All I Want For Christmas is a Homeless Man Like Dylan Thomas

It was near Christmas a couple years back and I was walking through Boston Common when a down-on-his-luck-street-guy came up to me looking for something. I didn’t have it so I tried walking faster. But he was big and stepped in front of my walking, which scared me, because only days before I had been jumped by four hoods in Dorchester and they kicked my ass and took all of the something I had in my pockets.

So I didn’t like people. Or people who came up to me with their hands out. Fuck off, I wanted to say, poisoned by the humiliation of being beat on and robbed by a bunch of hoods.

But this guy in Boston Common had a hook in his eye. Not literally, of course. More like a wink without blinking that I could see as he approached, which signaled the difference he felt he offered from all the other fellas out there begging for quarters. He had a hook in his eye because he was smart enough to troll the Boston Common, where plenty of students gathered, and approach them with more than a plea. He could say poetry, you know. Poetry was his hook.

He got in front of me and asked if I wanted to hear a Dylan Thomas poem. I stopped and looked at him — he was an older black dude with rheumy eyes, knotted fingers and bulky, weather-thick clothes.

Wow, I said to myself. Now I’ve got him.

It goes without saying that being approached by random people in the city, any city, is part of the experience. Up to this point I’d pretty much been a prize — a reckless giver, oftentimes I’d drop more than quarters into the laps of the city’s unfortunates. I had this romantic, literary notion that a guy living on the street had a smeared-over intelligence and charm that most people just couldn’t see. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s not. Either way, it wasn’t like I could afford to give money away. Hell no, I was in school, paying for rent and everything else with the money I earned waiting tables at Top of the Hub restaurant.

Money comes and goes quickly when you’re a waiter. Or at least it did at Top of the Hub, a fancy, tourist-rich restaurant occupying the top floor of the Prudential Building. I’d leave the building late at night, have drinks or whatever, go home, and by the time my next shift rolled around be broke again. So it went for months. At any rate, the night I got jumped was a Friday, so I had a good bit of cash in my pocket. I also had a backpack loaded up with books. I took the last train from downtown Boston to Dorchester.

Two of my would-be robbers were in the same car. I could feel their eyes on me. It was late, I was alone, and I had an explicit understanding that they were deciding whether or not I was worth their fists. I returned eyes only once. It was enough. When the train pulled up in Dorchester, I quickly left the car and made my way down the platform ramp. At which point, taking a look back, I noticed my two would-be robbers talking to two of my other would-be robbers. Only now a little girl was with them — maybe six years old — and for some reason her presence calmed me. I didn’t think I was going to get jumped by a group that was also pulling babysitting duty. I was wrong.

I had made the walk to my apartment countless times this late at night and always I’d made it home without incident. But the feeling I had on the train was still with me. My heart was thumping and I was plotting ways to get home faster. Then, just when I thought I saw a taxi approach the curb, the feeling swelled within me. Seconds later I heard their footsteps. Footsteps pounding the pavement toward me. I turned and my head met a fist, then another, and another. Until I was on the ground, being kicked and tugged and thrown about. Their fingernails scratched my legs as they dug through the pockets of my pants. Their rum-spiced breath spilled across my face and they laughed nervously as if basking in the robbery’s criminal and thrilling elements. They took my baseball hat, my coat. They tore my backpack open and scoured inside. The beating lasted a couple of minutes and when it was over I lay on the wet pavement, stiff with panic, but full of a wild, angry adrenaline. There was no sign of the little girl.

The adrenaline lasted through to the next morning when my brother and I returned to the scene of the crime. For what it was worth, I wanted to show him where it had happened. More, I wanted to go back to that place with him and regain what I had lost the night before — not my money and possessions, obviously, but my pride, or maybe just a sense of control. Walking around we saw what the hoods had left: a camera case with no camera, my empty wallet, folded inside out, my shriveled backpack, pens and other school detritus on the ground. At the time though, what pissed me off the most, more than the beating and the loss of my holiday money, was the fact that the bastards had taken — and kept — my worn out Red Sox cap and two of my personal notebooks. My blood thundered to think of them counting my money, holed up in some room, while one spun my cap ’round his finger and another read aloud from my pages, the result of which could only inspire bursts of laughter and derision.

But my anger quickly turned into a dizzy sense of surprise when I saw, stacked neatly on a cinderblock wall, each and every book that had been in my backpack. I couldn’t believe it. The irony was hilarious. I laughed for a long time. My brother smoked a cigarette and said nothing.

One of the books stacked on the wall was the Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas. I had it with me — in a different backpack — the same day the guy in the Boston Common stopped me.

“Hey,” he said.

“No thanks,” I said, ducking my head and cutting a different path.

“You want me to say a Dylan Thomas poem? I can say a Dylan Thomas poem for you.”

The irony, or maybe cliché is a better word, of a street guy living up to my own romantic, literary sense of homelessness stopped me flat. It was almost as cliché as my robbers leaving behind the undesirable stack of great literature.

“What’s the poem?”

“Dylan Thomas wrote it. After the Funeral, by Dylan Thomas.”

Wow, I said to myself. Now I’ve got him. Because, to be honest, bitter after getting jumped, I wanted this guy to fail. I wanted him to be a scam artist who had picked the wrong target.

“All right, yeah,” I said. I took the book from my pack. I found the page, looked him in the eye, and said, “Actually I’ve got the book right here. Go ahead. I’m ready.”

After the Funeral is 40 lines long. Combine its length with Thomas’s dense wordplay and you’ve got a rather difficult poem to recite. I couldn’t do it, that’s for damn sure. But this guy, standing in the center of a cement path in the Common on a frigid winter afternoon, wanted me to believe that he could.

He hesitated. He rubbed his hands together, turned away from me. What’s the matter, I said. And then he began.

“After the Funeral (In memory of Ann Jones)

After the funeral, mule praises, brays,
Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffled-toed tap . . .”

His eyes were closed. He rocked toward me, away. He continued:

“Tap happily of one peg in the thick
Grave’s foot, blinds down the lids, the teeth in black,
The spittled eyes, the salt ponds in the sleeves . . .”

Again he rocked toward me, away. His motion driving home how stupid I was. He wasn’t a scam artist; I was. His performance called my bluff. It told me to forget it, he was not the guy to turn to if I was looking for an easy way to get back at the world.

“Morning smack of the spade that wakes up sleep,
Shakes a desolate boy who slits his throat
In the dark of the coffin and sheds dry leaves . . .”

By this point I had lowered my ass to the ground. I sat there listening, a well-behaved and enthusiastic groupie. He knew the poem by heart. All of it. Every single line came out crisp and pure and strong and burst through his breathsmoke, heating my ears. The last time I had been on a ground this cold I was getting the shit kicked out of me. Needless to say this was better. Much, much better.

I glanced around. Is anybody else seeing this? Does anybody hear what this man is saying? No. Nobody did. People just kept going, avoiding us like skiers sloping around a splayed lump of mountain-wrecked first-timers. Which was fine by me. It was starting to snow, and a stranger was reciting Dylan Thomas in the middle of Boston Common.

Of course I was thrilled by the entire experience. But when he finished saying the poem all I could do was stand up, say thank you, and continue on my way. I didn’t give him any money. I didn’t even say Merry Christmas.