The man whose wife and child died

My friend was tall and very thin. He was older than I, by a lot of years. He didn't have any teeth and wore bad dentures that he had found - they clattered when he spoke.

He rode his bicycle everywhere, usually with a cobbled together trailer of some wheelchair parts loaded down with who knows what.

He almost always had some sort of squat going in a parking lot or under a building and would find futons and beds that he hauled there. I could count on him for a soft, safe place to sleep - if I knew where to find him.

We sat up one night talking about ourselves and how we had come to be where we were. He told a story full of pain about a younger man that drank too much. He was driving a car under the influence and got in a very bad accident that was his fault. His wife and son were killed but he was not injured.

Even 30 years after it happened, the pain crippled him. We talked about the oblivion that can be found and the necessity to make the world back away from our skin. How at times it feels like the air itself is laced with razors and can cut you if you even breathe.

When he was high (which was every moment he was awake) he always had a smile for me and an offer to share everything he had. No matter how little dope he had, some of it was mine for the asking. He found food all the time and tried to feed me everytime he saw me.

One time, he came up to a place where I was camped. He had stopped at the Bakery dumpster and the fruit stand on his way up the hill. He pulled a angel food cake out of the box on the back of his bike and then a bag of peaches from somewhere. The peaches were huge and overripe. He told me that peaches were god's way of making sure that we know how to eat angel pussy by the time we get to heaven. I watched him start to eat that peach and sure enough - that's exactly what it looked and sounded like. How could it get any better? Angel food cake and angel pussy peaches.

He died from Hepatitis C - a long slow painful death.

I loved that old man and hope that he is in a better place where his pain is gone and that angel pussy is as good as he hoped.