Gawker

« next »

How A Homeless Man Taught William Eville The True Meaning of Thanksgiving

evil.jpegLike Wordsworth, William Eville appears to be a Billy rather appropriately surnamed. In a "New York Observed" column for the Times yesterday, Mr. Eville recounts the time "in the early '90s" when he found a homeless person living in his car, which was parked by TriBeCa's "Duane Park...a park in name only." But why would said Mr. Eville be in possession of an internal-combustion engine? Oh, you know, "being from the New Jersey suburbs, I felt that a car was like an essential organ. It was not something I was prepared to give up." But knowing he felt such feelings about giving up said personal-mobility device and the fact that "a garage cost almost as much as rent," why had Mr. Evil come to New York? "I had come to New York to work as a banker. I didn't like the job but at the time I thought it was something I was supposed to do." Hmm, sounds like somebody was ripe for a moral lesson!

Enter homeless man. One Thanksgiving morning, because Mr. Eville "had left the door unlocked, my usual practice, so that thieves wouldn't break a window to get in," a domicile-challenged fella had indeed gotten in! Mr. Eville's "first impression was to evict the man" but then he felt "a wave of understanding and compassion." Not to mention "excitement"—"just by letting him stay I immediately stood apart from the crowd of 20-somethings milling around the bar." ("When I wasn't working, I hung out at bars with colleagues or former classmates"—Google reveals Eville was a 118-pound wrestler at Princeton!—"and drank myself silly just like everyone else." Agency's a bitch.)

So anyways, William Eville's empty life began to turn around because "sometimes around midnight my friends and I would walk down to Duane Street and, like archaeologists on a dig, peer through the windows of my car to see what he was doing." Then, as often happens in such Rent-era fairy tales, Giuliani Time intervened, and the cops got to the homeless dude anyway. Reclaiming his car—here's guessing Saab hatchback—Mr. Eville noted "the place smelled like an animal's den."

The vagabond was never heard from again, but like a vehicular Bagger Vance, his work was done. The unwritten epilogue to William Eville's story is that the incipient scribbler realized his eye for the nuances and vagaries of urban life were totally MFA material, so much so that the Times, seven years ago, noted that his workshop fiction was "so personal he might as well have shown up naked." And so our hero gave up finance for douchery of a more literary sort, as evinced by his italicized byline."William Eville teaches writing at Union Theological Seminary."

Self-discovery accomplished; everybody wins. Except, perhaps a likely-dead street man. Eh, it's a tough world out there; "New York," after all, is "a punch in the face...perfect [e]xcept for the parking."

Why He Moved Into My Car, and Why I Let Him [NYT]

9:40 AM on Mon Nov 26 2007
By Jon
1,772 views
24 comments

Comments

Start a discussion:

Reply by Email

Login with your username and password below. Or comment on this post via email.