Almost thirty years ago, I lived in an urban neighborhood known for its live music venues and ethically-sourced coffee houses. There were microbreweries, vegan cafes, and popup art exhibits. The residents called their thrift store clothing “vintage” and claimed they were wearing it for the sake of the environment. They took public transportation for the same reason. Virtue signaling was rampant. Everyone insisted that ethics, not poverty, dictated their lifestyle choices.

There was a homeless man in this neighborhood, who had been a benevolent fixture for years. He spent most of his time on a particular bus stop bench on the corner near my apartment building. No one knew his real name, because he did not speak. We called him Santa Claus, due to his long white beard and rotund belly. The neighbors liked Santa Claus. He was unobtrusive and nonthreatening. He did not actively panhandle, he just sat there on his bench, and passersby would give him a handful of spare change or a half-eaten veggie burger, and he would smile his thanks. Santa Claus had rosy cheeks and warm twinkling eyes. In his silence, he seemed wise, and his smile felt like a benediction, the bestowal of some secret blessing. 

I think we all assumed that Santa Claus was, if not actually happy, at least content. Or maybe we just didn’t think about it at all. Then one day, as I sat next to him at the bus stop, I noticed that his legs, protruding from his dirty cut-off sweatpants, were swollen and mottled purple. He sat slumped in his usual soiled brown jacket, the hood pulled up despite the heat of the day. I handed Santa Claus a dollar bill. He nodded and smiled tiredly, his eyes lacking their usual twinkle. 

It disturbed me, but I didn’t think about it again for several weeks, until I saw graffiti spray painted on the side of a dumpster: “Where is Santa Claus?”

That’s when I realized that I hadn’t seen him in his usual spot for days. 

Another week went by, and he didn’t reappear. People in the neighborhood glanced worriedly at his empty bench when they passed by. One day, a bouquet of flowers was left on the bench. On the brick wall behind the bus stop, someone spray painted “Santa, come home!”

Messages to Santa Claus began to pop up all over the neighborhood. People spray painted walls and printed fliers which they affixed to telephone poles. Someone must’ve contacted the local paper, because it published an article entitled, “Where is Jerry?”

He had never been Santa Claus. Jerry was a deaf homeless man in his sixties, born and raised right here in the city. The newspaper article shattered our illusions. We had thought Santa was content on his bench, that our generous offerings of change and leftover food scraps were sufficient. The article quoted a police officer who said that Jerry had been attacked and robbed by other homeless men several times during the months before he disappeared. On the last occasion, he was beaten so badly that he had to be transported to the hospital, where the staff noted that he suffered from a number of chronic health issues, including unmanaged diabetes. They treated his injuries and released him back to the streets, where he vanished. 

The morning after the article came out, I noticed a small crowd loitering around Jerry’s bus stop bench. I hurried over to join them, and beheld something wonderful and awful: during the night, someone had installed a life-sized effigy of Jerry on the bench. The unpainted paper mache sculpture was not detailed, but somehow it eerily embodied him, capturing his proportions perfectly. There were flowers, stuffed animals, and other offerings strewn around the sculpture, and on the bench beside it there was a spiral notebook and a pen. Neighbors were taking turns using this to write messages to and memories of “Santa Claus”. 

The newspaper sent a reporter to do a follow-up article: “Neighborhood Mourns Disappearance of Homeless Man”. Several neighbors were interviewed. They spoke of Jerry’s smile, his twinkling eyes, his kind and gentle presence. I recalled the last time I saw Jerry: his swollen purple legs and sad demeanor. I knew something was wrong, but I did nothing about it. What could I have done? I was not interviewed for the article. 

By then, we all knew he wasn’t coming back. He was dead, and his body would turn up eventually. Neighbors sat on his bench next to his effigy, scribbled in the spiral notebook, and sometimes cried. 

The entire city was now caught up in this sad little melodrama. People came from other neighborhoods to visit the bench, see the sculpture, and leave offerings. Some even left money and food, cigarettes, cans of beer. All of this piled up, untouched, around Jerry’s bus stop bench. People loitered about, reminiscing, speculating. The spiral notebook was nearly full.

The newspaper embarked on an entire series of articles: “Who Was Jerry?”

