After living in a town as small as Pittsburgh for four decades, your past tends to bump into you with annoying regularity. There's the curl-up-and-die moment when we plunk down our family's dinner tray in a fast-food joint next to some drunken one-night stand from 20 years ago. And hey, who can forget the realization that the state trooper who just asked for your license turns out to be that kid you gave wedgies to in sixth-grade gym class?
None of these incidents can compare to meeting schoolmates-turned-panhandlers. I swear, there's so many of my old classmates from Wilkinsburg High begging for spare change on the streets of Pittsburgh, if we ever had a class reunion it could be on the Roberto Clemente Bridge. We'll drink jug wine from paper bags, and our buffet line will be served in city refuse cans.
Our school was no different than others, but it now appears our curriculum included "Wine Guzzling and Crack Breath 101." Or maybe it's just bad luck and the effects of our region's desperate economy, but I seem to know far too many homeless people. Or worse yet, they know me. Seldom can I complete a streetside interview without some grizzled, yellow-eyed panhandler interrupting with a smile of recognition and a rattling of the old McDonald's cup. "Yo, cuz! Don't you remember me⢠It's Jimmy from fourth period science! I know you can help a brother out."
Typically, I'm too stunned to help the brothers out. The mind reels at the ability of the long-term alcoholic and drug addict to remember a face from 30 years ago. These are the same people who most days can't remember that they are not, in fact, Eleanor Roosevelt or The Incredible Hulk. Or which Dumpster they call home. Yet their database of local faces and names is both timeless and impeccable.
So what's a homeboy to do⢠One would think that, after years on the streets, homeless people would be ashamed to have their old school chums see them in such a state. Perhaps homeless life is so hard that, after days of being told to "get a job," even a distant memory must seem a welcome sight. In that case, I'm flattered. But brothers, please -- one classmate at a time!
