the spider living beneath the freeway

It was perhaps a month ago that I first saw him. His wheelchair sat rancid and idle while he struggled atop a piece of cardboard next to a garbage dumpster. He was naked from the waist down, and his legs, lean and crooked, were streaked with excrement. I have never seen someone so utterly debased, so helpless.

Since that first encounter, I have not been able to get him out of my mind. I have gone back to where he spends his nights a number of times since then, sometimes to see him folded sleepily in a twisted heap beneath a filthy blanket, but most of the time to find him absent from the pile of refuse and swarms of fat, black flies.

But tonight I worked later than usual, and on my way home I found him there in the dirt. He was resting, but I felt compelled to talk with him.

As I introduced myself he waved his hand awkwardly in my direction. The first thing I learned about him was that he is almost totally blind--cataracts. Once he found my hand we shook, and he told me his name was Spider. 

After mentioning that he was 60 years old, I asked him how long he had been roughing it. He mumbled his reply, something that sounded like "eight years". When I repeated it, he corrected me by telling me it had been twenty eight years. His nails had curved into talons, his hair had begun to dreadlock, and I kept thinking of the greasy mire on the hand with which I had grasped his.

Within the folds of his blanket was a radio, and as we chatted he went on to tell me that he regularly listened to a program about starving children overseas, and how terrible it all is, that you could see their tiny rib cages, that life is a four-letter word, that they were dying, that he prayed for those little ones, that he was grateful for every day, that he had no one to care for him, that Jesus saves.

What is perhaps most devastating about all of this is that Spider apparently receives disability payments--about $950 per month. That is only about $100 short of qualifying for the subsidized apartments a mere mile up the street from the squalor where he now rests his worn-out body; the price of my morning latte was all that stood between his worse-than-bestial existence and humane food, clothing, shelter, care, dignity, humanity. 

What's more, there is someone else who is managing his money for him. When I learned this I tried not to become angry. When I asked him if he would like his own apartment, he simply replied, "Yeah, that would be nice." I then asked whether anyone had ever offered to help him get into proper shelter: "No."

He has no papers, no ID, no proof of income; he kept telling me, "I can't read." I will post again after I take him to the institution that is in charge of his finances.