We all noted the “was”. Jerry had now been missing for over a month. 

The latest article delved into Jerry’s past. As a child during the 1940s, he had been a resident at the State School for the Deaf. During the years he was there, there was a movement in deaf education called Oralism. It was believed at the time that deaf children should be forbidden to use sign language, and that they should instead be taught to lip-read and speak. Many deaf students, including Jerry, were not capable of learning this new method of communication, and they were harshly punished for their lack of effort and for any attempt to use “manualism”, aka sign language. Jerry’s school records showed that he could read and write a little, but failed to learn to communicate in any other manner. 

I thought of his warm, compelling smile and expressive twinkling eyes. These were the mechanisms he developed to communicate. They were the only tools he had. 

The article interviewed a local deaf man who claimed that he had once attempted to speak to Jerry using sign language, suspecting that the homeless man was also deaf. With a stricken expression on his face, Jerry had waved him away, averting his eyes. When the man persisted, Jerry got up and fled. The lessons of his youth were obviously deeply ingrained. 

Over the course of the following week, the neighborhood seemed subdued, almost sullen. The sculpture on the bus stop bench began to feel like a rebuke. We thought we were ethical people, tolerant, progressive people. We thought Jerry was accepted, well-cared for, even beloved, sitting there among us. It turned out he was sick, suffering, locked in silence and isolation. We had not known where he went at night, or what happened to him there. It never even occurred to us to wonder. We hadn’t even known his real name. Our ignorance shamed us, and we began to avert our eyes when we walked past his bench. 

Six weeks after Jerry was last seen, I was awakened early in the morning by a neighbor pounding on my apartment door. 

“They found Jerry!” he shouted, shoving a newspaper into my face. 

Bleary-eyed, I scanned the article with a growing sense of disbelief.  

Jerry had been located. It turned out he had been “adopted" by a local family, and was currently ensconced in a guesthouse in the backyard of their suburban home. 

For the final article of the “Jerry” series, the reporter visited Jerry in his new home, which boasted a bed and a television, a private bathroom, and a kitchenette with a microwave and a minifridge. In the accompanying photo, Jerry looked more like Santa Claus than ever, with his white beard freshly washed and trimmed, his filthy brown hoodie replaced by a clean plaid flannel shirt, his twinkling eyes peering over the rim of a new pair of bifocals. The reporter interviewed the family who had adopted him. They said Jerry was settling in well, and was the perfect tenant: clean, quiet, and polite. He was still very reserved and mostly kept to himself, but they hoped that as time went on he’d feel more comfortable interacting with them and their children, one of whom was deaf. They said that Jerry was receiving medical care, and his health was improving.

As the piece de resistance, the reporter (who probably hoped to win a Pulitzer for his “Jerry” series) presented Jerry with the notebook from the bus stop bench, into which we had poured our collective hopes, fears, wishes, and memories. Jerry paged through it slowly, scanning the anguished scribbles through his new bifocals. Finally he closed the notebook, reached into his pocket for a pen and a notepad, and wrote, “I didn’t think anyone would notice I was gone.”

The reporter, with great satisfaction, noted that there were tears in Jerry’s eyes.

It was the perfect ending, a rare, happy ending of the sort that almost never happens in real life. Yet it left the residents of my neighborhood strangely dissatisfied. It’s not that we’d hoped he’d turn up dead; it’s just that we’d expected it. It was the only conclusion that made sense. The offerings at the bus stop disappeared over the next day or two, reclaimed or recycled; they were an embarrassment now, one we no longer wished to look at. 

I thought later about the tears in Jerry’s eyes after he read the spiral. Were they tears of gratitude, or of bewilderment? Could he even process this situation? How did he really feel, reading those tear-stained pages full of maudlin messages to “Santa Claus”, telling of how much we missed seeing him sitting unhoused among us on a bus stop bench? We longed for his presence so much that we created an effigy and sat it there in his place, and brought offerings to it just as we used to bring them to him. His presence made us feel good about ourselves. His defection to a guest house in the suburbs exposed our foolish conceit. 

Autumn came, and the paper mache sculpture of Jerry slowly melted in the rain. Finally it disintegrated and washed away into the gutter, and by that time our collective memory had also been washed clean.