Cray crays

Something about me attracts the crazies.

Maybe “crazies” is a bit harsh. “Eccentrics” may hit closer to home, but any way you want to define them, they have a way of finding me, perhaps sensing I’m a bit eccentric myself. It reminds me of the way a morsel of food will attract insects even when there are no insects in sight. I am officially a slice of watermelon. Never thought I’d say that.

Evidence of this came last week in the form of a transient woman whose crusty bun of hair looked as though it might crumble like soup crackers in strong crosswinds. I was relaxing in Portland’s Monument Square, chomping on a nectarine, when a young man approached asking if I would sign a petition. The woman -- I’ll call her “Penelope” -- sauntered over and began engaging with the man. It was a bad sign when she didn’t know Susan Collins and Angus King were her senators. It was an even worse sign when she sat on the bench next to me and started talking about how she rummages for food in other people’s trash.

Petition Man quickly got our signatures and hoofed it, practically leaving a cartoon puff-cloud behind hm as he set land speed records racing down Congress Street. He and I both knew that Penelope would soon be launching into breathy and meandering discourse on all things transient; she exuded this quality immediately, much the way Kryptonite emits a lime-green glow of radiation. Petition Man, needing more signatures, had a pretense for leaving the scene. All I had was a nectarine. Lucky me.

Penelope settled deeper into the bench as her eyes assumed a far-way look, the kind that usually precedes a long philosophical rant. What choice did I have but to sit there and listen? My lunch hour had just begun, and though I could have lied and said “Sorry, I have to get back to work,” chances are she would have stayed on the bench for a few minutes, started walking again, and spotted me finishing my fruit while hiding ineffectively behind a hot dog vendor. I’m always caught in these situations, and so I stayed put and listened patiently while sucking on the pit, secretly wishing I had the power to morph into a bird and fly to safer ground. Nova Scotia, perhaps.

What a tale she told. Penelope seemed less a hard-luck case than the hobo type, deliberately choosing a transient lifestyle for reasons that are still unclear to me. Maybe it’s the romance of it. Originally from Massachusetts, she spends the warmer months roaming the northeast, camping and squatting and eating cheap calories in the form of discarded bread and bad lettuce. She seems to live in some alternate, concurrent reality, a Mad Max dreamscape running parallel to our own workaday lives. Her story would have sounded almost quaint if she hadn’t smelled like old pottery. Maybe these types of stories are more charming when you don’t feel like burying your face in a bucket of potpourri.

And I just sat there and took it. There’s a quality these people sense in me; maybe it’s that I don’t talk much. They look at me and see a giant ear they can squawk into. Which, come to think of it, is a half-decent idea for a cartoon character: Eary McLobe, a superhero whose power is soaking up the ramblings of loquacious drifters. Gotta copyright that before Marvel pounces on it.

To clarify, my unease had nothing to do with Penelope being disadvantaged. I donate to food shelters and drop bills into buskers’ guitar cases, and feel the requisite liberal dismay when poor folk are unfairly targeted by bad public policy. My beef was that she was both chatty and insane. Much like the woman who approached me in almost the exact same spot some three weeks previous.

Same park, same time of day, different bench. Turkey sandwich this time. I was staring into space with dead bird in my mouth and thinking about nothing at all when another woman, I’ll call her “Fiona,” settled in next to me and started massaging her calf, which was pockmarked with mosquito bites and looked like a deli ham. With no preamble -- no “Hey, howya doin’” or “Mind if I sit here?” -- Fiona told me all about her knee surgery, and how much it hurt, and how entertainment options in Portland were limited for a woman of her age. Apparently her idea of entertainment is finding random turkey eaters and picking up on conversations they didn’t even realize they were having. Beats going to clubs, I guess.

Fiona is one of those people who’ll expound at length on her own travails while expressing no interest in the lives of her listeners. These people are amusing, but exhausting. In about five minutes I knew about her family, her living situation, her hobbies and her medications. If I’d had a second sandwich I might have been able to stick around long enough to grab her social security number and the passcode to her apartment building. I said about five words, none of them revealing, but in retrospect I probably should have said more. I missed an opportunity to concoct a flesh-and-blood fictional character from scratch. A more inventive mood might have produced Randy Shephard, an amorous farmer whose indiscriminate fornicating practices have resulted in a stock of very shy and confused cows.

Buried underneath my bemused frustration is the lurking suspicion that maybe I’m one of the crazies myself. In 30 years I may well be interrupting people’s lunches to expound on my theories about using wormholes to travel through time. I’m strangely OK with this. As long as I still have access to fresh nectarines, it’s a fate I can handle.