When I was growing up, there was an older man who lived in my neighborhood named Crazy Ed, at least that’s what everyone called him. I never knew his real name.
Crazy Ed lived in a basement apartment in a working-class tenement next to the corner store. Everyone in town knew who he was, mainly because he always wore a women’s skirt, usually plaid but sometimes denim, and high heel shoes, usually red.
Every day, he would walk all over town dressed this way—miles and miles—pushing an old shopping cart full of rusty car parts and dented soda cans he’d collected from roadsides and weedy parking lots. At night, Crazy Ed would park his shopping cart outside the door to his apartment with a handmade sign on it: Do Not Touch. As far as I know, no one ever did.
Crazy Ed covered so much ground that you got used to seeing him. He was a fixture in town, so much so that his attire and shopping cart were in many ways just part of the fabric of the place, unremarkable in the way that familiar things tend to be regardless of their normalcy.
Although Crazy Ed wore a skirt and heels (I never saw him dressed any other way), he didn’t identify as female. He had a scraggly white beard and always wore a men’s shirt or sweater. During the colder months, he sometimes wore men’s athletic tube socks, the kind with the stripe at the top, with his high heel shoes.
Sometimes, kids would taunt Crazy Ed, especially young boys. Once, while walking to the corner store from my house, I came across a group of neighborhood boys throwing rocks at him. They were shouting homophobic slurs, and laughing whenever one of the rocks hit him. Unable to run in his heels, Crazy Ed took shelter behind his shopping cart. But the attack was so relentless that Crazy Ed was eventually forced to take his shoes off and hide. He cowered behind a parked car while the boys overturned his shopping cart and tossed his red heels into a nearby trashcan.
At the time, I was nine years old. I felt so sad for Crazy Ed, and I was angry that the boys were given license to treat another human being so brutally, that they felt justified in doing so. Even at the time, I knew none of them would face consequences for what they had done. And none of them ever did.
When I was in high school, I worked in a coffee shop downtown. Crazy Ed was one of our regular customers. Almost every day, he would park his shopping cart outside on the sidewalk, sit down at the counter, and order a black coffee, for which he would pay with a handful of grubby coins. He would often sit there for a half hour or more, keeping an eye on his cart through the window. He almost never talked, at least not any more than was necessary, unless someone spoke to him first.
Usually, other customers would just say hello to Crazy Ed, but if someone asked him a question, especially one about why he was wearing a skirt and heels, he would get angry and defensive, often causing a loud argument.
At the time, I found these exchanges, and Crazy Ed himself, pretty frustrating, especially considering the frequency with which they seemed to take place. The coffee shop was almost always busy, and it was easy to fall behind if something took your attention away from your work. The other employees and I eventually started trying to discourage Crazy Ed from sitting at the counter by putting his coffee in a to-go cup, but it usually didn’t work.
After I went away to college, I would still spot Crazy Ed around town sometimes when I was home on breaks, but not very often. A few months after I graduated, I moved to Boston to attend graduate school. After that, I don’t think I saw him again.
In the years since, I’ve often wondered what drove Crazy Ed to live the way he did. Did he suffer from some sort of mental illness or was he just eccentric? What was his life like before he moved into that basement apartment and took up roaming around town with a shopping cart full of junk? When and why did he start wearing a skirt and heels? Did he have a family? Did he have enough to eat? Why didn’t anyone ever try to help him?
When I think about Crazy Ed these days, it’s almost always with a wistful heart. Although I’m not particularly religious in a conventional Western sense, my memories of him often bring to mind the Parable of the Sheep and Goats in the Gospel of Matthew, which says the way we value and care for the most vulnerable among us—the poor, the hungry, the sick, those who are discriminated against for one reason or another—is, in the end, what reveals our true character.
ENP
