Meet Snuffy. I did.

No one knows his name, but everyone around here knows him on sight. He is shorter than I am, maybe 5'6" with graying hair and a beard that looks more like he's simply forgotten to shave for several days than a true attempt to keep a beard. His eyes are this pale grey color that, while expressive, always seems to look vacant. His jeans are stained black from mid thigh to mid calf; the bottoms are splattered with mud and come complete with a fraying hem. He changed his shirt yesterday, but it will soon look like the one before; sweat stained with spots of spilled beer and other unidentifiable grime dotting nearly every inch. We call him Snuffy.

Snuffy is always smiling. He greets everyone as if he's thrilled to see them. Perhaps he just hopes they'll stop and talk to him for a few moments. Quite a few do, perhaps unable to resist that vacant happy expression that marks him. He's a very polite little man with a earnest compliment always at the ready. Those who don't speak avert their eyes when they notice him and scurry quickly past, perhaps praying he doesn't speak to them either. He does anyway. When they don't answer, he doesn't get offended. He simply shrugs one shoulder and continues smiling. I always wonder if he's just gotten used to the silent rebuffs or if he just doesn't realize what they think of him.

I see him every day since my husband took on a second job and even if I can't stop and speak to him, I offer him a smile. When my husband gets home, I always ask how Snuffy is doing. Or at least I did.

Snuffy, as you've probably guessed by now, is homeless. My husband asked one day how he ended up on the streets. He shrugged one shoulder and with a bright, happy smile informed my husband that he drank away his wife. And then he drank away his house. Once that was gone, he drank away his health.

The story isn't much different than that of so many other middle aged homeless men, but Snuffy's always breaks my heart. It's not what he says, but the way he says it. He just doesn't quite seem to grasp how terribly wrong his story is. You want to tell him that he's telling it wrong, that he should stop smiling, but you never have the heart to do so. It just seems like too much of a cruel thing to do to someone that is already living a cruel life.

Unlike many, Snuffy takes complete fault for the way his life has turned out, only I can't help but think that he's probably one of those that truly isn't at fault. He doesn't blame circumstances or a cruel twist of fate. He simply says he drank his life away, starting with his wife and ending with his health. I'm not sure if it's even true or if he's just heard it so much that it's become truth to him.

Snuffy isn't all there. The vacant look and the happy smile are always there, no matter what he's talking about or what he's witnessed. He doesn't really know very much. He can't count very high, can't tell time well. What reading he is able to do barely gets him from one place to another. He sits at the bus stop when he has no where else to go. When the bus pulls up, he looks bemused; as if he thought that the bench was simply a stopping place for the weary and not designed for any other purpose.

Until this weekend, he hung out at the store where my husband works weekends, keeping my husband company while he worked the closing shift. It'd been a ritual since my husband started. On Saturday, however, that ritual was called off. People don't give Snuffy food. They give him beer.

And when people give Snuffy beer, Snuffy acts up. He politely asks if the young women would like to fool around. He politely tells people to go fuck themselves. No matter what kind of outlandish statement he's making, he does so with a smile and a sweetly said please. It doesn't amuse those at the receiving end of the statement. A go fuck yourself is a hard pill to swallow, even if it is buttered up with an earnest please. Once he's thoroughly offended them, he asks if they can spare a buck. It's the only time Snuffy ever asks for money, but that doesn't really matter. They complain about it.

When it happened on Saturday, my husband had to ask him to vacate the property. Snuffy told my husband he was sorry he wasn't being nice, thanked him for the conversation, tucked his hands in his pockets and whistled his way off the property. A few hours later, Snuffy had forgotten that he'd been run off and reappeared, drunker than before. That time, my husband regretfully picked up the phone and dialed the police station. They sent three officers to come and get Snuffy. Snuffy again apologized before they led him off the property.

When I saw him yesterday, he had that new shirt I mentioned. It's black this time. It made me wonder if the officers took him down to the Salvation Army that opens its doors to the homeless population here. Every Sunday, there's a line of sad faced homeless people flanking the doors, awaiting the click and the flip of the sign.

It broke my heart to think of vacant eyed, smiling Snuffy sitting in that line, waiting for that click. Somewhere in the last several months... Snuffy had stopped being just a homeless man that I smiled at sympathetically. He'd become the other person I worry over. The one I feed at every chance, the one my husband talked too nightly, the one that I knew even though I really didn't know him at all. The only homeless person that I can greet without fear when completely on my own.

None of that really mattered though. Snuffy had become a nuisance and nuisances aren't welcome by shoppers, no matter how much you might personally like them. The saddest part though, is that Snuffy doesn't really even realize that's what he's become. He's just Snuffy.

I sighed sadly to see him in that new shirt yesterday. It just didn't seem fair that society could give him a new shirt, but no one could give him the intelligence to even realize that no longer knowing your own real name is a problem. It still doesn’t quite seem fair. Snuffy’s come back to the places that are familiar to him since his removal from that same environ on Saturday and it just makes me wonder if he’ll ever find a home that is as comforting to him as this little stretch of street or if he’ll die out there, not even really understanding that it doesn't have to be that way.

But in Little Rock, it will pretty much remain that way if the current state of affairs continues. We're notoriously unfriendly to homeless people, going out of our way at every chance to make an already difficult life even more difficult. My more vindictive side hopes that those passing such laws eventually find themselves on the receiving end of such madness.

My other half, the half that always wants to help, no matter how helpless a situation, has renewed the vow to found an organization that provides mental health services to the homeless as well as providing legal assistance to the mentally ill in prison. That's always been the other ultimate career goal I have... only now, it's become a lot more personal and tinged just a little with the hues of desperation. I don't want to save the world... just those like Snuffy that don't have the mental capacity to save themselves. That's all I really want.