He was smoking a cigarette outside Duane Reade, standing next to a shopping cart filled with used bottles and cans. At first, he wouldn’t give me his name but he was willing to have a conversation.
He collects cans and bottles for a living. The cash he gets from returning them is what he uses to survive. Unlike many of the people I’ve met on the streets, he doesn’t receive any kind of benefit from the government. He also doesn’t like to beg but will accept money if offered to him. “A man has to stand on his own!” he declared. “I don’t like to lean on anybody.” He doesn’t even visit doctors, he said. True to his word, he avoids shelters. Just like Rodney, he went into the subway system to protect himself from the blizzard instead of seeking safety with an institution.
He had worked construction as a young man but no one wants to give him work today because he is too old. He has no friends and no family to speak of. He doesn’t even like to associate with the other homeless people around. “They’re all drug addicts,” he says.
As suspicious as he was when I first arrived, he became voluble as I prepared to leave, probably because this was the first time he had had a conversation in a long time. “My name is Pancho,” he finally revealed. “I’m from Mexico.”
His parting words were words of wisdom: “A man has to keep going!”