!— each time we connected.

Adrenalized I stand up, fists balling and un-balling. My knuckles push hard against their skin covers.

The amputated Negro lay flat on his back, coughing, clutching his head and whimpering—

“Why’d you do that man?”

Guilt then pride makes me throw a five-dollar bill at the broken man before I leave his camp. The warmth of the world is gone. I need to get my walk on.