Joe Gray wrote down his own encounter with a street person after reading Homeless Protest Roundup
in the metro-section of The Times Of NYC.
As an undergraduate in the early 80's he was thinking of majoring in social work.
Scheduled classes required counseling in this department at the -----bldg.
Joe later decided not to pursue this career, especially when a counselor told him how demanding it was
and of course you have to be a "people person".
Your empathy must be pretty high with touchy feely personality,
bluntly he told me it was a bad field to get into.
The -----bldg was old, sitting next to a weird looking, incredibly tiny gothic style church.
The entrance of the -----bldg had an alcove encased with masonry brick and slabs of cement.
Every morning a homeless man would stand in the alcove.
The man was not your typical person, he kept his entire body hidden with a strange get-up.
He wore a gas-mask and his body was clothed in some kind of material,
it looked like red vinyl and yellow synthetic rubber.
He kept his hands gloved and his neck covered as if he was protecting his body from something.
He dressed like this rain or shine, freezing or burning up hot weather.
He would not speak to you, he only spoke to certain people in the ----- bldg.
No one would speak to him anyway because he looked like a freak from another planet.
It was obvious there was something wrong with him.
Joe thought he frightened people who did not know that this person always stood in the alcove.
Some asked the counselors who the strange man was outside the ----- bldg
and they said to them he was harmless.
Other students around the campus were familiar with him and would pass this way without any further thought.
Joe wasn't told when this man stopped appearing at the -----bldg,
but he did, later, years later.
He either moved on or was killed or committed.
Joe remembered seeing another man who was strange, making incoherent sounds when you spoke to him.
This homeless man was downtown and stood out because he had a full head of long hair,
salt and pepper strands that made him look like a wild man.
If he was cleaned up, he would make heads turn, a man to be reckoned with, with piercing eyes.
He got stares all around and he wore a old beige trench coat that made him belong in the trenches of a warring mind.
Joe seen him when driving in car lanes passing the telephone company's slogan, "Can You Hear Me Now".
The man was usually clasping his ears giving a Gauguinesque scream.
The public cannot ignore them anymore.
Humped-backed men with their belongings stuffed on their back and with grocery carts are prevalent even in Greenvale.
And now sad to say there are families, women with children in the ranks of the new poor.
The meaning of poor has changed over the years and everyone has a definition for it.

End Of Part VI.