Waiting for a Bus Without a Token of Sympathy

The man is a transient, not old but a terrible wreck, unable to conceal an awful body and mind illness. Stark and furtive, he is pacing near the bus stop, attracting attention. He is tense, preoccupied, insistent in his gaze. He carries the baggage of imbalance, mania, perhaps addiction.

Something there is not right, but he is able to manage the basics in some fashion under the punitive stares. Perhaps “liberated” from institutional life, set free to persevere on these streets, to wrestle his strange voluble demons under public scrutiny. He has inherited . . . what? Not simply a particular decade’s indifference; perhaps a cumulative impatience, many years of unwise economies. This is the denouement of a social service that has no answers and now no room. Instead, he is here foraging among those waiting for the bus.

What can we suggest for him? He is beyond us, beyond our distrust and reproach, unmediated by any possible sympathy.

The risk of being forced into conversation, contact--no one wants to be part of his unexplainable wounds. No one here will make the necessary gestures, draw the unsavory to themselves. These strangers are afflicted with caution. Culture, language, charity--nothing of theirs will include him.

He is drawn along the sidewalk here as if by a current, someone to be looked at before looking away, but being here in front of us, audible, he requires attention, focus, thought.

American. One of us. And that perplexes, exasperates, as does his scabrous army jacket with its bulging pockets, his broken eyeglasses. For these strangers, he is something out of a bad dream, a dream that expects too much of them, that they have no remedy for.

When he boards on Bristol Street, the bus holds its breath until he has chosen a seat. The urban ordeal: Someone will have to share a space with him. He is liable to be quarrelsome, and we do not know if he is out of his head, what lies beyond his spew of words. The wariness of the riders is impugning, alert; it settles over the bus like an atmosphere, combustible, shorn of ambivalence.

He will find no sympathy here. The passengers are righteous, militant behind whatever defense they may need, can muster. They feel that their poorness, their need for public transportation, should not expose them to this bare pathology in their midst. They are stone-faced, conceding nothing.

The phenomenon of the publicly mentally ill, these case histories who have been freed to the asylum of the streets, seems so perplexing and implacable, so far short of solution, that one’s own response--and a miserable one it is--is to turn away. Yet in lieu of a solution, none of us can be exempt, can be untouched by the sordidness, the brutal ardor with which these individuals go about surviving. Or by the incapacity of the political to offer correction, resolution, vision.

And the man? How all things conspire against him! Unanchored, but not exempt from life. Somewhere beyond the lotions of SSI and Medi-Cal he has his history, too. Somewhere, even for him, there had been some terrain of family and connection and the rest of it. Whatever mutation had occurred, now there is only the sad choreography of his derangement, his off-kilter clothing and gestures, his final, unimaginable aloneness.