My Long Lost Homeless Friend, And The Junk Mail I Get On Her Behalf

When I got this junk mail the other day, I stopped in my tracks, as I remembered exactly why I, a non-smoker, was getting coupons from Newport cigarettes.

About 4 years ago, I struck up a friendship with a homeless woman who used to hang around near our work building (WJLA-TV) in Rosslyn–Her name was Chu, and she was either Chinese or Taiwanese (she showed me her passport once, but I can’t remember) and she was always clean with freshly washed hair. There was an elderly woman in the neighborhood who let Chu bathe in her home, if I understood correctly.

Chu, like most homeless people, was obviously suffering from some kind of mental illness, but she was often lucid, and never drank or took drugs, as best I could tell. She wasn’t the typical “ranter” walking down the street. Just the opposite–she rarely spoke.

Oh, and you know what? She not only never asked me for money, she would often offer me food or candy, and she once bought ice teas for my then girlfriend and me from Starbucks, and was waiting to give them to us when we left the building for dinner break.

That’s when I would usually hang out with Chu–on my evening dinner break. The thing is, she didn’t speak often, so she and I would often just sit on a curb by the Spectrum Theatre and not say a word to each other. I’d just be eating–she’d be sitting there beside me, completely silent–then I’d say goodbye and go back into the building.

One day, she was the most animated I had ever seen her–she had obviously been waiting a long time for me to come out, and when I did, she rushed toward me holding something in her hand. Well, what it was, was an entry form to win a million dollars (or whatever the sum was, I don’t recall exactly) from Newport Cigarettes and all you had to do was log in to the website to enter. So, for the first and only time that I know of, Chu actually came inside the TV station with me, and we went into an empty office and logged onto a computer and “entered to win.”

Since Chu had no address, we used mine. I entered my address, phone, email, etc.–and then I clicked the button to enter. I looked back over my shoulder at Chu and said, “Well, I guess we’ll see if you win, and I’ll let you know if you do.” And then I realized –right at that moment– that she thought we were going to find out immediately if we’d won, and she seemed crushed that that wasn’t the case.

In the days that followed, she pulled further and further away from me until, after a few weeks or so, she wouldn’t even look me in the eye or say hello anymore. My theory is that she thought that she had actually won something and I had kept it from her. That was NOT the case, but I can’t think of anything else that would have changed the dynamics so quickly. Meantime, junk mail, not money, started arriving in my mailbox from Newport. Tons of it.

Now, I was the one who was crushed–It felt like the scene in “Rain Man” where Tom Cruise feels that he has REALLY connected after so much time with his autistic brother, so he goes in for a hug with Dustin Hoffman… who only stiffens up and shows no emotion at all. It really wasn’t so complicated, when you looked at it with the cold, objective eye, I suppose. Both Chu and I were responding in the ways that were natural to each of us. Still, I was sad. I thought our silent hangs meant something to both of us–though it would be hard to put into words what that “something” was.

Chu became more and more scarce. One of the other homeless guys told me that she had pulled a knife on some other street people. There’s a good chance that those guys had it coming to them, but all bets are off, since one can’t take the element of mental illness out of the picture.

And now the years have passed and I have no idea where she is. If she has come back to that area where we used to hang out, she might well wonder where I am, since I haven’t worked at that building for almost two years. In fact, I’ve changed jobs, phone numbers and even addresses. There’s probably no way for us to find each other.

But I still get the goddamned junk mail from Newport cigarettes.