Last Act in the Play

Ronald Poppo, 65, has a name.

The Miami homeless man, whose face was chewed to the bone by another man, has spent 30 years on the streets, getting high and getting arrested, which is the going-to-work-and-coming-home of the street people. His name was known only to the cops.

People are raising money for his treatment. Poppo is a celebrity cause now and has the further temporary advantage of sleeping in a bed, between clean sheets.

A great majority of the homeless get to die in a hospital. American medical care is most affordable when the hospital knows you're not going to be around long enough to pay.

You have to wonder what Poppo's next act is going to be.

Rehabilitation example, speaking to auditoriums full of bored, irony-soaked high school kids?

Back to the sidewalk with maybe a two-paragraph obit when it finally kills him?

Reality show?

Record deal?

Can he sing?

My urban neighborhood is clotted with homeless people sharing cigarettes, sharing needles, standing in line at the liquor store, bumming change and picking through my trash.

When we write about them, we say they "made bad choices."

Which they did — or at least they made choices a lot of people make and came up unlucky.

In a work life that spreads over 40 years and several states, I've worked with and for a number of substance abusers, from lunchtime nippers to bathroom-break snorters and users of legally obtained pills.

When I had a dishwashing job, the manager of the restaurant had an addiction to cough syrup. A long time ago, people used to have cough syrup addictions.

We rather liked working for her, since she was usually too high to notice the steaks and prime rib going out the back door of the kitchen and the kindly old black bartender putting the price of every fourth drink in his pocket.

But Ronald Poppo was not so lucky as to bore into some business owner's heart, so he pillowed on the sidewalk and got arrested a lot and a terrible thing happened to him, not the first terrible thing that ever happened to him, but probably the worst.

And it made him famous, got him off the streets and in between clean sheets. You can get a pretty good high off that hospital dope, too, though they won't let you use as much of it as you want, which is the hell of it.

There's a guy who lives in a park about 20 blocks from me. He got out of prison some years ago, and he got a heroin habit, and he started living in the park with another junky, a woman who shoots up maybe seven times a day and claims a great respect for Native American culture.

Ronald Poppo is famous. The two park-dwellers are not and probably never will be, unless someone eats their faces.

If I were Poppo, I'd be planning my next move, writing my next act, trying to figure out how to keep the money coming.

It's not Act Two for this guy. It's Act Three, the last act.

But for now, he's nearly as famous as any of the Kardashians, although his own line of perfume seems unlikely.

Just think of Ronald Poppo as an ambassador for the American Way, which tells us that if you live poor at the start and you "pay your dues," you can be famous.

Enjoy the clean sheets, Ronald.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

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