The Blue Plastic Milk Crate

Roger spends most of his days seated on a blue plastic milk crate. Every morning, summer or winter, the sun wakes him in his rag nest, warming the cold concrete in the opening leading to the corner stairwell of the building car park. Only just awake, Roger slouches half upright on his right arm and leaning over, takes a drink. Then of course there are other actions he undertakes that do not bear polite description. The point however, on every other morning, is the grime crusted, bearded, hair-dirted figure that ultimately staggers upright to flop onto his blue throne.

Around the corner, in the bitumen open space between the back of the Newtown Centre and the newer block of town houses there is a large crowd of industrial rubbish bins. Above them on the roof top the Ibis also gather to meet the sun. It’s peculiar if you remember that these birds were characterised by the ancient Egyptians as representative of the deity Thoth, god of writing and knowledge. A more unlikely bunch of long-legged, moth eaten looking birds, greedily squawking out of the side of their black, scythe-like beaks at the  prospect of fresh garbage, is hard to imagine. Scribes without too many pennies in their pockets perhaps? Fallen on hard times and forced to the streets to get a living?  Maybe they’re just like Roger.

Roger, set back in his customary niche in the early light. His old grey army surplus blanket is now draped around his bony shoulders and his arms are crossed on his chest; one hand is keeping hold of a grimy corner; the other tightly surrounds his breakfast bottle of beer.

You might also see Roger on other occasions as he returns from the other end of King Street. He is staggering from side to side along the black bitumen and brick footpath; stumbling down past Newtown Station toward the side lane by the High School of Performing Arts, the location of his throne. 

These outings do not for the most part coincide with any mere necessity for the body’s sustenance: stale bread rolls or some mangled chicken or leftover fruit; perhaps a two day old litre of milk, all being thrown out by the Cafes and other businesses along the strip. Instead, they are pure journeys of a suff,ering soul, rendered down now to the need for another bottle of drink. On such occasions, if his luck is in, Roger has already managed to consume at least one full one and has another clasped against his chest. The result of this good fortune is the added drama of loud, incomprehensible yelling and other, quieter conversations with what you could only interpret as the shades of his past:  beings that Roger can see, but we, the other passers-by cannot. 

Maybe if the seemingly oracular words of these mad, alcohol sustained rants could be unpacked like the contents of old suitcases, you might find in them some clues as to the progress of Roger’s life: why it is that his existence  has been rendered down to this crumpled crouching on his plastic box. Such an investigation however might require a real conversation rather than the simple acknowledgement that many locals afford Roger as they pass. If anybody did succumb to a full scale engagement with him though, Roger would probably tell them that he lost the tickets and the keys for the said luggage a long, long time ago.

So Roger will simply lie down once again at the end of this day. His head rests on an old jumper and the blanket is pulled up almost to his nose. His arms are crossed once more. He has enough liquor in his system to feel suitably embalmed: his breathing becomes one with the velvet dark.

In the frail barque of his sleep Roger is adrift and blessedly forgetful; and through the underworld of our urban night, he is sailing now, slowly, toward yet another dawn.