“It’s funny I guess, but it was my life.” I've heard that too many times, but you remember so clearly when you're a child. I'm old now and I've spent a lifetime chasing down people's pasts. I have floated up and I think I’m losing touch with myself. I don't need a backstory anymore and I'm done crying for anyone else. But before I let it all fall back down, there is one thing left, I've kept him to myself. I felt It felt better that way, and now I can't hold him any longer, so now I give it to you all to hold for me. I still remember him, he was of chameleon heart, so blue and frail in song, like how a candle with honest flame casts many different shadows on the walls for the surrounding room. Nevertheless, his eyes always kissed the skies I remembered him like that, I remembered him.

My memory feels fuzzy like the world is far away. But I still have what's important, leaving me with only the person I was when I was young, when I was defined only in my dreams. And now I'm someone else, defined by so much more, yet it is all so much more grey.

It was October 1973 and Mom's hand was so tight, suffocating in the sweetest way only a mom's hand can. She kept me on the ground as she walked me to school. We’d walk down the same route every day, down Ocean Lane. We would pass this homeless man: The town locals have come to call him the 'Tweener Trinketeer. And every day he played music on the street. He was always different, like he was a variety-show of a man, yet he always felt the same. It wasn't like he wasn't himself, it was just like he was more than that. Although that feels funny and wrong, it’s the type of thing you can only believe as a kid.

His look, that twinkle, that hint of hope, not happy per se, but hope rarely grows from happiness. I don't think Mom saw it. Every time we passed, Mom mumbled the same simple, yet true parental platitude: "If you can't stand to be yourself, you can't ever be anything." I liked him though, all of him.

One day we passed him chatting up Merrick or Mike, or whatever his name was, our local blue-collar wanna-be-rebel, slowly walking in the opposite direction of his lawyer's office, thinking it was a sly way to evade tax evasion charges. I remember the ‘Tweener, looking up at Merrick and offering this:

"Hey man, can you give me a buck? Ain't no one going to help us but our fellow man. Surely not ‘The Man,’ and hell, I know it ain't gonna be the big man upstairs." Every fiber of The ‘Tweener felt his words, the intensity, a certain authenticity teared up in his eyes. He felt it. You knew that dollar was coming and so did Merrick, reminded that not everyone was a lawyer.

And then on another morning, the Trinketeer was watching Reverend Coates preaching to the clouds. He broke the Reverend's sermon:

“Reverend, I thought the Lord said he'll give ya what you need if you sleep in faith, but, you see I don't have a bed.” I remember the ‘Tweener Looking up at Coates again, like his soul was screaming and funneling screams out into simple words. You couldn't mistake it for acting, his eyes looked up too much.

Coates replied with a humbled smile, “Then dream tonight in the Abbey and awake renewed.” as he followed a self-pleased Coates, who got to be a savior for a day, back to the church.

Then one day we heard, "What's a dollar to a friend?" The Trinketeer shook my mother and I from the lingering daydream of a morning haze.

"Go be a bother somewhere else as someone else", Mother bit back, finally getting to release years of bent up annoyance buried under social prudence.

The Tweener Trinketeer looked back confused, like he genuinely had no idea what she meant. After a moment of thought, with all sincerity sewn into his voice, he looked up from the blanket of splayed out oddities, and asked in the exact voice mom imagined, "a buck’s not worth changing me, ma’am. Just cuz I'm lonely doesn't mean I'll tidy up just to please a pretty penny off you."

Mom flinched back, put off by his confusion and hung up on his “nerve”, while missing his feeling. And then grabbed me my then hand huffing off on our way

I didn't see him again until I was eleven, but still, he stuck. Something in the air around him just lulled you into his story, the who’s and the why's of it. He was a type of guy that winks at children like they both knew something I've now forgotten.

He'd visit me, or at least I’d imagine he did. He’d star in my backyard expeditions. It's embarrassing, given the people I've met in my line of work, but I wished I was homeless. I wanted to act like only a child could, in the sweet naive hope that he had given me. He'd appear captured in crayon on mom's kitchen walls, blue and orange waxy pictures like candlelit little dreams my childhood-self caught like fingerprints on the walls.

After the last time we saw him, Mom changed our route to school. I was devastated, but soon enough about three years later, Mom thought I was old enough to go out walking on my own. (That sounds weird now, but it was a different time then, not safer really, but it felt safer.)

