Wayne

“I’m a Boy Scout, to tell you frankly.” Wayne let out a wheezy, under-his-breath laugh. His wirey beard, of varying red shades, held an alert position and looked stiff as can be. He was wearing a baseball cap smudged with dirt and too many layers of clothes under his black down jacket.

“I’m an Eagle Scout, Scout Master and have a Mountain badge and all sorts of other badges,” he said, “I know how to take care of myself.” He let out another wheezy grunt of a laugh. He certainly seemed proud about that.

Wayne was crippled, I learned, and half blind and so received a bit of social security money each month. Several years ago he was hit by a car and shattered his pelvis and hip bone. On a different occasion, he fell from a wheel ramp and sliced open his arm, accounting for 24 staples. He pulled back his coat sleeve and showed me a long scar leading from his wrist all the way up his arm. I could see scars left from the staples. He lost a pint of blood.

We had been sitting at the plastic picnic table for probably twenty minutes now and he hadn’t taken a single bite out of his chicken sandwich. It sat there in front of him, a chunk of grilled chicken, green sprigs of lettuce, and a bun sprinkled with poppy seeds displayed like an artful sculpture atop an open platter of tissue paper.

I had seen Wayne hunched over a shopping cart full of bloated black garbage bags, scooting around Sellwood many times before. For as many homeless friends as I have, I had never met any of the people living on the streets of my own neighborhood. Not until I sat down at that plastic Garden State picnic table to enjoy three delicious risotto balls stuffed with cheese and herbs. It was then that Wayne pushed up his shopping cart, ordered a sandwich, and sat down next to me. I was fixed to leave about then, having finished my snack, but this was a character I wanted to meet.

Rowan, the Garden State cook was sitting with us. “Hey Wayne,” he said, “You gonna come pick up my cans again?”

“Yeah, you got some?” he asked, “Same place?”

“I’ve seen you around, but have never met you before,” I introduced myself, “I’m Briena.”

“Wait a minute,” he said. He removed the tattered fingerless army green glove from his right hand, and offered it to me. “I’m Wayne.”

Wayne had big bags under his eyes which weren’t as much dark circles as they were sacks of loose skin. He had a weathered face and, although he didn’t talk in a way that I could see, I knew he was missing at least most of his front teeth. I wondered how he would eat his sandwich.

“This guy used to live in my backyard,” Rowan laughed, “Him and a bunch of other guys… until I had to kick them out.”

“That house was abandoned for seven years,” Wayne confirmed, “A bunch of us used to camp out in the backyard. Some guys even built a fire in the garage. But not me,” he insisted, “I never did that.”

Wayne had lived in Sellwood for fifteen years. His zone stretched from Bybee to Linn Creek, 17th to 7th, and not beyond. He knew all sorts of stuff about the neighborhood, including where to get cans and locations of abandoned buildings, but also about other homeless people. He knew my friends, Dan the Can Man and the Bionic Tramp. He chuckled when I mentioned them. He also knew all sorts of unfortunate stories about people dying on the streets.

At one point he told me of a man in his thirties who lost a good computer tech job to alcohol. One day, he told me, the man took a handful of vicodin and a handful of other medicine and washed it down with beer. In the morning he was found sitting upright and dead. A six pack of beer was sitting next to him. Wayne was an alcoholic, but he still acted amazed that someone so young and capable of a good job could lose himself to alcohol.

“Can I have an orange pop?” he shouted at the new guy who looked an awful lot like Sideshow Bob, thin and lanky with a frolicking mop of spiral curls, black jeans cutoffs, and tall black lace-up boots.

“Orange pop? Of course!” he said and scurried to grab an orange soda.

“Have you ever seen some gold tokens…” I began to ask.

“Yep,” I hadn’t even finished explaining what I was talking about, but Wayne knew immediately what I meant. I was trying to describe the Sanctity of Hope tokens. “Some guy came up and gave me nine!” he said enthusiastically and somewhat aghast, as if he wondered what in the world that guy was thinking to give him so many, sucker. “Nine!”

“Yep, I was standing right there,” Wayne said, pointing to the order window of the Garden State food cart, “ordering my sandwich and he just walked up and handed ‘em over.”

I wondered, then, what he did with the tokens. There wasn’t much to offer within his Sellwood boundaries in terms of redeeming them. I imagined Sellwood Cycle Repair, the neighborhood’s only participating vendor, didn’t have much to offer for someone sporting a shopping cart instead of a bicycle.

“I gave them to a friend,” he said. “He’s kind of passed on now.”

One day, Wayne told me, he and a friend, Allen Summer, were put in Hooper. “For detox,” he told me, “We were drinking and, yeah, we were a little drunk,” he admitted. His friend was let out of the tank an hour earlier. “He had all my money. Twenty-five dollars and three tokens.” Allen was crossing the street at MLK. He was looking for a beer. And was hit by a semi truck. “He wasn’t watching where he was going,” Wayne shook his head, looking down. “He was… I don’t wanna say it,” Wayne continued shaking his head, “He was scattered all over the road,” he said.

Wayne was full of stories. He was polite. He was friendly. He talked about anything I wanted to know about. And even talked about what I really didn’t want to know about. I have a lot more talking to do with this man. But mostly a lot more listening.

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