Foggy Bottom Grocery, Washington D.C./ Travelwebshot.com

NEW CD FEATURE:  Second in a series of hot-button excerpts from G.M. Corrigan’s “religio-socio-econo-politico-philo-psycho-romantic (whew!) novel, "Chasing Chickens: A Love Story"

By G.M. Corrigan

Introduction to excerpt #2--theme: The enemy within. Is there something at the stealthy core of our culture—and even our hearts—that militates against our happiness, our ability to love and find fulfillment, and that sabotages relationships? Elated at having finally discerned a possible unifying theme for his coherence-defying assignment, Walter characteristically keeps his own counsel in the matter as he walks from his west D.C. office to the nearest Metro, mulling his insight and his recent breakup with office heartthrob Maggie Syzygy. On the way he unexpectedly meets someone who mysteriously suggests that the two seemingly disparate topics may not be all that disconnected.

Turning east on M Street, Walter pulled his scarf tighter about his neck and proceeded toward 23^rd Street, northwest and the Foggy Bottom Metro stop—a name given to the low-lying area four blocks south of M Street by the swamp fog originally associated with the spot and now irreverently also applied to the nearby State Department headquarters.

Even this far east of Georgetown proper, the street scene was a sound and light show of sleek cars, blazing chrome, and stone and glass high-rises motile with fleeing, well-dressed thirty-somethings, ceding the city to advance units of yuppie merry-makers eager to revel in the Reagan recovery.

A beguiling cavalcade of human and fabricated exotica, it was a show that nightly intrigued Walter as, with blithely plodding schools of fellow commuters—largely cushioned against economic angst by the budget behemoth that is the federal government—he pressed his way home.

Of particular interest to Walter were the platoons of brisk, tailored women who, with the blank and unflinching expressions of those who have had their fill of men for the day, hurried from hives of political or commercial activity to tony apartments in Virginia or Maryland—or to one of the bustling bars in the downtown area.

There was something in these women's cumbrous, pitching gait and erratically scraping high heels that to Walter pleasantly suggested the female endowment—nurtured and groomed for its wondrous power over men—held only precariously in place beneath dress-for-success primness.

But there was also something troubling about this gaudy gauntlet, this slick steeplechase of stylish but armor-plated career women, bustling businessmen, ribald revelers, colorless civil servants, and demented, semi-politicized street people that made Walter often want to shout it—and what, the isolation and self-delusion that it cloaked?—to a stop.

Pondering this, Walter absent-mindedly crossed M Street and headed down 23^rd toward Washington Circle Park, spotting the huddled shape of the bench-bound derelict only after he entered the sparsely planted memorial-cum-traffic circle to the nation's first president.

At first, Walter considered a course change that would skirt an unwanted encounter with another aggressive panhandler.

But then he saw that the motionless, tarpaulin-clad shape was that of the non-aggressive type—the truly damaged, farouche kind that sought only to be left alone.

Unlike some of his fast-talking, even menacing compatriots, such "leathermen," Walter thought—twigging to the Doctorow short story of that name—projected an aura of mute and authentic suffering.

Such poignancy, however, was sometimes even more unsettling than the outright confrontations of the aggressive panhandlers. 

 
Heading straight toward the miserable mound, Walter again recalled his project’s petition-propitiation-participation theme and, curiously, the pessimist philosopher Schopenhauer's theory about spontaneous human identification with the sufferings of others.

There’s that communion shtick again, he thought, speeding up, hoping to pass the hobo at a quick clip.

Approaching the bench, however, Walter hazarded a look.

There, motionless and covered in tattered layers of filthy clothing, blankets, and a tarpaulin headdress with two slits to admit air and light, was what presumably was a human being.

For a disturbing moment it appeared to Walter that he was gazing upon someone enveloped in a giant cocoon, preserved, as in the movie "Aliens," by extraterrestrials for some future horror.

On the bench next to the shape—its only entreaty to a world bustling indifferently by—was a used and dirty paper coffee cup, filled a third of the way with pennies, dimes and nickels.

Off to the side was a shopping cart piled high with cardboard boxes—presumably all the hobo's earthly possessions—fastened together with duct tape and Bunjee cords. Hanging from the cart's grillwork were several bulging, plastic People’s drugstore bags and two paint buckets filled with assorted odds and ends—treasures, doubtless, only to the traumatically dispossessed.

At once repelled and fascinated by the comically overloaded cart, Walter had a fleeting urge to ask the leatherman how he navigated the monstrosity through city crowds.