little. yellow. different. A weblog by Ernie Hsiung

ernie’s guide to the crazy people on my street

• Crazy cigarette smoking man: A wiry Ethiopian man that wears a button down shirt and glasses. This guy is harmless, but a trip. He walks up and down Telegraph Avenue, and if you light up a cigarette, he will run up to you and ask for one.

  And he does, literally, run up to you. One time, Mike and I walked home from the record store up the street where he, I kid you not, jumped out of bushes to ask for a cigarrette. (Who the fuck jumps out of bushes nowadays?)

  “They’re menthol,” I say. “Hope you don’t mind.” He hesitates for a while, then agrees and walks away.

  Beggars can’t be choosers, apparently.

• Ricardo:
  

  RICARDO: Hey, man. My name is Ricardo. I know it’s 3am, but can you help me out? All I need is $20 — just $20 — so I can get to the local church and get some help. My wife just died and I got this inheritance coming my way in a week… and I got this daughter… she’s this rap artist who lives in LA…
  ERNIE: All I have is a $5. Here you go.
  RICARDO: Just a WEEK, man! All I gotta do is find a way to survive for another week, and then I got this inheritance thing going… and my daughter.. I got me here a headshot of her, you wanna see? She’s going to make it big someday and…
  ERNIE: I just have a $5. I really do need to go and…
  RICARDO: You wanna know how my wife died? Maybe if I tell you the whole story and talk for 45 minutes, you’ll understand my situation a bit more…

  (three weeks pass)

  RICARDO: Hey, man. My name is Ricardo. I know it’s 3am, but can you help me out? My bitch of a wife just left me and…
  ERNIE: … *sigh*. I don’t have any money.
  RICARDO: …
  ERNIE: Listen, I gotta go.

• Screaming skitzophrenic man: This man, who is screaming outside the window at this very moment, is the reason why I am posting this entry. He rides on his bicycle and screams obsenities at the top of his lungs. When the police is called, he gets quiet, and then when the police leave, he screams again. It’s impossible to sleep with the window open or without earplugs.

  He screams at the people in the drive-thru window at the restaurant next door. He screams at taxi. He screams at other homeless people, where I witnessed a guy pick up the dudes bicycle, and then a newsstand, and throw it into the street, litter and newspaper and bike parts scattered on a street like a fucked-up tickertape parade.

  He reminds me of my parents fighting when I was ten.

Maybe dad is right. Maybe I do need to live in the suburbs again.

I know how you feel. I have a wiry old Vietnamese man living next door to me. My girlfriend and I were driving home one evening and he was out on his bike, veering into the car like he was going to hit it and smiling at the same time. Kinda strange. I can also smell him smoking outside at like 2am every night. However, he does not jump out of the bushes asking for cigarettes. That would by kinda humurous (and freaky at the same time).

We must live on the same street.

I’ll see your three crazies and raise you one: a 6-foot-3 caucasian prostitute who completes his gangsta-b*tch ensemble with what appears to be an authentic Tampa Bay Bucs jersey.

Maybe Ricardo remarried after a week of mourning, but it didn’t work out because he was on the rebound from his last wife’s death.

you gave five dollars away to a dude on the street?

Wait. You mean you’re not in the suburbs now?

Your city looks like my suburbs. :p

And we have Ricardos in Chicago, too, except in my experience they’re guys wearing security jackets claiming to have lost their wallets and needing a couple bucks to bus it back home.

There used to be a Screaming kitzophrenic woman that would come into the Sears store i used to work at. She would come in and yell at other customers. She would also demand to speak the the store manager by name. I think they finaly had her arrested for tresspassing or something.

Who the fuck jumps out of bushes nowadays?

Just read it , sympathise, identify with it and feel good about your own life.

When I go into the city to a friend of mines place, there are few guys that walk around. What is it with bikes? This one guy whose always not wearing a shirt despite the weather, will ride around to any car that is occupied. Usually where Im at in the 15 min parking waiting for my friend. He just likes to come over and lear at me with his one tooth and shoot the breeze. Its kinda creepy. But man, he hauls ass on his bike, I told him to be in the tour d’homeless race or something. And then there is one shoe willy. Ive seen him 3 or 4 times, always with one shoe, always a different shoe. You think hed rather mix and match, but I guess he just keeps upgradding lefty.

Out in the sticks where I live, we had a crazy guy who got divorvced move into my woods and live like a freakin hermit. he had a fur hat, I shit you not. We had to take some guys up on fourwheelers with me and evict him. heh. No moonshine distillery was found though sadly.

“kitzophrenic”? Is that like constantly obsessing about rubber-ducky shower curtains or Precious Moments figurines? Oh no, that would be “kitschophrenic”. Ah, I’m just playing. Being kept awake by a screaming man at 3am is probably to blame.

When I lived in downtown SJ, there werent’ any “crazy” people, per se, but I feel you on the loud people who scream for no reason tip. I had to learn to say “SHUT UP!!!” in Spanish, Tagalog, and Vietnamese.

Unfortunately, I have an entire bevy of “crazy homeless people” stories.

I used to work up on Broadway here in Seattle, which is kind of like the Haight or Telegraph of the city. Its the trendy little hot spot that all the fucking tourists go to. A street lined with fetish boutiques, gay bars, and coffee shops.

During the day, customers into and out of my coffee shop are bombarded by the same line. “Spare any change for a hungry man?” Hungry man’s been out there for as long as any of the other employees can remember — which is at least five years, but probably more. If you leave the store to go grab a bite to eat, he’ll ask you for spare change. I’ve taken to barking insults at him, but it doesn’t help to stifle his voice. You can head to the pizza by the slice next door, and come back 3 minutes later with your food, and he’ll ask you for change again like he’s never seen you in his fucking life.

