On the Waterfront

There's a bench next to a bronze statue between piers 53, which houses the waterfront fire station, and 54, which has an Ivar's restaurant and is the beginning of the touristy part of the waterfront. The bench is a perfectly nice place to sit and see the waterfront. Sometimes I've seen tourists crowding around the bronze statue - a fisherman - taking pictures. But most of the time it's occupied by homeless people. There are lots of little benches and parks that dot the waterfront, and most of them are populated by homeless people. Most of them are by themselves. They sit with their bags of belongings. They don't usually ask for change. If they do, they're more likely to be standing along the concrete barrier that separates the sidewalk from the water, holding a fishing pole with an empty cup at the end or doing something to try to attract the attention of the tourists who stream past.

But the homeless people on the benches just sit there with no intent other than to sit. Usually their bags are arranged carefully around them and they set themselves up in the middle like paupers turned princes reclining on thrones of collected junk and old clothes. Often they sit there with a cigarette in hand, although never a full cigarette. You never see these people pulling a cigarette out of a pack and lighting the virgin end. Their cigarettes are always in some state of consumption, usually showing more filter than white.

The bench next to the bronze statue is a few feet lower than the statue, but close up next to it, so that whoever's sitting there can nestle themselves, surrounded by their bags, into the crook under the fisherman's arm.

When I walked past there was a woman sitting there, hunched over with her limbs bowed out in front of her, and her stomach sucked back in under her chest, the pit at the source of her outstretched extremities. She held a fat hand rolled cigarette that was burned down to a nub and looked like it was about to fall apart. She brought it up to her lips with a leathery hand. Her mouth was encircled in something brownish yellow, but I couldn't tell what it was. It was on her hands too. It highlighted the creases and wrinkles and the wiry stray hairs around her chapped lips. Her hair looked like it hadn't been washed for a while, and stringy clumps brushed across her forehead. Her eyes laid buried under wrinkled flaps of skin and were a dark gray-brown; whatever was in them was obscured like the bottom of a deep well. (Does this make sense? Do you see what I'm getting at? I think I might need to change this still but it gets the general idea across).

She wasn't asking for money. She had no sign, and didn't say anything to anyone who passed. She just held the cigarette up to her lips and closed her mouth around it, but not all the way. When she inhaled her chest arched back slightly and her stomach came out of its pit. It was like all her internal organs had turned into a big lung, and when she inhaled, the entirety of her torso expanded with the smoke. She made a horrible noise as she did this; a low, deep wheeze with a rattle of phlegm that played itself in reverse as the smoke came out. She didn't look at anyone and the cigarette stayed at her lips or near them. I turned away as I walked past, and as I got further away the noise faded. I looked back again and she was still sitting there with the cigarette against her withered yellow lips, puffing metronomically like an iron lung keeping the burning end alive.