Daniel has always been homeless. He was born in a Renault 5 which he learned to drive soon after. He took fares, taxiing bald hookers with knives in their eyes to their dates. Pimps shot up his baby formula on the car's bonnet. All this before he was eighteen months old.
Eventually Daniel’s car was stolen by a three year old bully and he had to learn how to walk and beg for money too. He made a good living, sitting on newspaper in
But the gravy train couldn’t last forever. He soon became a middle-aged man; an age when asking for pureed food seems creepy. He owned a knee length suit and six nectar cards that could claim three Toilet Ducks. And so the circle of life continued. And now he’s sitting in front of me drinking coffee. It doesn’t seem right that he be allowed into Starbucks.
‘I have never had sex with a woman,’ Daniel said, ‘and yet I’m not a virgin, if you know what I mean.’
I didn’t.
‘I have never seen The Wire. I have never felt the love of a dog that didn’t hump me and feel ashamed soon after. I have never tasted ice-cream, I mean I really don’t think what I ate was ice-cream. I have never slept a night without the fear someone will steal my papier-mâché fort'.
Later, as I walked him to his card-board box, moulded into the shape of a red sports car, I realised it’s not just us, the shiny bench pressing white rulers of the planet, suffering from this mentally retarded, paralysed from the waist down, amputated, clinical depression of a financial crisis. The fact is homeless people have been whinging for years.
As I departed Daniel grovelled, ‘Can you spare some change, please.’
I thought about it, rifled through my pockets and lied, ‘Um, I don’t have any. Sorry.’ I felt no guilt. These are the times we are living in.
