Very Odd Situation: Homeless Man on the Subway.

The other day I got on the subway downtown around lunch hour, and as I sat down, this (old) (black) (scrawny) homeless guy up a bit in the car began asking people for food, and saying how the shop windows were full of merchandise but no-one could spare any food for people like him.

That really got me, so I opened up my bookbag and got out an apple and offered it to him, but he said that his teeth weren’t too good, so I offered him an orange, but he said that wouldn’t work either, his teeth weren't that good.

Then, he began telling everyone that he was Jackie Robinson.

After a while at that, he set down his Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup on the middle of the floor and said that he got it out of the trash, then he began dancing with the metal subway car poles over to it, and eventually came over to me and said that I was a racist for trying to give him food that he couldn’t eat, and at that several (black) women in the car who were trying not to look shifted in their seats and looked visibly uncomfortable, I could see out of the corner of my eye.

“Do you know who I am?”, he said to me after coming up close and standing over me, “Look into my eyes, look into my eyes!”, and with that he stared at me very intensely.

“Jackie Robinson?”, I was like.

At that, he broke out into a smile and went to give me a fistbump. 

“Brother, how’d you know,” he was like.

“You just said that to those women two minutes ago,” I was like.

“Then why don’t you give me food that I can eat,” he was like.

“I’m sorry,” I was like.  “I had a banana earlier, but I ate it.  If I had known that I would meet you, I would have saved it for you.”

“A BANANA?!”, he was like.   “You calling me a monkey, racist?”

But, at the same time that he was saying that, he was winking at me out of his eye on the opposite side of the face from where the two (black) women were sitting, and I knew that he was playing it up for them.

At the next stop, he got out, and so I began speaking to the women.

“Well,” I was like, “That was something,” and I explained that the poor guy was not actually mad at me right before he got off, but had been winking and playing the situation up, in his own way.