Episode III: Raleigh, North Carolina

We hadn’t been seated more than five, perhaps ten minutes before the homeless gentleman took a seat at our table in the Applebee’s, on Briar Creek Parkway, at roughly 9:30 in the evening. Bill saw him first, and I turned to watch the man slide into the chair with practiced caution, as though my friend and I were wounded animals. It immediately occurred to me that he had chosen our table over the aging white couple and the large group of Asians because he had done this before, because he saw us as guilty liberal college students, because we were only two compared to many, and maybe because he expected us to forget the fact that he wreaked of human waste. Surely his intellect was not so sharp as to identify us as a golf course superintendant and a lethargic writer respectively. I decided I would tolerate him only so long as he stayed interesting.

“Could you give me bread and water?” he said, his accent thick with British and African influence, which, looking back was the most convincing aspect of his presentation.

“Bread and water.” I repeated.

“Yes. Just bread and water,” he said.

“Yeah. Sure.”

“It’s all I need,” he told us, “to…sustain myself,” with a nod and a yellow smile.
I glanced at Bill, who was sitting forward in his chair; wide-eyeing the man as though he were afraid I might be stabbed at any moment. I wanted to laugh at him, but there was a homeless man in our presence, and a foreigner at that!

“So what’s your name?” I began.

“Oh…” he paused, staring at the ceiling, “its not important. None of that is important to me now.”

“How so?”

“I am past that,” he stated with a wave of his hand, speaking slowly, as though it were painful to talk, or that he would be punished for choosing the wrong word or speaking with excessive force. I was undeterred.

“Where are you from?”

“Cameroon,” he said, “but I have lived most of my life in England.”

“Very nice. So if I get you bread and water you’ll be off? That’s all you need?”

“Yes. That is all I need,” he nodded.

The waiter arrived just then, and I shooed him away with demands of bread and water and he said we don’t have bread and I said how can you not have bread and he said we have toast and I said toast then, and he clasped his hands and snapped away as though he knew exactly what was happening.

Bill spoke for the first time, inquiring, “How did you end up in America?”

“I am trapped here,” said Nameless, and I was exceedingly please with how interesting our friend was turning out to be.

“You’re trapped here? How did that happen?” I asked.

“Oh, its much too long of a story for you gentleman,” he said, again very slowly, as though his lungs were betraying him.

“How about North Carolina?” asked Bill.

“I’m sorry?”

“How did you get to North Carolina?”

“I walked here, from Buffalo.”

I whistled and Bill raised his eyebrows and stuck his jaw forward with a nod.

“So you were stuck in Buffalo?” I asked, adding “that’s a good place to leave these days,” but I think the humor went over the head of Nameless, or perhaps ricocheted off his forehead. “So you really just walked all the way here?”

“I did. Yes,” and he then made eye contact with me, staring hard and strong and I instantly understood how proud he was of that fact.

“Where are you walking?” asked Bill, and for the first time I saw how jaundiced the eyes of Nameless were. His liver was not well. Perhaps he ingested more than just bread and water. I wanted to know more. I wanted him to tell me he loved pills, or drank Evan Williams, or something equally depressing to match the scent of his body.

“Florida,” he said.

“That’s quite a hall,” said Bill, “and do you usually just sit down at someone’s table like this?”
“How about a bacon cheeseburger?” I offered, hoping to distract Nameless from Bill’s aggressive tone. I even showed him the well-prepared photograph of the dish, but he gently pushed my hand away and closed the menu in the process.

“I can tell…you guys are a little….freaked out?” he said through his raw, flaking lips, as though he had just recently learned the phrase ‘freaked out’.

“I mean, a little. But we don’t mind,” I told him, “its no big deal.”

“So why are you walking to Florida,” Bill demanded.

“I have friends there,” said Nameless, “and they will help me to work on my book.”

“You’re writing a book? What’s it about?” I asked.

“Oh…a little of everything. I like to write about this country, the people,” he said, “I like to think of my writing as a way to communicate with myself,”

“Uh huh,” I was disappointed that he didn’t go into the details of this sprawling epic he wished to pen, and I began to wonder if he was just bat-shit.

