Shoutout to Terry the Crackhead

Shoutout to Terry the Crackhead
I have to send a spiritual shoutout to Terry the gas station panhandler. Well, panhandler isn’t accurate because Terry always volunteers to help you out with whatever your task is. pumping gas, putting air in tires, washing your windows. he wants to do a little work, make a little coin, grab some snacks at the package store, talk and laugh and spend some time weaving the fabric of his life.

today Terry put the air in my tires. he’s a big dude, 6 and some change, and gangly and that’s not a little menacing when he rolls on you. But I’m accustomed now, he’s always respectful, "Excuse me pretty lady, can i help you with something in return for whatever change you have available?" Most of the time i say no because there are a lot of people around Terry who aren’t as respectful and i’m not trying to be an easy mark, but today he just took the initiative and filled my car tires with air before the 75cent ran out. He was about his bidness. And I paid him a dollar and he ambled off. All good.

i do miss that. In the small town where i would visit my grandmother there were some indigent guys who floated through town. Sometimes they were off-season migrant workers from the islands, one was my mathematical genius autistic cousin. He swept every street in the town while chewing on the the nastiest cigar I’ve ever seen in my life. His name is David. There isn’t a combination of numbers that you can give David and he not solve, but he has the social skills of a mollusk. He used to scare me as a child because despite his singular obsession for sweeping streets, David has no regard for personal hygiene. you can smell him from a block or two away if the wind is blowing wrong, 5 blocks if it’s blowing right.

But he’s always been kind and he’s always known who I was. He knows his family and at times when I would find myself cornered by a bully or just a boy who wanted to get frisky, David would show up with his broom and get me safe and admonish me in his own special language about being safer and not wanting to tell my grandmother on me.

David’s way of dealing with the world, other than sweeping tirelessly from sunup to sundown, was to drink. He seldom got out of control, only a couple of times that i recall and mainly when someone interrupted his peaceful tradition.

So, yeah, Terry the Crackhead doesn’t bother me. he wants to be a part of society and sometimes i wonder who Terry was in a past life. We all have past lives, and he carries himself in such a way that I always resist the urge to ask, "who are your people? Where do you come from?" and find out how it was that he ended up at the gas station, approaching strangers for small jobs and small change to make his life a little less dull.