So I'm waiting for the bus. It's just after midnight. In the bus shelter nearby is a guy in a wheelchair. He's about 250 pounds, bearded and scraggly, and with the layers of clothing he's wearing he barely fits into the chair. In part this is because the back of the chair is loaded with crap: boxes, bags, miscellany. Street trash. This is obviously a homeless guy or a crazy guy.
Or, as I am about to discover, both.
I stand a good distance away to give him some room because you never know who has a knife these days, and as I watch, the man stands up from the wheelchair and walks into the liquor store behind us. And I don't mean he limps, or staggers. He walks, quite normally and in no obvious discomfort. Inside the store, he buys some booze, and retrieves something else from behind the counter (wrapped in brown paper, so who knows), and then he returns to his chair and sits down.
A minute goes by.
And then he wheels over to me and starts talking.
I have headphone earbuds in, but I decide that it's probably in my best interest to listen to this guy, just in case he drops a hint that he's about to stab me or something. And he talks, and rambles, and repeats a bit, and I do my best to interject the occasional "yes" and "oh really" and "oh i knew someone from there once" just to let him know I'm paying attention, which I am.
In summary, this is what I learned about his life, though not necessarily in this order.
The man is 45 years old. He used to live in Ballard, a neighborhood in Seattle, Washington, as well as in Oregon, where he was a lumberjack and helped clear cut a few forests. At some point he hurt his back, and now his spine has a birth defect that makes it too narrow so he can't walk.
Note, of course, that he walked earlier.
The man's spine issues give him headaches, and sometimes he blacks out. He hears voices. He was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and has medicine but he doesn't like it. It makes him angry sometimes. In fact, once he was arrested for attacking some police officers. At his trial, the judge (a black man, did you know they're all racist?) was racist to him, and he got the judge disjudged. Debenched? He wasn't sure of the term. But anyway now the judge is screwed because he was two years from retirement and now he gets nothing.
The man said that Washington state has good concealed carry laws and he had (has?) a .38 caliber pistol with 1000 grains of ammunition.
I did not ask him to show it to me.
When the man saw the doctors about his spine, they wanted to insert a titanium rod, but that would be too stiff because titanium is very hard, and then he couldn't walk. So he asked them to insert a silicone spine, because that's flexible, but they said that would be too flexible. So he told them to just infuse the silicone with titanium enzymes. He said the doctors looked at him like he was crazy, and he was amazed that he -- a man who has no high school diploma or GED -- knew more about medicine than they did with their medical degrees.
"I was a hit man once," he said after that.
"Oh?" I asked. "Up in Washington?"
"No," he said. "All over."
At this point the bus arrived.
"Are you getting on the bus?" I asked.
"No," he said.
"Well I have to get on," I said. "Nice talking to you, man."
I boarded the bus and moved to the back, just in case he changed his mind. He didn't. The last I saw of him, he was sitting outside the now dark liquor store in his wheelchair, watching the bus pull away.
I like to believe it was all true.