The Homeless Dentist
This is Juan. He used to come into the bar where I worked and buy the nearly dead roses a wandering Mexican would be hawking on Friday nights. Juan would buy the whole lot, then hand them out to the young women at the bar. My job was to sweep up at night, and there were always trampled near dead roses all over the barroom floor. I hated Juan for this.
He gave me his business card. He was a dentist. But such an odd dentist. He rode a bicycle, as you can see in the photo, and he would sit on the curb in front of the bar and change his socks, then pull a strange sparkly shirt out of his bookbag and put that on. Then he would rub colored zinc oxide under his eyes.
One night my boss, Joe McGraw, told me not to let Juan in anymore. Joe had seen him sleeping in some bushes earlier in the day, and that was the final straw. Juan did bothered the woman a lot. Always looking for hugs and kisses for the roses. But everyone missed Juan. His name was written in Sharpie on the wall by the jukebox and we moved on to other characters.