If you spend much time in the street you’ll find that a lot of your homeless will have their own signature stench. Crazy Kermit, for example. Crazy Kermit was with us for a few days under the bridge. Before he joined us he used to sleep in a grease pit. So there was the stink of axle grease plus the smell of stale sweat. Not just stale sweat, but stale on top of stale on top of stale. Fermented sweat. And then of course every once in a while Crazy Kermit would load his pants. It wasn’t just that Kermit was crazy, there was something else wrong with him too. I never knew what it was. But that was Crazy Kermit’s signature stench—axle grease, fermented sweat and human shit. He wasn’t a bad egg aside from the stink. We’d make sure he got breakfast every morning, the birria tacos. Then we’d send him out into the world and he’d spend the day sitting on a bus bench barking like a dog.

          We had another guy with us for a while, Ike or Mike. He didn’t go out at all. He was shattered, shell-shocked. Post-traumatic stress syndrome. He’d crouch under the bridge, shaking like a leaf, his clenched hands shiny with ground-in dirt. Never ate breakfast. Mungy Nuncie would give me some money and I’d go to a little bodega and bring back his four 40-ounce King Cobras for the day. “If it don’t sting it ain’t the King,” he’d say. Those were the only words I ever heard him utter so I never knew exactly what happened to him in the war. He’d try to talk sometimes, but it was mostly gibberish that came out of his mouth. As nearly as I could figure it wasn’t what they did to him over there. It was what he had to do to them. He lost his humanity over there, and he wasn’t going to be getting it back any time soon, at least not crouching under a bridge pounding 40-ounce King Cobras.

          A month has gone by. Quality Control found rat hairs in the Pau d’Arco Powder. The Pau d’Arco Powder is supposedly imported from the Brazilian rainforest but most likely it’s just ground up eucalyptus bark and cockroach bodies. Big Bluto steps on it too, with baby laxative, just like the coke dealers.

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