Charlie lived at the city dump, behind a stack of discarded phone books still in their wrappers. He used to tell people he liked it better than his college dorm, but that was before he started screaming obscenities at everyone who came close enough to hear. Priests, social workers, kindly strangers – his vivid invective spared no one.
He had a scrawny mud-brown terrier he called Fizzle. Charlie and Fizzle roamed the dump looking for odds and ends. They lived on the limitless waste and occasional kindness of strangers. Charlie talked a lot about Hegel and Palestrina and the orchid mania of the nineteenth century. He spoke quietly but passionately. Fizzle listened without saying much, his whiplike tail thrashing as he trotted at his friend’s side.
They weren’t lazy. Clambering over mountains of stinking, slippery garbage every day isn’t for the squeamish or uncertain. They weren’t crazy, either. Certainly there were more comfortable places to live, even without money. But those places had walls, and corners, and only the tiniest sliver of watered-down sunlight slipped through the glass at the right time of day. There was very little for Fizzle to sniff in those cold, hard places.
It wasn’t a perfect life. But it was something, and it was enough.
