EllenPall.com - JOURNALISM

The Man on the Bench (New York Observed)

by Ellen Pall

from The New York Times, February 19, 2006

OUR neighbor Sam died two weeks ago. He lived on 82nd, 83rd and 84th Streets, between Riverside Drive and Broadway, and died under a corner scaffold sometime late on the night of Thursday, Feb. 2, or early the next day. A week later, at 10 on a Saturday morning, some 80 or 90 of us gathered at the bench beside Riverside Park where Sam was most often to be seen, to share stories and pool information about him.

A blizzard was approaching New York. We stood in a clump around the bench, huddled in parkas and wound up to our chins in scarves. Above the noise of the fitful wind and the M5 buses, we told one another what we knew of Sam.

No one present knew his age — maybe 50? maybe 60? — or the cause of his death. It wasn't exposure: the night he died was unusually warm. No one present knew his last name, though it seemed the police did. Teddy Gross, a tall man with thinning silver hair, pointed out that Sam had probably known us better than we knew each other. Mr. Gross had spoken to our City Council member, Gale Brewer. Sam, she had informed Mr. Gross, came from the South, where he still had family. She had been told he had a sister here in New York. His family knew of his death.

But it was not clear yet whether his family would claim his body. Carol Nolan, who lives across Riverside Drive from Sam's bench, reported that a neighbor of hers had offered to lead a drive to provide a proper burial, if necessary. We discussed the idea of raising money for a plaque on the bench. This day, white lilies in a glass jar sat where Sam used to sit, and someone had tied peach-colored roses to the trunk of a nearby tree.

Sam, as we all knew, was a spare, self-contained figure of Dickensian singularity. In the last five or 10 years, he always appeared on our sidewalks wearing a suit and dress shoes, and wheeling behind him a hard-sided leather suitcase. The baseball hat some recalled him wearing years ago had been replaced by a series of berets and, more recently, a woolen cap molded by use to the shape of his head. Though he seldom made eye contact, he was remarkable for his nearly perpetual smile.

"He seemed to be happy with himself," said the Rev. Ian Alterman, who has lived on 83rd Street near Riverside Drive for 40 years, and who works with the homeless. "And that's rare."

Mr. Alterman was a child when he first met Sam, he told our group. Sam was "more lucid and active" then, but grew more "visionary," as Mr. Alterman put it, as time went by. The minister had tried to reach out to him in these later years. But Sam was not interested in being reached out to.

"He made us feel that he had what he wanted," said Mr. Gross, who had also tried to help Sam. "He didn't want what he didn't have."

Gerald Lynas, an artist who lives in the building at Broadway and 83rd Street in front of which Sam often sat on a metal tree railing, brought a photo portrait he took of Sam in his younger days. Mr. Lynas remembered with something like admiration Sam's blunt response when he once dared to offer a compliment.

It was Sam's occupation to tidy and rearrange the trash baskets on the corners along Riverside Park. Sometimes he would amalgamate the contents of a couple of baskets. Sometimes he would remove a full plastic liner and lean it neatly against the now-empty container. He often rolled the heavy baskets from one spot to another, across 83rd Street, perhaps, or only a few yards off to one side, according to some system or compulsion invisible to us but irresistible to him.

So Mr. Lynas, himself a busy steward of the neighborhood, thanked him for this.

Sam briskly informed him that it was none of his business.

Over the 25 or 30 years Sam lived among us, we neighbors had traded many theories about his identity. Many people believed that he had a room somewhere nearby but rented it out either during the days or completely. Roberta Waddell, who lives on Riverside at 82nd Street, and was among those who organized the memorial, said a neighbor in her building knew that Sam had once been a student at Columbia University. Another woman told of a time, years ago, when she had handed Sam a poorly written article submitted to an archaeology journal she was working for. He returned it correctly edited with proofreader's marks.

OVER the next week, a few real facts came to light. Sam's last name was Averiett. He died of a heart attack at the age of 57; he had abused alcohol, the medical examiner said. According to the police, there was no rented room: he was homeless. For a long time, he slept on a rocky outcropping in Riverside Park. Many people in the neighborhood had made a habit of slipping him money; at least one person who did this had once been homeless herself.

Councilwoman Brewer contacted Mr. Averiett's sister, Shirley Buie, and found that she lived not in New York but in Birmingham, Ala. Mrs. Buie had not seen her brother since their father's funeral in 1975. In 1991, when their mother died, she was unable to find Sam. Her brother had been one of five African-American students to integrate the white high school in Sylacauga, Ala., where they grew up. He went to Talladega College, in his home state, and in 1972 earned a master's degree from Columbia School of Journalism.

It was not clear to his family whether he had been undone by a turn in his luck, or mental illness, or a problem with alcohol. They would have liked him to come back and live in Birmingham. A few hours after our gathering by the bench that Saturday, he was buried near his parents in Sylacauga.

We in New York knew nothing of this. Our memorial service was mostly hearsay and reminiscence. Ms. Waddell recalled having seen Sam brushing his teeth at a Riverside Park fountain. The mood lightened as some remembered the times, many years ago, when he would occasionally wear a dress over his other clothes and carry a purse. Those were "his jauntier days," said Mr. Gross. Many remembered that he bought a newspaper daily at a newsstand on Broadway and 83rd Street and read it, as several neighbors attested, "cover to cover."

Before we left, Mr. Alterman, the minister, appealed to us to remember that many of the homeless are not drunks or drug addicts, but only people down on their luck. According to a 2005 survey done by two New York City agencies, well over 4,000 homeless people spurn shelters and live on the streets. The city keeps a tally of deaths from exposure among the homeless (17 between 2001 and 2003) but has only recently begun to track how many simply die outside.

"Just remember as you pass these people," Mr. Alterman said to the gathering, "they are human beings. They have stories, they have lives." Then, cold in the rising wind, we all went home.

Ellen Pall, a novelist, recently started DebbiesIdea.com, a literary Web site.