Joseph Zitt

It’s been a long time since I’ve anyone encountered sleeping on the grounds of the church. But now the winter is approaching with its cold winds and rain, and the homeless have begun to take refuge in its dry and sheltered nooks.

Late one night last weekend, I found someone sleeping in the east stairwell, outside the chained and padlocked door to the Child Care center. As usual, I didn’t disturb him, since it was raining hard, and he wasn’t blocking my path. And, as usual, he didn’t return.

Two nights ago, as I passed the church at about 2 AM, in the rain again, I saw someone sleeping under the eave at the top of the western stairs to the sanctuary. The person was wrapped in a shabby yellow blanket, with a rolling suitcase standing nearby. (I’ve been seeing a lot of rolling suitcases over the past year, dragged around by people who one wouldn’t imagine to have a need for carry-on luggage. But the cases are getting quite inexpensive, and, I suspect, easily stolen.) Again, I didn’t disturb the sleeper, sweeping the rays of my flashlight around that spot rather than over it.

Last night, passing once more at about 2 AM, I again saw the sleeper. I was tempted to take some action, since it was the second night in a row that the person was in the same spot. But it was cold and raining again, and I was too exhausted to want to deal with much of a fight, so I did my rounds as usual without doing anything about it.

I went past the church much earlier than usual tonight, at about a quarter to seven. I had been at dinner with my housemates, then had dropped by a nearby coffee joint for an espresso before stopping through home on the way to a performance.

Pausing for the espresso took a little longer than I expected. My predecessor, from whom I had taken over the church job almost four years ago, was sitting in the coffee shop. We almost didn’t see each other, since he had his head down as he worked at a chord pattern on the electric guitar that he had running through a tiny amp to his headphones.

When he raised his head and spotted me, we got to talking briefly, with him going into one of his standard intricate trivial monologues, describing in detail why the Elton John album that contained the song that he was learning was the apex of the singer’s career, and how to recognize the best of the several CD reissues of the album. Out of courtesy, I invited him to our performance that evening, but hoped that he wouldn’t actually get there, since he was dressed even more poorly than usual, with holes in his flannel shirt and sweatpants.

When I got to the church, I saw that the sleeper was once again there. Since I was already running a bit late, I considered waiting until later to deal with the situation. But it was early, and the weather was relatively good, so I decided that it would be best to get the person to move on while there might have a better chance of finding a different place to crash for the night.

I climbed the stairs toward the blanket. As I got near, the sleeper rolled over suddenly and glared at me, widened eyes staring out from a grimy, clean-shaven face framed and partially covered by long, stringy hair. “What?” he growled.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Joe. I do security for the church. I’ve seen you sleeping here for the past two nights, and we just can’t let anybody get into a pattern of sleeping here. So I’m sorry, but I have to ask you to move on.”

He sprang suddenly into a seated position, fully clothed except for the shoes that lay near where his head had been. “I know who you are,” he muttered. “You’re one of those false Christians who go killing the real people.”

“Actually, no,” I said. “I’m not Christian. I just work here.”

That seemed to confuse him for a moment, but then his glare returned. “I know you! You’re one of the satanic millennium who hang out down at the supermarket and murder priests. You’re with Lady Etheridge. You’re Thomas Randall, the false king of England!”

By this point, his bellow had raised to a shriek that I was certain could be heard a block away.

“No, sir. But you do have to move on.”

He continued to shriek, howling insults and obscenities at me. I considered standing my ground, but realized that from where he was, he could easily shove me down the cement steps.

I stepped backward when he paused to cough. “I’m walking away now. But I will need you to be gone by the time I return. Good night, sir.”

The man continued shrieking, coming up with strikingly colorful combinations of threats and obscenities. I don’t think I could repeat what he threatened to do with the bodily organs of anyone who looked like me on Christmas Day, but visualizing the image would have required a collaboration between Hannibal Lecter and Hieronymus Bosch. I ducked around the corner to the north side of the church, out of view.

Several minutes later, he was still shrieking and had not moved. I contemplated trotting back down to the coffeeshop to get my predecessor for backup, but then decided that that would probably make things worse. A few pedestrians had come past and looked frightened, most crossing the street to distance themselves from the screaming.

Digging out my cell phone from my pocket, I switched it on and looked through the address book for the number of the Berkeley Police Department, which I could have sworn that I had. It wasn’t there — the last time that I had had to call the police was long enough ago that I had used my previous phone. Dialing information, however, connected me to them for free.

It took a while for the police dispatcher to understand what I was calling about. I told her my location, and that an apparent vagrant who had been asked to move on was shrieking threats on the church steps. She said that she’d send someone to look into it.

As I hung up the phone, however, I heard him come down the stairs, his suitcase clanking as he dragged it down the steps behind him. The screaming didn’t stop as he headed down the hill away from me.

I called the police again to tell them that he had moved, but might still be a problem. I confused the dispatcher by telling her that he was moving south on what turned out to be an east-west street (for some reason, my mind tends to map “downhill” to “south”), but when I told her that he was moving away from a particular street and toward another, she figured out what I meant. But by the time that I got off the phone, I couldn’t hear him anymore. I didn’t know whether he had finally stopped screaming or just moved out of earshot, but I wasn’t going to follow him and find out.

I walked on, disturbed, but less shaken that I would have expected. This was the first time that someone that I had encountered in this situation had turned out to be this aggressive and deeply disturbed, and the first time that I had been threatened.

When I returned to do my rounds at about midnight, all was clear. He hadn’t returned, and no one else had taken up any of the shielded dry places along the perimeter of the church.

I’ll keep an eye out for him. But my hunch is that he may quickly forget me and that this ever happened, and will keep moving on, slogging across the intersections between our mundane (if soggy) streets and the horrific world that he seems to perceive.