Hungry man retires to the other end of the strip around 430. At 6 or so he’s replaced by a girl, around 23 or 24. She has a variety of different approaches. Most frequently, she’ll tell people she needs money to call home to her mom. But often times she’ll beg for somebody to buy her a cup of coffee. Of course, it being Seattle and all, she actually says, “Can anybody spare change to buy me a grande white hot chocolate with caramel sauce and extra whip?” People care too much about espresso here.

Minty Fresh Man is so named because one day he used our rest room to bathe himself in peppermint oil. A nice gesture, but the combination of the mint and his natural aroma was not particularly refreshing. Minty Fresh Man was renamed to Good N Plenty after he started sleeping under one of those big bushes that smells of licorice whips. He reads the Post Intelligencer, the Seattle Times, and the NY Times every day. And his crumpled dollar bills make the registers smell like aniseed long after his departure.

Henry was a really nice regular. Sometimes he could afford to buy a cup of coffee. Sometimes he just asked for a sample of today’s blend and some ice water. One day he was waiting for the restroom, but couldn’t hold it anymore, so he urinated in our hallway on the plastic pallettes our pastries are delivered on.

And of course, the “best” for last. Scabies Man has gross open festering wounds all over his body. The Stranger (the equiv of the Metro in the bay area) has been following him through reader accounts in their Last Days column over the last six weeks or so. He rubbed himself all over our bathroom walls while using the restroom and all over the condiment bar while trying to steal our Sugar in the Raw and Equal packets. We had to call the Starbucks on call hazmat team (yes, they have one) to come out and sanitize the bathroom and bar.

…and people wonder why I no longer live in San francisco.

I feel for you, man, but I can’t say I understand what it’s like. There’s not a single crazy person on my street. Well, I have heard that there’s this one weird chick who wanders around town laughing aloud to herself and poking at roadkill with sticks. Which is kind of strange, since I tend to do the same thing. And a couple people say she looks a lot like me. But I’ve never actually seen her.

Wait a second…

Move to Austin. We got a whole different type of crazy homeless here. And I’m not just talking about the drag-rats either, though they are pretty entertaining as well at times.

i just moved to berkeley for the summer (internship) and have definitely encountered the first guy. i thought there were lots of crazy homeless people in boston, but berkeley definitely takes the cake. i was walking with a slurpee in my hand and this guy (black guy with dreds and glasses, sorta well-dressed, often stands outside of the subway on telegraph and bancroft) yelled at me that it could have just as well been a gun that i was carrying. mmmhm.

The Guy Who Lives In the Park Across the Street And Intermittently Screams RAWWWWWWR At the Top of His Lungs And Is Particularly Startling If You Happen To Be Walking By has nothing on the wacky type-A soccer moms on the other side of the hills. *Those* people are frightening.

In Pittsburgh there’s an old man, affectionately referred to as “Sombrero Man” by the college population, who lurks around the Oakland neighborhood asking for “change change.” While wearing a sombrero, naturally. There’s also the blind man who sits on top of a boombox and belts out gospel/spiritual songs.

This comment has nothing to do with your main post, it’s about that Web developer/nanny job post.

The job sounds like something out of “The Nannie Diaries”… Work for Mrs. X, anyone? I’ll take “PURE TORTURE” for $100, Alex.

BTW: Her website is here if anyone wants a look! $18 bucks an hour - they can’t actually be serious…

First of all…your post made me laugh outloud.

Second….I taught at a school for kids who are “a little messed up” (A.K.A “Jr. Ricardo’s)….AND the kids were only in first grade. Picture me (a 5′1 girly girl) surround by a class full of nutties…26 nutties…. That year was insane.

I don’t think he was homeless but at the good ol’ Univ of Minn - Minneapolis campus on nice days there is this guy everyone called Preacher Jed. Or was it Brother Jed? Either way, he would stand in the middle of Northrop Mall (grass field, not shopping area) and spout religious mumbo jumbo. Holding his Bible and screaming at the top of his lungs over the lunch hour he drew a crowd that stayed back a safe distance.

Runner-up best ever was when a kickball game formed on the mall and he just became assimilated into the infield. Nearly getting beaned with the big red ball did not phase him and he just went on a yellin’

But the best was the day he asked, err screamed at me from a distance of under three feet, and I quote “Are you an alien against God?” Good times.

Brother Jed must get around, because he left Ohio State’s campus a couple years ago. Glasses, shaggy hair, corduroys? Flaming, repetitive rhetoric?

Maybe he’s on a national Brother Jed tour.

I liked your article, Ernie! Good luck with the car payments and the IRS…

Omigish! I’m not crazy!! There are other more crazy people out there!! *yay!*

Evidently Ernie is a freak magnet, too…

But does it count if the freaks live on your street?…

I see the Ethiopian guy, too, in my neighborhood. I’ve seen him everywhere from Rockridge to Albany, almost every day, for the last errrrr let’s say 20 years. It’s probably not that far off. He totally jumps from the bushes, and look out: he’ll come running not just if you light up a cigarette, but if you open a drink, unwrap a candy bar, pick fuzz off a pocket-dwelling cough drop. He asked me for my lunch, once, on Telegraph. Whee.
It’s too bad you missed the days of Rare. Gawd I’m old.

Is this the same bush guy that freaks people out at Fisherman’s Wharf?

Not so long ago, mentioning that the begged for cig was menthol turned most people off and, therefore, saved me from handing one over. I don’t know why I switched to regulars; everyone likes ultra lights anymore.