“A lot of fiction is nonfiction,” James insisted as he pulled a smudged hand out of his novel to shake mine. It was that time of day when the sun is gone but it’s still a little light out, and the other bums were watching me like I was as crazy as I thought some of them were.

The man showed me the cover of his book: The Perfect Storm. “I mean, fiction is. . . I mean a lot of fiction is really just nonfiction. This is, you know, fiction, but it’s not.” James spoke in a voice that cracked of cigarettes and one too many rainy nights on a park bench. We talked a little about books before I got around to asking him what his own story was.

James – 46 years old and homeless – and I sat in Thomas Square near downtown Honolulu. I held a notepad I had swiped from The Rio in Las Vegas and scratched notes furiously while I perched atop the short brick wall that divides the park from the street. Sitting on the bench next James was a woman of similar age with scraggly long hair. She had refused to speak to me, but James volunteered to tell me a few things about himself.

“I can’t speak for anyone else here,” James protested vigorously when I asked how many homeless slept in Thomas Square on an average night. “That wouldn’t be right.”

Besides an 18 month stint in Germany with the US Army, James told me he’d been living in Honolulu for the last 42 years, since he was four. He told me that he wasn’t eligible for veterans’ benefits or social security like some of the other guys in the park, but I couldn’t help but wonder if his service had been cut short by an injury of some sort, based on his somewhat stuttering speech and difficulty thinking of answers to my questions. Born in North Carolina, James had moved with his family to Oahu in the 60s, and he has no plans of ever leaving again.

Most days, James said, “I head over to Labor Ready to see if there’s any construction work I can take. They didn’t have anything Monday, and… tuesdaay… today I was feeling sick. They pay 45. 45 dollars. A day. And I think the economy is going to make more work at Labor Ready, because it’s cheaper to get construction from there than the contractors. So it might pick up more.”

Perhaps the most surprising thing that occurred during our interview was when I mentioned President Barack Obama. James didn’t know who that was. I explained to him that Obama had used to live with his grandparents just down the street on Beretania, and that he just became President. “Oh. I think I have heard about that,” James told me.

Our conversation was brief, and it sparked more questions for me as it went on. Where is his family? What makes him tick? What was in the shopping cart? But it was getting darker, and more bums were starting to filter in the park, signaling that it was time for me to go home. I refrained from taking a picture, due to the dark and some rather menacing bums in the vicinity who looked like they would seriously confront me if I tried to snap a photo anywhere near.

I thanked James for his time and offered to let him borrow my book by President Obama, Dreams from my Father, if I ran into him again at the park.

“Are you from Greenpeace?” James asked before I left, pointing to my shirt (a Greenspace logo t-shirt by Rackspace Hosting).

“No. I’m just writing for a blog.”

Share on Facebook