A bunch of guys were sleeping close by, all bundled up in blankets and beat-up coats, hiding their faces from the freezing morning air. This one guy had a gray beard and pushed around a shopping cart jammed with plastic bags. Another dude was sitting up, sipping out of a paper cup.
I totally remember asking the other guys on the street, “Do you guys know me? What exactly happened to me?”
The dude holding the paper cup just squinted at me. Then he let out a laugh.
“Man, you’ve been hanging around here for years already. Stop acting like you forgot every single thing.”
A couple of the other guys let out a laugh, too.
Not in a mean way, really. It was more like they had already listened to every crazy story a guy could make up when he had absolutely nothing left to his name.
At the start, I figured they were just messing with me.
I kept throwing questions at them. What was I called? Did I get beat up? Did anybody ever show up looking for me?
One guy told me folks just called me Ben because that was the name I answered to this one night when somebody asked. Another dude mentioned I always just stayed totally out of the way. A third guy guessed maybe I hit the bottle too hard and totally fried my brain.
But I didn’t feel wasted at all. I just felt completely hollow.
