STORYTELLIN’ PART: 2

i saw a drunk homeless man get hit by a car one night.

taken from notes i wrote down during this time.

Summer of 1996, on the corner of western and gage avenues.

I was walking toward the liquor store on Western, one of three within walking distance, feeling jazzy, with Dogface on my right. It was a Sunday evening and the beginning of what would be a wild night, ending with me getting punched in the eye by said Dogface, a homeless resident of the area whose face resembled an angry, oily, pockmarked pitbull with a dead, milky right eye. Our destination was the fridge for a couple of cans of Old English malt beer, on me.

As we neared the entrance, a scrawny, short, unknown homeless man (I had never seen him during my time living here, and neither had Dogface) walked out of the liquor store, hooping and hollering, dissatisfied with life and his mistreatment inside the store. Lots of squeaky, slurred “motherfuckers” were tossed about. He walked right through the middle, between me and Dogface, cursing at no one in particular. Dogface, a menacing character on his own, simply scoffed at the man, and the two of us dismissed his drunken antics as part of the everyday scenery here.

It took no more than a handful of seconds before, from behind us, came the horrible grinding screech of rubber on asphalt. I, still at the entrance of the liquor store, turned around in time to see the homeless man get hit by a speeding car that attempted to stop a little too late. To my shock, I saw the man get thrown into the air like a used, dirt-colored rag, bent and crumpled by the car’s fender. The image burned into my mind is that of a shape—dark beige and black—tossed in the air resembling a twisted swastika.

I’m not sure what I was thinking, but I ran toward the man now lying on the street. Maybe it was morbid curiosity.

I remember staring at him as he lay on the ground, his body mangled and bent in impossible ways. I could hear a gurgling sound emitting from his throat. I can still remember the reflection of the streetlights on his blood, which had by now puddled the asphalt.

I looked toward Dogface and saw a crowd had gathered along with him near the liquor store gate. I realized I was the only one near the man’s side; maybe I was expecting others to come and bear witness too, and this snapped me back to reality. As I was almost kneeling above the man, I stood up and walked toward Dogface, feeling the type of euphoria one experiences after witnessing an event like this, feeling the shock of what I had just seen setting in.

A few minutes later, the ambulance hauled the shattered man away.

Later on, Dogface laughed, “Yeah, I saw you dig in that nigga’s pockets, tryna get his shit.” Even though all I had wanted to do was get a morbid close-up look, I lied to Dogface and told him something along the lines of, “Yeah, you know I had to see what was up.”

As for how the night ended and why I was punched in the eye, suffice it to say that it was a night one would expect hanging out with the homeless residents of South Central, los angeles, during that time, drinking malt liquor until the early morning. He did later apologize in what felt like a very heightened state of fear; he knew that i knew where he slept—a metal mesh cage behind a mechanic’s garage, exposed on the streets—and feared retaliation, I suppose. Or maybe he was just on crack when I saw him, but we never hung out again and would only see each other from afar for the remainder of my stay in south central.

Months later, as I walked out of my house with a person I had met that night—a Brooklyn-born man my age who shared the same passion for music and graffiti—we ran into Dogface, who was walking somewhere else. As the three of us greeted each other, Dogface pulled out his latest acquisition, a copper-colored handgun that he palmed, showing it to us. Something set off my Brooklyn friend, and his eyes bugged out as he quickly made his exit, sprinting away, causing Dogface and me to laugh at his abrupt departure. “That nigga’s a pussy,” Dogface blurted out, and all I could do was laugh and walk away.

‡