Monday, 08 December 2008
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The Man on Bristol Bridge
Every day when walking to work, I would come upon this rather strange homeless fellow. He lived under Bristol Bridge, which if you didn’t know, is an old bridge that connects the city center’s east and west parts in Bristol, England. The bridge has sidewalks on each side for foot traffic and a road running in between. It ascends over the Avon River, which runs through the gut of the city. I used to walk across this bridge everyday on route to my job at a large financial institution, so I know it very well.
Back to the homeless guy, I don’t know his name. I never asked it because I never talked to him much. In fact, I never talked to him at all. But he talked to me; he talked to everyone crossing the bridge. Well, he didn’t really talk as much as he begged for money. “Can you spare a pound? Can you spare a pound?” he would always ask. But he rarely got me, or anybody, to spare him a pound; I think it was because he scared the crap out of everyone that saw him.
Why’d he scare everyone? Well, his appearance wasn’t too enticing. I guess when you’re homeless you can’t look too GQ, but this guy took it to an extreme. He was a pale as a cadaver, which isn’t too uncommon in Britain, but he had a large, and I mean large, unkempt afro of dirty black greasy curly hair that was accentuated greatly by his ghostly skin. His afro much have been about three feet high and wide. I think he kept things in there. He was about 6 foot 7 inches tall and rail thin. Being homeless doesn’t give you much opportunity to eat, I guess. He was missing several teeth, and the remaining ones were almost a black type color. He always dressed in the same ragged blue jeans that had more holes and tears than I could count. And he wore several faded neon dress shirts from the 1970’s that were ragged and torn, too. He actually wore them layered together because he must not have had a coat. And most disturbing of all was that he always wore only one shoe. Never two! And always on the left foot, the non-shoed foot, was a ragged old gray wool sock with holes in it so his toes popped out. And don’t get me started on his toes; I don’t even know what color they must have been. His finger nails hadn’t been cut in years and were like blades. He had an Osama Bin Laden beard and long nose and ear hair that could be braided. And perhaps most disturbing of all, he had that one eye looking one way, the other eye looking the way thing. I don’t know the medical term for it, but it scares the crap out of me. He would always carry a mangled umbrella and when it rained, it offered very little shelter to him and made his disposition even more unnerving seeing him under it all bent and such.
One day as I walked to work, I wasn’t in a very good mood. It was raining as usual, and I’d just had a terrible date the night before. I hadn’t slept much, and I’d stubbed my toe that morning, too. It seemed the homeless guy wasn’t in a great mood that day, either. Usually as I passed him, he extended his Tesco coffee cup to me and politely asked for a pound, but today he was indignant. He stepped right in front of me and screamed in his Bristolian accent, which sounds like a Disney pirate, “Give me a pound!” I told to him please politely move away and that I’m late for work, but I didn’t use such polite language. He then started screaming and accosting me, yelling that I was a bloody yank and that I should give him a pound because I killed his great-great uncles wife’s cousin’s brother’s neighbor’s tax collector’s chimney sweep’s father’s pub tender’s friend who stole somebody’s cat in the War of 1812, and he was perturbed about it. I was impressed by his knowledge of history and felt for his loss, but I was in no mood for this. I asked again for him to step away, but he did not. He then started mentioning all the tea we’d wasted in Boston and how that was to blame for his current state. He reckoned he’d be tea salesman if not for us and that was in essence his tea thrown into the water.
This was too much for me now; I agree the loss of tea was tragic, but I’m becoming late to work now. So I pushed him out of my way. It wasn’t a hard shove, just a light shove, but being so skinny, it knocked him straight into the road and into oncoming traffic.
He only stumbled into the road for a minute before a large truck hit him straight on. It hit him so hard that he flew into the air and when he came down, another large truck came and hit him again, which made him fly into the air and when he came down, another truck hit him again, and on and on this cycle went for nearly five minutes. Miraculously, he didn’t die, and yelled an ever increasing amount of obscenities throughout the whole thing! This went on until a very large truck came and hit him so hard, he flew off the bridge and into the river. He flailed for a minute or so in the water and then drowned. A group of onlookers screamed and pointed and some even took pictures and video on their cell phones, but nobody dared to jump in the river and save him. The water was freezing cold; and besides, he was homeless.
The police showed up and some buck toothed cockney sounding lady with a bowl haircut started to point at me and told the cops I’d killed him. The cops came over to me, and I tried to explain my story, but it was to no avail. The buck tooth lady showed the cops video of the whole thing on her cell phone and yelled, “I ga it a me mobile! E weren doin nutin wron, ya seee, at bluu-ey wanka pusht im, e di!”
The cops arrested me, and I went to jail for involuntary manslaughter. I spent four years in jail, lost my job, and lost all my money paying off the civil case brought by the homeless guy’s wife and ten kids. Who would ever think that a homeless guy would have ten kids and a wife?
After I got out of jail, no one would hire me because I had a criminal record. I couldn’t pay for a place to live, so now I’m homeless. And I just moved under a bridge.
THE END
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