The Devil's Advocate

The man standing before me can't be God.

The man standing before me can't be God, but I can't get over the feeling that he was sent here to test me, to humble me, to take my freewheeling careless optimism and turn it on its head.

The man standing before me is the embodiment of human misery. Ragged and sinewy from years of mistreatment, he hunches over his gray steely bicycle, feebly attempting to grip the handlebars with his grossly misshapen hands.

He wears thick black sunglasses, but I don't need to see his eyes to feel the pain emanating from them. His long graying mane sticks out the back of a dirty brown ball cap and ties loosely into a ponytail, complimenting his already gray beard.

It unnerves me how much he looks like the late, great George Carlin; except for when he smiles. It is a sinister, inauthentic smile, serving only to highlight the small decaying teeth he has left, and it chills me to the bone.

I am sitting on the edge of my van, jotting some notes, when the man approaches me. He is looking for some change, and I quickly oblige, offering him the chance to sign my vehicle (an early tradition on this trip.) He takes the change but shakes his head.

"I don't like to leave a trail."

I ask him about himself, and he responds, laughing ironically.

"I've lived a long, miserable life."

He is 52-years-old, but appears much older, having spent the majority of his life on the streets, scrounging for food, skipping from shelter to shelter. He used to do home maintenance, but bad arthritis (and an increasingly apparent mental condition) have rendered him unable to work beyond a couple hours.

I do my best to help him, to offer him solace and hope for the future, but he refuses any attempt at appeasement.

"I'm glad I've got hair, because it covers up all the scars. I've been hit in my damned head so many times!" He laughs a wicked, wild laugh, then stares directly at me. "I don't know how I keep living...Why I have to keep living."

I ask if he's able to find work doing anything else, flailing at words to give him some level of comfort. This only serves to anger him.

"I'm PISSED off," he yells, his face turning red as it forms an even wider grin. He will yell this many times over the course of our conversation. Though it is clear he is trying to intimidate me, I refuse to flinch, instead offering a regrettably agitated counter argument.

"Then do something about it," I counter. "Your life isn't over. Get yourself together. Quit being pissed off and start helping yourself. Because things aren't going to change unless your attitude changes."

I have a bad habit of arguing with mentally unstable individuals. It becomes obvious throughout our talk that this man will never listen to reason, that he can't listen to reason. But the scary thing about this man is that, crazy as he is, he is not incapable of thought.

"I just want to be invisible. I just want to disappear. Everyone should be cremated when they die. I have to be cremated. There can be no trace of my existence. My brother died and they danced on his grave."

He pauses.

"The men who killed my brother are gone now. That makes me happy. But I'M STILL HERE!"

A police car passes by, and he pulls back.

"I can't stand the cops. I can't live in Henderson, because the cops won't let me be. I can't live in Summerlin, because the cops wont leave me alone. I can't live here..."

"That cop didn't do anything just now."

"That's because I didn't lie down. All I need to do is lie down."

We talk about the local shelters, my having experience with the futility of the options presented Las Vegas' homeless population. He lived at Salvation Army for 30 days, but they "refused to let me do my program, which is to have a place to sleep and a place to leave my stuff. So I told them to fuck off." He spent about a month at St. Vincent's homeless shelter, then told them to screw off.

I lasted about half that time before I gave that shelter a piece of my mind and left in disgust.

Five weeks. That's how long I lived homeless in Vegas. It took much longer to return my mind to normalcy. I remember how beaten down I was after five weeks, and shudder at what I would be like after five months. Five years. Thirty years.

In between his moments of reason and poignancy, his topics of conversation range from his black belt in karate to his depression to the government's refusal to acknowledge the UFOs he saw. This is not a well man. This is not a man that should be in the streets.

There is something particularly cruel about a society that forces the mentally impaired to suffer physically as well.

This man can't be God.

I see no God in this man.