I used to walk down Ocean Lane while swimming in the ocean up inside myself. Turbulent feelings and rocksteady core. At eleven you're just beginning to realize you’re someone, and you yearn to find who that is. I'd go make faces in the puddles, and then making stories for the faces and then splash it all away.

I'd daydream lost in myself and then there he was, as him as he ever. I looked up at him and this time he looks right back at me, looked at me like he didn't remember, but with a grinning nod of shared spirit. Have you ever met the “Marlon Brando” of your imagination? Have you ever felt what it is like to have him believe in you, right when you were beginning to find yourself?

He had that street philosophy stench, though my 8-year-old mind had hidden that away. He was the most sincere of weirdos or most insane of the everyday.

He put his guitar down looking excited, he smiled at me and nodded again as his knapsack fell with a plop. Spewing out all sorts of little tin toys and other odd and tales and ends.

I sat with him on the blanket rummaging through them without a word, we sat each picking up weird and marvelous things. Holding it up for the other one and the world to see. Then we’d dive our hand back to pick up another.

Eventually, my eyes were met by a little face inside of the jar. I pick it up and turned over. I remember the feeling of seeing it, I would've been surprised if I was older. Its expression tore through me. I dropped it, and, as it fell, the Head looked pleadingly past my gaze at ‘Tweener as it fell. The Head’s smile faded his eye looked it up at the sky. It cracked as it hit the stone. The liquid the face floated in cried out as the Head sunk back into itself.

The Tweener Trinketeer picked the jar up off the ground. The head looked up at him, and the Trinketeer gave back a nurturing knowing nod, the same nod he had given me. He put a bandaid over the crack. And put the face and the jar away, as he too looked at me, then back up at the sky and finally back at me. Sadness stole away his gaze, but he seemed to get it back after looking back up to the clear morning sky and sighing.

He packed up his belongings, giving that same nod to each as he did. Then closed his eyes and turned to the alleyway running behind his squat. I lagged behind a little but decided to follow him. I shadowed him, going off like I'd do in my back garden. Following through the meandering alley to a door set in between a corner like someone had hidden it who had never looked for anything in their life. He knocked. As no one answered, he went In. I picked up speed and jumped behind him into a small room, an elevator of some sort, buttons riddle the walls like tattoos. He looked down but didn't really notice me, but he also didn't seem to mind my following him there. He pressed one of the buttons without looking, but I couldn't tell which one he pressed.

Then the lights began to shake like the stars having a seizure. We fell like we were floating like lightning bugs flying down lake shore drive, or a painting of that tunnel from Willy Wonka. His hopeful eye flicked like the mind's eye flicker in between dreams.

He began to sing in a prism of tunes, soul music splitting and tying itself back together. His face was melting cooling and melting again like wax in strange orbit a new face appears. His chameleon heart, on mirrored glass, changed color but remaining in shape. As his song changed melody, but kept steadfast meaning. Ringing out stronger and louder as he vomited up new faces. I was brought back to the puddles I'd splash in. As his faces splashed away, droplets fell like tears or stardust and reformed into faces of their own. I used to make up stories for those faces in the puddles, but the flickering was too fast, running away and hatching like heads sink into a cool pillow’s embrace. The jingle jangle carnival orchestra of faces weaned and wobbled in and out in what sounds like unending carousel circles of happiness and blue thoughts or melty dreamy alphabet soup.

Then the elevator stopped, the lights returned and so did he. He spoke to me in a voice that sounded like how you’d imagine the heavens feel, and just like how I'd imagine him, He asked me where I wanted to go.

“Home”, I nervously replied in the shaking hum of a crackling eleven-year-old voice.

He again looked confused and said, “home can be anywhere, just depends where you lay your head, and what's inside your head.”

I just gave him the same frozen shaking look.

He shook his head and looked off to the corner, looking hopefully at the buttons. I repeated almost in tears, I was in too deep in my fantasy and I was too afraid. “I just want to go home”

He looked at me with those dreamy infant eyes and just hummed out: “I know”

The 'Tweener Trinketeer reached his hand up and pressed a button looking with keen precision and care. He pressed it as we floated softly and calmly back up like still waters after a storm. The elevator stopped, he looked at me, nodding one last time, I stepped out of the elevator and found myself lying in bed, my eyes now heavy as I slipped back into a dream of a different kind.

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