Greenpoint Santa

Every urban neighborhood I've ever lived in or spent a lot of time in has 'its' homeless person. While there may be quite a number of homeless people who frequently hang around in that neighborhood, it seems that there's always just one who dominates the landscape, usually by way of his or her larger-than-life eccentricity.

In my current neighborhood, the signature vagrant is unquestionably Greenpoint Santa.

Way less charming than this guy.

Greenpoint Santa takes his name from his bushy white beard and the large satchel of 'presents' he totes around with him. He was so dubbed by a few friends of mine whose stoop he likes to sit/sleep on. Greenpoint Santa bears the dubious distinction of being the most revolting homeless person any of us have ever come across.

This gentleman appears to be in his sixties or seventies--though his lifestyle suggests that he might be much younger than he looks--and an encounter with him is a multisensory experience. Like many homeless people, he smells bad. But "he smells bad" doesn't really do Greenpoint Santa justice. The man is a compost heap on legs. When he hangs out on our local subway platform's benches, the smell is so overpowering that commuters give him fifteen yards or so of space on either side. The odor is unmistakeably that of decay, and not friendly carbon-cycle-circle-of-life decay. It's a corrupted, urbanized rot that I've come to associate exclusively with New York City.

Greenpoint Santa's appearance is equally iconic. He dresses entirely in baggy black clothing--a hoodie/jacket and what appear to have once been Dickies, along with a pair of white high-tops that look like they went out of production some time during the eighties. His head is usually covered in a sort of tight cowl or hood that a monk might wear, if the mendicant orders were populated by reeking transients (not entirely improbable, I suppose).

But Greenpoint Santa's worst feature is the intersection of the look and the smell. After seeing the guy enough times, you start to notice that the legs of his pants look sort of...full. And that his shoes have all these weird grey-brown stains. And that flies swarm around his feet at all times.

Then you realize that he smells the way that he does because he constantly shits in his pants. He must also be tying the bottoms of his pant legs shut so that the shit just stays in there. This is to say nothing of Greenpoint Santa's habit of leaving what my friend described as "baseball bat-sized shits" around the streets. It's quite possible that his bag of presents is also full of turds.

There are a number of compelling reasons to live in New York. Greenpoint Santa demonstrates that the other residents aren't necessarily one of them.