Homeless and in Squalor, ‘Blue Eyes’ Sees Beauty
Sheila Dixon Howard calls him Blue Eyes.
Hair in dreads and feet tar-black with crusted dirt, he spends his days crouched over like a caveman, squatting beside a pile of empty water bottles, rotting oranges and boxes of uneaten sandwiches. Every so often, and for reasons only he knows, he hops, the tattered rags on his legs dangling at his ankles. He will not tell you his name. And photographed? No, thank you.
Howard, like thousands of others, spotted him in the middle of a busy downtown thoroughfare between court and state government complexes. Here, amid the bustle, he has become a metaphor for the choice that confronts every urban citizen: Keep walking, or hand over a few coins? And, if you choose the latter, what’s the story behind the person you’ve helped?
The man reeks of urine, and most people cover their noses or purse their lips as they walk by. Some just turn away. Others, like attorney Ronald W. Stenlake, swiftly but silently slip the man a few dollars or leftovers from lunch.
“I’m very cynical and don’t contribute much to causes,” Stenlake said. “I have my own system for giving money: women and old people. But, I have a warm spot in my heart for that guy.”
Blue Eyes responds by leaning sideways like a crab to snatch the bills which will soon blacken like the wad of others he clutches in his right fist. He politely tells Stenlake thank you.
Howard, who works nearby as a senior secretary, is among the man’s regular visitors, the few who stop weekly for some conversation and ask if he needs anything. These, the man calls his friends.
“When we first met, he wouldn’t tell me his name,” she said. “He had the most beautiful blue eyes.”
That’s when she decided to call him Blue Eyes. He liked that.
It was months of walking past before she paused to speak to him, pushed by the haunting thought: What if that were me, or someone I knew? She wanted to know why he was there.
His answer: because he wanted to be.
Guardedly, Blue Eyes says it all started one night when he got caught in the rain, far from home without any money and only the clothes on his back. He said he’d come from the East Coast and had been working his way through a series of unremarkable jobs.
That night he slept under a tree. He felt free. He did it again the following night. And again, until nine years had passed and he was 46.
“I just didn’t see the point in working any more,” he said. “I lost my momentum under that tree.”
Little by little he didn’t see the point in showering anymore, changing his clothes or even wearing shoes. He would just get dirty again, his clothes would fall apart anyway, and what was the point of shoes if he wasn’t going anywhere?
He’s been arrested a few times, at least once for indecent exposure (because of the tattered pants). For more than a year now he’s been returning to the same bald patch in the grass near a bus stop at 1st Street and Broadway. Waiting for him are two sparrows, which wake him up every morning and chirp at his feet for their daily meal at 4 p.m.
“You pay a price for everything in life,” Blue Eyes said, watching the cars pass. “This is the price I pay to hear those birds in the morning. The price that guy pays to drive a Jaguar is that he doesn’t get to hear the birds.”
Blue Eyes also has his friends, the few who have seen something beyond the matted hair and yellowing teeth. Howard even introduced her 5-year-old daughter to him recently, and the little girl invited him to stay at their home, assuring him, “Daddy won’t mind.”
Blue Eyes declined. But Howard and Blue Eyes do talk. And about a year after that first chat, he told her his name. She’s guarded about their conversations and won’t reveal his name. She can keep a secret; that’s what friends do.
Their relationship, she says, has made her more sensitive to the circumstances of others. It has shown her the value of taking a risk, of taking a step beyond her comfort level and reaching out to someone she once might have avoided. He may have that effect on others.
“As people see him, I think it makes them stop and think, ‘Maybe I should be more giving or sensitive,’ ” she said.
Another friend, William Faulk, who lived on the streets for 10 years, brings Blue Eyes “whatever he needs.” Faulk is a former neighbor; though now employed, he used to sleep in the doorway of a law library.
“When I was on the streets, all I thought about was get up and get food,” he recalled. “Now I got my self-esteem back and responsibility back. Now I have three pairs of shoes and socks.”
He and others think Blue Eyes should do the same, but despite Faulk’s urgings, Blue Eyes hangs his shaggy head and gently says he doesn’t know if that’s what he wants.
“The worst part about being homeless,” he later confides, “is that people don’t think you’re intelligent.”
It upsets him when passersby impose their views on his life, offering to take him to a shelter or even a trip to a mental hospital. (“People can help you to death.”) He doesn’t think he’s given up.
Even so, his friends struggle with the state of his life. They can’t grasp why this man they’ve come to know--who loves French existentialist writer Albert Camus, speaks Spanish and French and is well traveled--would want to live this way.
They wish there were more they could do beyond the occasional rib dinner and $5 bill. Blue Eyes, in turn, almost as another spectator, momentarily hopes for that spark of motivation to move him off the pavement, uncertain that it ever will.
