Yesterday, I met a man who wore a sleeveless, denim jacket with "God Loves You" emblazoned across the back.
I approached him and asked him if it was something he'd found which happened to have that on it, or if he'd put it on himself. He said that he had had it put on by somebody for him. While he was telling me this, I noticed a little wooden cross around his neck just peeking out from under his shirt. He had medium length hair that was implausibly healthy looking, of a rather lovely burnished brown colour. He had a beard too, which seemed to begin as the same hair as his head and become a wiry mass the further away from his face it got. His teeth were browning, his gums receding, and the finger and thumb he held his cigarette between were streaked with terracotta stains. He had laughter lines around his eyes.
He started to tell me his story. This is what he told me.
He worshipped the devil for 30 years - drink drugs depression schizophrenia - and was reduced to his lowest point in early 2006. He decided that there was no way he was going to wake up alive the next day, that he just couldn't face going on. He drank a bottle of vodka, but still couldn't find the courage to end it. He went to a Wetherspoons. While he was there, three men offered him a drink and to sit with them. One of them said to him that he looked like he was on a mission for a big night; he corrected him, explaining that he was just trying to end it, didn't want to live anymore. The man told him that he had terminal cancer.
The next day he woke up round the back of a supermarket. He was shaking like crazy and he saw himself in the reflection of a door and knew it was time to make a change. He went back to an area where he knew two people he trusted, who were part of the Salvation Army. He said they'd tried to help him the previous year. The woman, who was one of the two people he trusted, came along and asked him what was wrong. He told her he just wanted to end it. She stayed with him all day and took him home later, let him shower and eat, gave him some clean clothes.
She and her family were going to church that evening, and so he went with them in order to get the lift back into the part of town (I think this was all in London but he didn't say) where he sleeps. He went to church, and didn't think much about it.
The next morning he woke up, and the first words out of his mouth were a prayer to God. From then on, he says, his whole outlook changed. He says from that moment on he has had no dependency on drink, drugs, no depression, and that he knows God changed everything for him at that moment. He did say he'd had one relapse with drink, for 3 months a year or so ago, because of woman trouble!!
He is an intelligent man. He now lives on the streets, sleeping in a carpark, and believing and trusting wholly in the religious maxim "God will provide". I said to him that we can't all live according to that - because then there wouldn't be the people walking past who get him a meal etc. He said that it comes at different times for different people. He asked me if I'd trust my father to feed and clothe me - that is how God is for him. He mentioned that demons walk the earth, but we didn't go into that further.
He told me that he recently returned from an attempt to get to Jerusalem, where he wants to live for a month or so and then go to work on a Kibbutz. He set off with no money or anything, after a 'copper' helped him out and bought him a Eurostar ticket. In 5 weeks, he had made it to the Turkish-Syrian border. And there he got turned back, because he didn't have a visa. He doesn't beg - he takes what people choose to give him, but doesn't ask for things - so he hung around in Turkey a bit, but people only gave him food, no money, so he couldn't raise the money for a visa. So he's back, and he's going to try again in March, this time with a visa (he has a passport, I checked).
There was a funny moment where I said he sounded like he collected alms, like Jainist monks, and he started doing a Monty Python impression - "alms! alms for the poor!"
The way he spoke about the world's geography was probably
the most beautiful part of our conversation.
It was how I'd speak about going from Charing Cross to Covent Garden - left here, down to here, right here, through here - but his 'here' was replaced with France and Hungary and all these countries. A true mendicant holy man of the 21st Century.
I didn't get his name. But he did tell me where he tends to hang out in London, so I'm going to make sure I pass through sometime soon and have a cup of tea with him.
