He is a thin, muscular man with an olive tone, black hair slicked back with grease and numerous indistinct tattoos. His head is narrow and his face hawkish. Standing five feet ten, he leans on the wall of the McDonalds, listening to his head set as his cell phone charges in the wall plug. Above the line of his sunglasses are tattooed pea-sized dots. The red short-sleeve shirt forms to the contours of his stiff body, with the body mass index of a twenty-year old but with the shape of a fit fifty-year-old. His black cargo shorts accentuate his tentative gait as he follows me inside and strikes up a conversation. Ignoring him, I take my coffee and sit.

He sits down behind me near a fit, youngish black woman who works at the Dollar General. She is texting. He is working on some craft.

I can no longer see them after I pull out my laptop. He soon introduces himself to the woman as “Paul” and says, “Here, Miss, you are a beautiful woman and this is for you.”

She said, “Oh, thank you. You made a flower out of a dollar? I really appreciate this.”

He responded awkwardly, “Well, Miss, I appreciate you—you are very pretty to look at. Have a nice day, Miss.”

She wished him a good day as he walked to the door and embraced an older man of gruff aspect. They stood upfront ordering until the little woman left. They returned to Paul’s seat, the older man having bought him food. A mentoring session then ensued in which the older man told Paul that “the doctors know more than Paul” and “I’m not going to apologize for being hard on you. This is the price you pay for seeing me. So does Paul keeping doing his drugs, living in the woods, until he dies, or does he get help?”

Paul: “The drugs help Time go by.”

Mentor: “So you do drugs until you die?”

Paul: “I think so.”

Mentor: “You’re on your own.”

Paul: “Thanks for coming to see me.”

I did not hear what the older man said as they parted, only saw Paul walk across the lot in front of the window I sat before, crossing busy Eastern Avenue smoking a cigarette and listening to his headset, not concerned about the traffic that managed to miss him as he walked towards the railroad tunnel, the route homeless men take from the Hawthorn waterfront to the woods lining the two sets of railroad tracks—one for the commuter train the another for the freight train—that bisect Middle River.