Bartolo

I once made a point to write down all of the names of those in this neighborhood who passed away. Whether it was acts of violence, addiction, illness, cold, or natural causes, something deep within me feels the injustice of a death without recognition, without any kind of pause, thought, silence.

Ten minutes ago, I received a phone call from the hospital from a nurse, looking for Bartolo's next of kin. He had named me as his emergency contact. Me, the person who made him laugh with broken Spanish, who liked to pluck off his hat to show his lack of hair, who would occasionally stop next to the nest of blankets that enveloped him in his Doorway (http://144southdivision.blogspot.com/2009/12/door-way.html), who called him 'sir', and called him a friend, but couldn't go much further than that. I knew nothing of his next of kin.

But I knew of his laugh, his kindness, his deep and beautiful wrinkled face. And just for now, for this moment, I'm thinking of him.

My Old Man

I have always called him "Tricky Dick" because of the time I caught him stealing my dry erase marker and he claimed that it, in fact, did belong to him, but that he would give it to me as a gift. Everyone else simply called him "The Old Man". Once in a while, I would call him "My Old Man"; his usual streetname with a posessive paternal spin. I love him.

I saw him in my office. We talked about his favorite Biblical passages and his favorite sacreligious interpretations of them. We called his siblings who lived in far away cities and looked up pictures of their hometowns on Google Images so he could imagine where they were. We talked about how the police always picked on him because he was missing a few toes from the war and consequently always walked like he was drunk, and then the irony of the fact that he really was always drunk.

I saw him outside of my office. He liked to use this old broomstick to hit on fenceposts and to pretend to cut down trees. He was really going at it on a sapling in front of the bank, so I sat him down and gave him some iced tea and told him to give the trees a rest for the sake of preserving the earth for my future offspring.

Someone left a message for him on our universal message line that his brother had died. I was nominated to take the old man into my office and tell him, because we realized he had no one else here to tell him. We talked about his brother, we called his sister, and called his sister again. We looked up pictures of where his brother used to live, so he could imagine where his brother's body would rest.

And then Tricky Dick didn't come back for a long time. I thought about him, and about him thinking about his brother. I thought of him pretending to cut down trees somewhere as an attempt to ease his broken heart. I we were weeding out old mail one day, mail we would have to return to sender because it had not been claimed, and I found a letter sent to him by his sister. I kept it in my desk, in my top drawer, for months and months hoping that he would come back and that I could give it to him and that it would give him some hope. Yesterday, he did.

As usual, there were a million things going on, and I was in the midst of placing mental bookmarks next to two other requests while I focused on a third... but when I saw him, the rest of the world blurred. I stared at his old and tattered and weathered and wrinkled face and shook my head.

"There's my old man. I have something for you."

I gave him the letter that had become the inner decor of my top drawer like it was some kind of certificate of merit. I held my hand on his shoulder for a minute, and felt like I was about to cry for relief or joy and grief for my old man's life, what I know of it and what will come of it.
He thanked me, and the moment passed, and the other demands flooded back in as Tricky Dick stumbled and tipped his way back out into the street.

Estrella y mi Oso

Mr. Estrella is a walking paradox. He is a short Spanish-speaking mexican teenager who dresses like a gangster and talks like a retired English professor with a thick accent. He's everybody dude's friend, every girl's "husband". I don't know where he came from, or where he's going, but he sticks out wherever he is, and not just because he wears a fluorescent orange coat.
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He really has four names, but Estrella is the one I picked.
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Mr. Estrella has been to see me in my office 32 times since September--mostly just to talk. Every conversation ends like this:
"Pues. No se, Anita. Adios"
(And then, he punches my stuffed bear in the face)
"Estrella! Mi oso! Me PresciOso!"
"It's ugly oso."
And so it goes. I am pleased with a pun in my sencond language, and he is pleased with his insult to a bear I was given that was found in a dumpster.
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Mr. Estrella got a job painting, which I could tell before he told me. He was covered in it. When he got paid, he bought me three bags of gummy bears. He had never had them before. I gave him some.
"Anita! They are so delicious! I love them! I love them with all of my heart, Anita!"
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I looked in every drawer until I found calling card that would work for calls outside of the country. Mr. Estrella has not talked to his mother in a year. There is five minutes left on the calling card, but she never answers. Today, Estrella cried.
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Estrella came into my office last week with a string of spanish exclamations that came a little too fast. All I could catch was "Your teacher! Sooo nice! She is going to call!" And then he went to work. An hour later, I answered the phone:
"Anna? Hi! It's Rachel! Your 3rd grade teacher! I met your friend Juan, and I want to give him a Bible in Spanish. Can I drop it off to you?"
She did, and Estrella carries it with him everywhere he goes now. He said he "looks at it every night".
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Mr. Estrella looks like Paulie, the native-american/phillipino-looking-19-going-on-11-kid-with-a-dutch-last-name. They both have drinking problems, but Estrella pointed out one very important difference:
"Him, man's body, boy's mind. Me, mind and body both match."
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Estrella says after he gets paid next, he will move. He says he has no family here, and that his 7 different supposed wives don't count. "Nobody is sad when I am sad" he says. He thinks he will go to New York.
He told me that he was not going to say goodbye.
I asked him why.
He answered in Spanish, and the best translation I could come up with was:
"For the sake of the bear."