Monday, September 20, 2004
Vignette II: Gnop
Gnop: He’s there about half the time but I haven’t figured out a pattern to the appearances. He’s always at the southeast corner of Fremont and Mission, right across from the terminal where my bus stops; I have to pass him on my way to the office. This is a particularly raunchy corner, one where I’ve encountered some of the worst examples of homeless psychosis I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve encountered some doozies.
The fellow I’m thinking of is tall and thin, white but deeply tanned. His head is covered by a colorless knit cap from beneath which enormous fist-thick dreads slither, raffia-taupe and wily. His face is square; it’s the shape I associate with frontiersmen, widebrowed and broadjawed. Small square spectacles perch on his small pointed nose, under beetled brows that lend him an air of studious tension.
A ratty plaid shirtcoat, untucked and unbuttoned, flaps loosely around his railthin frame. His legs are basically naked, as his habitual cutoff shorts are almost indecently abbreviated. The original trousers from which they’d been crafted must have had wide legs, and, as his are very skinny, the tiny shorts bell out uproariously at their lower fringe, just slightly below his hips. His gnarled feet stand on old plastic shower sandals.
Beside him is his bicycle, a road-weary touring model heavily laden with large, well-worn nylon totebags, neatly but very fully packed. The bike leans against a mural of designs created by schoolkids to encourage us to love the planet, in a display sponsored years ago by Enron to mask the blight of a gaping vacant lot. The bright colors and ingenuous sentiment of the murals in front of which he stations himself, worn though they may be, belie the seedy gritty treeless waste of the corner where he stands, selling flowers.
That’s what he does there: he sells flowers, by the stem or in bouquets, sometimes bound up with baby’s breath or in cellowrap. He stands in his shabby coat and ludicrous shortlings, holding up a rose or a dahlia or an iris; he peers at it intently, grooming it, picking off bruised leaves and petals one at a time. At his feet lies a welter of long slim white cardboard caskets full of homeless flowers, on offer today at fire sale prices. They litter the filthy sidewalk with color.
