Frank

As I take my afternoon walk on work days, I pass a lot of apparently homeless people. A lot of them seem to have mental issues, talking to themselves or to unseen entities. Seeing one particular guy me me think of a man named Frank who used to shop at the store here I worked.

Frank was probably in his fifties. He often wore old faded army fatigues and had a heavy beard. I don't think Frank was homeless - he always seemed to have plenty of money, so if he was, he had a fairly reliable source of income. Frank, however, had some eccentricities.

Frank was convinced that the CIA was tracking him through the UPC codes on food packaging. After he made a purchase he would take a small pocketknife out and cut the UPCs off and throw them away. On a few occasions other customers would see him take out the knife and assumed that because he was talking to himself he was somehow a danger. No, only the UPC codes were in danger. Every once in a while he would use profanity when talking to his invisible friends. He would always apologize when I asked him to keep his language clean.

Frank also was very concerned with order. Some days we would find Frank taking tuna cans or Oscar Meyer bologna packages off a shelf, rotating them according to date, and turning all the labels the same way. The first time we saw him Loss Prevention followed him around for two hours thinking he as a shoplifter, but he was actually doing a service for us. Frank in a checkout lane was also a challenge. He always paid in cash with exact change. He would pull out a little change purse and root throw the coins, somehow perceiving that one specific nickel was preferable in a given exchange.

Frank was harmless; a little weird, but harmless. Nonetheless, he made a lot of people uncomfortable. He wasn't doing anything to overtly cause the discomfort, but some people's worldview didn't allow for people like Frank.

One day, which happened to be my day off, an employee reported to Loss Prevention that Frank was taking items out of the bulk food bins with his bare, unwashed hands. He was confronted by Loss Prevention, who threatened to throw him out of the store. Frank responded by saying that he would throw the Loss Prevention employee out of the store. Frank was banned from all the company's stores and I never saw him again.

But here's the odd thing. Frank was a germaphobe. Whenever he purchased anything from bulk foods he would wrap the scoop in a plastic bag, then put his hand inside another plastic bag, and only then would he scoop his purchase into a third plastic bag. There is no way that he was putting his bare hands in those bins. Frank was falsely accused because someone was unsettled by his difference from what they considered normal. And he was thrown out and banned on the basis of that false accusation and the overreaction of the person who confronted him. Would it even have been an issue if it had been one of the dozens of clean cut people who didn't talk to themselves or cut the UPC codes off? Obviously not, because that kind of behavior was and still is routinely ignored.

I think about Frank whenever I pass some of our downtown street people. I don't know their stories or how I they got to the place where they find themselves today. I didn't know Frank's story either, but I always treated him with respect and I work hard to suppress incipient judgement against these folks that I see downtown.