Friday, 5/30/03: Street Life

Normally there are no bellowing naked white men in the fountain out front of City Place Mall (map), but there sure was a bellowing naked white man in there when I passed by this afternoon. This fountain is basically a pool with a big hump in the middle down which water flows, but with a little notch in the big hump to break up what would otherwise be a monotonous composition. The man had gotten in the notch, and was hunched over in the dun-colored water, head to his knees and arms wrapped around his legs as if he had cannonballed into a pool and unhappily found it to be two feet deep. The bellows, however, were not caused by physical pain; they sounded ripped from the man, an anguish borne of insanity and the consequent inability to fit into the world.

Surrounding the fountain when I got there were police and ambulance personnel, joking about their upcoming task. In the spectator ring, professionals were taking time out from their commute to see what the hell was going on. A couple parents were trying to draw their children's attention somewhere else. A few middle-school girls of various races had nervous grins on their faces and looked out of the sides of their eyes, knowing they would soon see a grown white man's weewee, and not only that but a grown insane white man's weewee. And a few young black men had gathered to summarily mock the man, including one man who had established a Marco Polo dynamic, answering each of this man's forlorn, angry cries with squawking catcalls.

I watched while the light to cross Colesville turned, and realized I wasn't cut out to be a conoisseur of human misery—I put myself in the other person's place too easily. But I couldn't quite turn away as long as I didn't have anything else to do. It was a relief when the other white man with no clothes, that little guy on the WALK/DON'T WALK sign, finally came on to allow pedestrian traffic in my direction. I crossed Colesville, and heard one black man—walking towards the scene, it should be noted—deliver the perfect coda: "Why do all these people want to see a naked white man anyway?"

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