Sorry, This One's Heavy.

I'm going to take a minute of blogging silence for my homeless friend who lived at the edge of the parking lot on Hollywood and Vermont. He disappeared a few days after he told me he'd had a heart attack, and I was fearing the worst. Today I walked by his spot and saw a few souls had stopped by to place candles there. There's only one thing that can mean.

We had a cordial relationship, where as I scooted past to hustle and bustle in my world, he'd give me a friendly wave and an, "All right then." Occasionally I'd slip him a smoke or a few beers. Only when it was really weatherish outside, I'd give him a few bills to ease him through the night. But, he never ever asked. In our snippets of conversation he told me he'd sparred with Sonny Listen (sp?) before he'd gone on to fight Ali. And another time he said he'd played chess against Bobby Fischer. I chose to believe those stories, cause even if they were lies, they were GOOD lies.

After I had seen him sit there for a few years, I remember once thinking that he was like a part of the landscape, part of nature, a big fat brown Buddha, wise enough to the world where he could live, exist (somehow) and commune with nature, smack-dab in the middle of a concrete and asphalt desert that is the part of East Hollywood he decided to call home.

I got a cheap candle as I was coming home tonight, lit it, and set it up next to the sparse few others that were there, and said a few words. Like usual in that situation, they seemed kind of hollow, but what can you expect. The world is now just a little more lonely, and only memories which are hard to share, will weigh down the world with the gravity that once was a man I knew.