Little Wing

A few days ago, I met Jack for coffee down at the Jedi Counsel Room. We need to enjoy that place as much as possible before the fair mother city’s newly proposed smoking ban makes it extinct. And that could happen in the next 40 days.

Thanks local voters.

While there, I ran into one of my new favorite homeless friends, Little Wing.

Most of the homeless folks I know go way back to the old izzy ministry days. Not Little Wing. I met him earlier this year when I hung out in the basement at the downtown Baptist Beach Head. We played a few games of dominoes and had a meal together there once or twice.

If you travel through the down town area of the fair mother city, you can’t miss Little Wing. He’s the effeminate black guy who looks like Jimi Hendrix.

I love it. All these hoity-toity folks walking the down town area pretending they’re real big-city or something, and Texas guys wearing starched shirts, decorative belts with little silver disc-thingys on them, and starched jeans (just what the hell are starched jeans?) along with a homeless guy who looks like my favorite dead rock star.

Little Wing is very well groomed. Especially for one who lives outside. He’s got a cool mini-dreadlocked afro and he wears a different funky, almost feminine outfit every day. Sometimes he’ll wear some floral-printed sports jacket with ruffles on the cuffs. I swear that jacket came straight from the Hendrix wardrobe.

I wish I could get away with wearing stuff like that.

Although I don’t know him real well yet, Little Wing seems to be one of the more non-threatening people in the homeless society. He’s a real sweet guy who wouldn’t harm anyone. Although painfully shy, he can still maintain his quiet, dainty ways in a cut-throat domino competition...which shows more than a bit of confidence.

Sometimes I fantasize that he’d walk the down town area, carrying a lefty Strat and, in that quiet feminine voice, ask those Texan hob-nobbers if they were experienced.

That would be funny.

I’m convinced that Little Wing is demon possessed. He talks nonsense to himself often. Butterflies and zebras. And moonbeams and fairytales. It’s all he ever talks about.

And he refers to himself as “we”.

I talk to myself too. But I call myself “I”. Maybe I’m only half possessed.

Most American Christians would say Little Wing has mental problems. Maybe mental problems and demon possession are one in the same. I don’t know. And I don’t care.

I admit: I usually lean towards the spiritual diagnosis of people and away from the medical diagnosis. But I don’t ignore the medical entirely.

All I know is that Jesus said to drive out demons in his name. Yet we Americans and Westerners seem to create and buy more and more pills for our “problems”. Is there a TV commercial break without a designer medication being pushed?

I don’t know too much about demon exorcism. But the CEO sent word and examples through his son to do it.

I’d bet believers in Africa, Haiti, parts of Mexico and Latin America, hell...anywhere that’s not the top wealthiest nations on earth...would know much about the dark spiritual realm of demon possession. And maybe they know how and when to do something about it.

But with Little Wing, I’m guessing that it’ll require a friendship with him. I hope that can happen.