To The Marbury Marlboro Man
It was sometime in 1985. I was a 28 year-old, working for the US Customs Service at JFK Airport in New York City. My work took me traveling to Washington DC for a week or two at a time throughout the year. My lodging of choice was always the same; the Marbury Hotel at the edge of Georgetown. My nightly routine was always the same; dinner then flirting with the bartenders at my favorite Georgetown haunts. Usually, my trips were accompanied by a few other coworkers from around the country. This time I was there on my own. I walked back to my hotel each night by myself, always with a cigarette in hand. I smoked in those days- a lot. On the second night there, I saw a man sitting on a one step alcove in front of the door of a closed office building.
He was tall. I could see that even as he sat on that small one step concrete stoop. He had jet black unruly hair, although the word becomes “unkept” when applied here and not in the civilized halls of polite society. His long black coat, while not in tatters, was clearly the garb of one without a home. He had the bluest eyes. He was in his mid-thirties, I think. On the second night he was there again. This time he pointed to my cigarette and nodded the question, “Do you have an extra one”. I smoked Marlboros at the time. I gave him one along with a light and went on my way. On the third night I stood and talked a few minutes. I had so many questions for him. He intrigued me. He had not the trappings of the usual bum on the street bumming a smoke. Beneath the grime and grit of his clothes and hands, there seemed a veneer of better times before. The only question I ever dislike is the one not asked and so I asked. What was he doing out here? He left the corporate world he lived in, he said. He hated it and what it had become. I didn’t ask if it was by his own accord or with an unwelcome escort or if his next stop had been a mental institution.
In those years after Mr. Reagan took office, one of the calamitous effects of the stroke of the Executive Order pen was to reduce the beds in this country for the mentally ill from 6 million to 600,000 by the time the budget slashes were done. It was the days of the homeless pouring into the streets and under the overpasses of highways and byways all over this country. My own Times Square in New York became a mecca for it and so had Washington DC. And yet this man didn’t seem to fit that bill of mental incapacity at all. Or so it seemed to this naïve young mind. I stopped each night thereafter, always with the same routine. He asked for a cigarette but now I found it my license to sit and ask more questions. How does he survive this way? How does even the basic tenets of privileged hygiene occur? I wish I could remember all the answers now. But I do remember we got to know each other in those brief half hour or so visits each night. I liked him. He seemed to like me.
It was late fall. The air was getting chillier each night I stopped. On about the seventh or eighth time, I asked him a question and as I did, the question didn’t even seem to be coming from my conscience mind. It was accompanied by that other voice in my head that said, “Are you insane?” It was cold. I could not fathom a night out here on that stoop for him. I asked if he would like to come back to the Marbury Hotel with me. At first, he was even more stunned than I was by the asking. But then he smiled and said yes. I was so happy. I regaled him with tales of a lovely shower. I told him there were two beds in the room. We walked down that street and into the hotel. I averted the eyes of the bellman and the concierge. I did not want any questions I had no answers for. We went up to the room. We talked more hesitantly now without the easy comfort of sitting side by side on our little stoop. I was nervous in a way that would never make me bolt for the door though. He took a shower. He had a bag of sorts and changed his clothes. He washed his socks and underwear in the sink and draped them carefully to dry across a chair. I remember he had pajamas in that bag. I remember thinking how odd a thing to pack in a survival bag fit for sleeping in the streets. It made me realize his time outside could not have been that long. It seemed he packed as any traveling businessman would do even if there was no destination waiting for him.
We turned off the lights. He went right to sleep. My brain lingered awhile longer in a kind of wonder and delight that he was not going to sleep on the cold cement at least for tonight. I can’t say my pride did not surface a bit at having engineered this situation. The thoughts of being killed in my hotel room by a perfect stranger were now long gone, fleeting as they were, as I felt I had gotten to know this man’s integrity, if not his whole story, in our nightly conversations. Planner that I am, I began to think about what we would have for breakfast and for ways to help him get back into the society he so thoroughly shunned. I finally fell asleep. He must have read my mind that night in his dreams. When I awoke the next morning, he was gone. I was sad and confused and didn’t quite understand how one could walk away from all the trappings of what I came to find was quite a comfortable life somewhere in Connecticut apparently. I went to work quite unsettled. I couldn’t wait for it to be over and go back to the alcove and find him. I went to dinner as usual. He was never there when I walked up the street, only upon my return. I cut my barfly time short and walked back towards the Marbury and he wasn’t there. I never saw him again, but he has stayed with me for almost 40 years now.
Maddalena is a former wife, Federal manager and PTA President, current mother, music impresario, and fledgling writer. She has had her work published in : The Grit and the Grace Project, Grand Dame Literary, Inside Wink, Harness Magazine, BobDylanPage, The Monologue Podcasts and the Sad Girls Club magazine. She was born in Italy, raised in New York and calls Los Angeles home, along with her two sons.