[sub]Note: These person may not necessarily be crazy, but he was certainly a tad eccentric.[/sub]
When I was working at the grocery store up the street a couple of years ago, we had a daily customer named Bill. Bill was 70 years old and from a small town in Iowa. He wore the same thing every day; a white dress shirt with the Iowa state logo on the breast pocket, a pair of dark slacks, sensible shoes, and a baseball cap with an archaic local IGA logo. His clothes were dirty and in slight disrepair, with a slight split in the seat of his pants and various faded stains on his shirt. I don’t wish to speak badly of him, but:
I don’t believe I’ve encountered a human being that smelled worse.
His odor was quite penetrating; a mixture of cattle on a hot day and cheap cigar smoke. I would often smell him the next aisle over as I was stocking cans. It was enough to gag you if you weren’t expecting him (which we often were).
He would come in every day and talk to the employees, including me. The subject was as variable as the weather: Maurice Richard, General Pulaski, his boyhood in Iowa involving a lack of Coca-Cola because his dad thought it still contained cocaine. Whether you were idly facing the shelves or helping a customer find the tortillas, he was there, eyes dancing, his stained teeth grinning incessantly in anticipation of what he would say next. He had a keen memory, and anything you said to him previously was bound to become fodder for conversation days later.
“Joseph, have you been following bowling lately? Walter Ray Williams won the trophy last week. Did you know that he’s also a horseshoe pitcher?”
“Have you ever heard of Rocket Richard? You did? You’re the only person besides Kevin who knew that! I know – you’re from upstate New York, and you probably grew up with a hockey stick in your hands!”
“You know, Joseph, the Mohawk Indians are from around where you grew up. Are you part Indian? No? I thought you might be – because you have a voice as deep as an artesian well!”
He was around to the point that he started to annoy people. His pronounced Midwestern accent could be heard describing the last plays of yesterdays college football game for an hour straight. A hollow baritone voice would often be heard growing louder and louder as you were putting back re-shops –
“JOSEPH! Did you see on the news today about Clinton?”
– He startled me somewhat, but I did my best to hide it. I listened to him intently, for I found his stories and outlook on current events interesting and very often entertaining. He was an intelligent man, despite what his appearance would have you believe. He had a healthy respect for the latest news from local gossip to obscure world events. His manner of speaking gave a bit of credence to the circulating rumor that he once worked for the CIA.
However, his annoyance was all too much to everyone but me, a man bagging part-time, and the store manager. His behavior was a bit unpredictable at times. “Greg, are you playing pocket pool?” he inquired of one of the checkers who was walking rather slowly to his post. I was ten feet away waiting on two middle-aged female customers. “Joseph,” he once intoned, “when I was young, what kept us in line was a social disease called gonorrhea.” A mother (and two of her children) I was waiting on also shared in this knowledge. It was one or two more weeks of similar happenings before the assistant manager kicked him out, only to have him become a regular customer again after two weeks or so.
I was once talking to the bagger, a man in his mid-thirties who lived in the same place Bill did. I was describing his latest antics while making it understood that I wasn’t poking fun when he cut in.
“You know, Joe,” he said rather pensively, "I was walking down the street one day a few years ago when I saw him sitting outside on his porch. He invited me to come over and sit, and we talked for a while.
“He’s got it rough. His wife – yeah, he has a wife, married for a long time – she’s an invalid, and confined to her wheelchair. She can’t do anything for herself. He feeds her by hand, he bathes her, he wipes --” He paused and gave me a knowing glance, ready for my cue that he didn’t have to go on. " Anyway, when he comes here, we’re like his family. His kids are all moved off and he lost contact with his relatives. When he comes here, it’s like a vacation." I was shocked, and told him so. I did my best to make it clear that I wasn’t trying to make fun of him, especially given his brave, loving venture onto a path taken by perhaps one-tenth of the worlds population. He understood, and then went on to accept a call to carry out someone’s groceries while I was taken aback slightly, saddened as I was by this old mans plight, pondering his outbursts and persistence when I was trying to carry on a conversation with someone else, yet observing the strange feeling I was having – I was honored to be chosen by this man, this man, obviously a bit withdrawn from current sundries of society, humbled as he was by an overlooking of hygiene – I was glad that I was there, despite my own reason for being there, to unknowingly add a glimmer of happiness to this old man’s grim autumn season that was the current stage of his life.
Soon after, the store folded suddenly, and I never saw him again, save one other time when I was in the area in an adjacent store. We talked for a few minutes about pro bowling and Pulaski, and then I had to go on my way; things were happening on a Saturday night for a boy who had recently turned twenty-one. “Well, I’ll see ya later, Bill; glad I saw ya,” I called out to him as I went out the door.
“See ya, Joseph!” he said, with that familiar, enthuisiastic grin of his, the genuine kindness and boyish charm readily apparent through his compromised appearance and age-hampered disposition growing rapidly apparent as his vacation drew to a close.