A man with sagging jeans and a large hole in his underwear shambles in through the door. He has ragged gray hair and is talking to himself. His voice is not the weak and wandering voice of the mentally handicapped, but the strong and prevalent voice of the professional stage actor. I think of him as a washed-up Broadway performer.

“‘It’s first come, first serve.'”

“‘Mr. Wizard,’ I says, ‘I want to join the Army. I want to serve. Properly.'”

“‘It’s no good if it’s not done properly.'”

He sits down at an empty table with an empty mug and sips out of it. I imagine he is reciting lines from a play he once did about joining the war effort in World War II. He appears to be lost in his own world, one where the play is still happening. His head goes down against his chest and the play halts. He seems to have fallen asleep, and I go back to reading.

“‘Mr. Wizard,’ I says, I says to him, ‘Mr. Wizard, I want to join the Army and serve my country properly.'”

“‘It’s first come, first serve and it’s no good if not done properly.'”

“‘Well, last time I talked to Martha she told me it wasn’t any good. I should do it properly if I’m going to do it at all. It’s first come, first serve you know.'”

It’s sad. It reminds me of nothing so much as the Death of a Salesman. My heart breaks at the sight of this once-great man, now stuck in the broken repeating loop of his past. I long to go sit with him, hear his story, give him some human contact; I want to fill his empty cup from the overflow of my own. But fear holds me back and I wonder if it would really make a difference anyway. There are so many of us, sitting with empty cups, waiting for someone to come along and fill them, while we babble to ourselves in confused play lines about days gone by, pinned in a place which exists only in our minds. Maybe all we need is a touch from another person to release and restore us. Perhaps all it takes is just one who says, “Here, share some from my cup, since yours is empty.”

In the end, he got up and walked out and I didn’t say anything to him. He left his cup on the table, still empty. I thought about it for awhile, but I couldn’t figure out what that meant.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.