Once, a homeless man stopped me on the street in New York City and gave me money.
It was the last thing I expected. I was nineteen, and I had been walking in circles for hours, up and down the streets around Thompkins Square Park trying to panhandle enough change to buy a bus ticket home.
It was a time when nobody had cell phones and you couldn’t just find your friends by sending text messages. You had to take your list of phone numbers out of your wallet, use either your spare change or your calling card, and actually connect with somebody on a telephone. For me, at that time, it was an impossible task. The handful of people I knew in New York either weren't home when I called, or didn’t have a phone I could reach them on because most of them were transient, either squatting vacant buildings or sleeping on the streets.
The allure of that lifestyle, the gutter-punk lifestyle, is what drew me into the position I was in. I had gone down to the city with a few people to find a friend who had fallen back into the grasp of heroin. While there, I spent a few days sleeping on couches and partying in squats. I stood on the edge of a world I romanticized, and felt sure that it was for me.
This experience turned out to be one of a few times in my life where I realized that the image I had for things didn’t match up with reality.
As I circled the streets of Greenwich Village, one person after another brushed me off and walked passed me until finally, without asking, a middle-aged man with a dirty face and a shaggy beard stepped away from the wall he was leaning against and said, How much do you need, kid?
Then, as I tried to decline, Look, kid, this isn’t for you, all right? I've been watching you roam around here for hours. This just ain't for some people. Look at me. I got a family. They came and found me. They brought me home and I couldn't take it. I left again and came back to this. This is where I belong. This is the life for me.
Trust me. Okay? Just take this money and get out of here. And don't ever come back. Promise me that. Don’t ever come back.
Once is a series of micro memoirs inspired by a book of the same title in which Wim Wenders, the German filmmaker, uses a combination of photographs and text to reveal what he considers to be the beginnings of untold stories, which he encourages his readers/viewers to complete.
Similarly, I offer these moments of my life to you as if they were not my own, as if they were in no way connected to me, which in many cases they no longer seem to be. I encourage you to consider these moments as beginnings, beginnings of stories or travels that you are free to write, live, or complete as you see fit.
Wow. What a life-changing event.
It really helped me out that day and opened my eyes to a lot of things. If he hadn't done that, I don't know what I would have done. I'm sure I would have found some of the people I had gone to the city with and they would have helped me out, but who knows how that would have played out.
Totally great story. Uplifting and is totally one of those turning point moments that are so great to share. Upvoted and followed. @dakini5d
Thanks @dakini5d. It was a surprising moment for sure, and something closed a brief and interesting experience with perfect clarity for me. Looking back now, I wish it had sunk in a little deeper and stretched out to other areas in my life, but you know the saying: Hindsight is 20/20.
thank you very much for your writing
Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed it.
Your story is mindblowing in the sense that it gives me the shivers realising there are a lot of beautiful people with a good heart around!
There definitely are, and often where you least expect to find them. In big cities like NYC, you often feel anonymous, like nobody is watching you, but sometimes people are paying attention, in both good and bad ways.
Wow great story. I think the ugly begger was actually god, who had come out to help you in your distress. In reality we don't believe the existence of god but these types of situations..
What do you think?
I never would have thought of that, but it's an interesting way to think about what happened, and it reminds me of a lot of Greek legends that I read when I was younger.
It's one of those moments that makes you think maybe everything does happen for a reason and within the framework of a plan.
Thanks for sharing this story and getting to know more about you.
There might be quite some life changing event in our lives we might even have forgotten
I can think of four specific moments in my life where I found out that the things I thought I wanted to do (lifestyle, etc.) weren't suited for me as a person, which then made me realize that I wasn't quite the person I thought I was.
I guess I really need to reflect and see if I can find those specific moments. Of course in retrospect I can clearly see how things have changed but I can't nail it down to some incident, it seems it was more of a process
I think that person was the messanger of god, that helped you in that situation. God helps those who help others.
I don't really think of god in that way, but I like your suggestion, nevertheless.
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I really liked this. Really nice man.
Thanks. It was a bit of a struggle to write. I kept wanting to add details that seemed to get in the way of the moment and the interaction I wanted to focus on. I might rewrite it another time.
I felt like there were probably many more details, but I think they might have compromised the feeling of presence and the movement of the story. I felt like I was there. I almost wouldn’t want to know too much more, but then again, I don’t know the details, so maybe I would.
Our lives get defined by tiny moments like this one. A stranger doing something kind forever impacts our future decisions and we can't forget their face or their smell. I love stories like this! Thank you.
Thanks for commenting @steemitgraven29. Moments like these are definitely strange in hindsight. You really end up wondering, Why? Why me? Why then?
I talked to this man for quite a bit. He was an interesting guy. I'd love to be able to talk to him again now.
Holy shit dude, I did some crazy stuff when I was young, but panhandling in NYC, that's dangerous. Don't you find it odd that that guy came out of the blue to put you on your path out?
Yeah. Especially in hindsight, I think it's pretty strange. My guess is that he probably helped a lot of people in his lifetime. I'm sure he met a lot of young kids on the street and was able to tell right away who would make it and who wouldn't.
He must have seen me circling and knew that I needed money and wasn't getting it, so he decided to step in. I wonder if someone had done the same for him when he was younger if that would have made a difference in his life. He told me that he couldn't live a regular life and that he needed to be on the streets. Maybe, though, part of that feeling is he had just gotten too used to that lifestyle and couldn't go back to work to beg for a chance to follow rules and do what someone else says to do all for a meager wage.
I couldn't, and probably still can't, bring myself to beg for money on the streets. Working, though, no problem.
This almost sounda like a piece of a movie for real. I can imagine you take these things with you for the rest of you life, in a kindness giving kind of way
I talked with this guy for about 30 minutes. The thing that stands out most to me and that I remember the most clearly are his story about wanting to be on the streets and my growing sense of desperation at the moment he stepped in.
Like I said in another comment. I'd love to be able to meet him again.
Great story, homeless people are often the most real, honest, and selfless people you will ever meet. I have alot of friends who ended up on the streets even my brother is sleeping rough. Things just tie you down and they want to be free. All they want is a warm place to sleep in peace.
I have found that as well. I live in Japan now, and I rarely have encounters with homeless people anymore, but when I lived in the States, especially in warmer climates, I met a lot of people who, like you said, just wanted to be free and live life their own way.