Small Talk

On the southwest side of the corner of Grand avenue and Braman avenue in Fort Myers Florida sits the house I rent. Also on that corner almost every weekday between eleven A.M., and two P.M. a mentally disabled black boy stands next to a telephone pole on the southeast side. Sometimes he'll even stand out there in the pouring rain. If I looked out my window now I'd see him. He wears the same black jersey....hold on...a Raiders football jersey....number 80. He waves and yells at the people pacing the busy intersection, busy for a residential area. Almost everyone ignores him, I ignore him, while calls them over to come to talk to him. When people stop at the stop sign he walks up to the window and tries talking to him. An elderly couple once just rolled their window up in his face. Even though faced with constant rejection he still tries to talk to people he knows (well he thinks he knows them, I'm not sure if he does or not), and doesn't know. Sometimes he asks for rides, sometimes he just wants to talk. I've tried talking to him. It was jibberish. He was hard to understand, his accent was thick, his syntax disjointed, and the ideas of each sentence weren't coherent. Sometimes he asks for a ride, he had to get away from that corner, so I took him where he had to go. Which, when I got there, seemed to be some sort of crack den. He's asked for rides since, and I declined. I told him I was going a different way, which I was. So he just kept on standing on that corner, talking to himself, talking to people that wished he would just go away (who wants to see a retard anyway after you just bought some groceries), but he keeps on standing there. In what seems to be the only way a person with a broken mind can cry out for help.