“Yes, but you know what I love about the way people treat me here, is they think that I cannot do what I say I am going to do,” he told me.

“How do you mean?”

Nameless shrugged, “I don’t want to tell you, man. I don’t think you want me to tell you, man.”

“Well we never said that you couldn’t make it to Florida,” I told him, “in fact it’s pretty fucking awesome you made it here from Buffalo,”

“You know how I get from place to place? I just ask people for bread and water. That’s all I need. Everybody…they want so much here. They think they need so much here. It makes me sick,” he said, gesturing with uncut fingernails and hands covered with cracked skin.

“Are you writing a book about your travels?” asked Bill, and Nameless made eye contact with him for the first time and replied with “Yes. But you know I can see that way…that way you look at me,” and he pointed at my friend. Then Bill put his hand into his pocket, which I knew held a collapsible blade and I said “Jesus. Really?” without caring if Nameless didn’t understand. And Bill gave me half a grin and pulled his hand out as the waiter placed buttered toast and ice water in front of us.

And Nameless crossed his legs then, began to pick at his bread then, as though he were going to stay a while longer, as though our agreement included a deep, captivating conversation on the state of America, one that would twist and digress until we had talked each other out, until the check came, until he flinched too hard and gave Bill an excuse to put a knife to his throat and speak down to Nameless, vent his frustration on Nameless. No one would have stopped him. I, like so much of my generation, wanted only to be entertained, and I was beginning to tire of the endless, self-important drivel coming from someone who lacked the common decency to ask permission to sit at one’s table. You would think British vagrants would be knowledgeable in such things, or perhaps I am just an insufferable prick. The point is that he began to violate the terms of our verbal contract. He was not to stay for an epic conversation. He was not to discuss his plans for the future or his thoughts on existence if he could barely speak about how he got here in the first place. I asked him if he might be willing to take off.

“Oh, you want me to…tallyho?”

“Tallyho,” I said.

He blinked at me for a moment and then rose from the table without his bread, without having taken a sip of water.

“Woah, woah, woah. Where are you going without your bread?” I asked.
“You do not want my company,” Nameless told me, turning back and extending a hand, stretching it out, cracking the dry skin.

“I’ll shake your hand if you take what I gave you,” I told him, “You asked me for bread and water, not a conversation,”

“Okay,” he said. And then Nameless reached into his New York Knicks jacket and produced the absolute last thing I would have ever expected, which in this case was a bottle of Purell hand sanitizer. I smiled with enough force to expose my high gumline and realized then that, although I could never convince him to sit back down, I did not want him to go. Poor and disheveled as Nameless was, he had decided to carry hand sanitizer with him, probably using it in various methods of bodily cleansing; rubbing it beneath his armpits, his crotch, diluting the substance with water and swishing it between his teeth, working the gel into the fresh wounds on his calves sustained from climbing barbed wire fences and so forth.

“You see our hands touched a little before and I want to clean them of you,” he said standing over me.

And with that he poured so much fluid from the bottle that it splashed over his hands and ran down his forearms onto the table and chairs, onto Bill’s wallet and keys, the sugar holder and the salt shaker and the little desert menu in the middle of the table, running over the edge and dripping onto my jeans, my shoes, some of it falling on the back of my hand. I did not uncross my legs or make a protest of any kind. Having expelled quite enough, he set the bottle on the table and began to fervently rub the fluid into his hands, his forearms, reaching up into the sleeve of his coat even further to access the triceps, and finally the back of his neck. I think Bill’s mouth was agape. I could only smile. Then Nameless looked at me.

“You know what I’m going to do sir? You know where you are going? In my book. You are going in my book and I will never forget you. I will never forget your face, sir.”

Then Nameless strode out of the restaurant, mumbling to himself and nearly stumbling over the newspaper dispensers. Bill began to laugh as I produced my handkerchief and wiped the Purell from my right hand, still grinning and deeply satisfied.

Written By Parker Quail

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