It was a cold, blustery day in the coastal paradise that homeless people like to call San Diego.  Winter was approaching and there wasn't much else to do but wait.  In fact, I'm pretty sure that's all that homeless people have to do.  Kind of sad, really.  The eternal waiting.  It's like always being next in line at the doctor's office or the dentist but then they never really call your number.  You just sit there and wait, pretending to read whatever crappy magazine you happened to pick up, eyeing with caution those around you.  You're just in there for a check-up; you don't need to catch something serious.

I'm not one of them, the homeless, but I work at the free clinic and I see my fair share.  It wasn't always that way, but once a bum sleeps on your newspaper ad and wakes up with an imperfect but legible tattoo of your phone number across his forehead, you couldn't keep them out if you tried.  Not that I have a problem with them one way or another.  Most are really nice folks; it's just that they are really nice folks that smell like an outhouse.  We long stopped offering showers at the clinic.  Those were for the burn victims and the terminal patients.  Damn terminal patients.

But today was Monday, and I wasn't slated to see anyone terminal until at least Wednesday.  No, if this was like any other normal Monday, I'd see Karl, Jerry, Frank, and maybe Joe, depending on whether his kidneys were acting up again.  Karl was a good-natured characater with a decent sense of humor, genuinely upbeat despite where he ended up in life.  I would be a lot nicer to Karl if he didn't smell like rotten fish and happened to be a close talker.  I'm not really sure what Karl's medical issue was or why he kept coming back, but I was pretty sure that he was stealing candy from the receptionist.  No one expects a homeless person to be moral.

To forgive the rhyme, Jerry is scary.  Jerry never forgave the world for whatever circumstances caused him to wind up like he did and he wasn't afraid to berate anything stupid enough to start up a conversation with him.  Security would escort him out of the clinic on rare occasions but, for the most part, everyone just ignored his tirades.  He would never be shy about belting out the fact that he was a homeless war vet and crazy or no, it's never politically correct to assault a homeless war vet.  I was the only one that Jerry didn't harrass.  It wasn't because he didn't want to lash out and strike me down with his limited vocabulary, but rather that I had long since learned Jerry's weakness: money.  He was irate but he had to eat, and he wasn't above running cheap errands for me in order to accomplish that goal.

As for Frank, well, if I didn't already know any better I would have been hard-pressed to peg him as a homeless person.  He never touched the bottle and talked about as eloquently as anyone who completed 10th grade.  He only really came in on Mondays for the free tylenol and a sampler pack of condoms.  He let on to me one time that he had a steady lady on the street and, since he didn't strike me as a liar, I had no reason to doubt him.  Truthfully, the idea of homeless people having sex grosses me out but I'm required to maintain my professional dignity.  Hey, free clinic or no, you don't just walk in off the street and get a job.  They have standards same as a regular hospital, albeit slightly lower because no one really cares about the people who go there.  I'm not saying that I cared to any greater extent myself but I took an oath, and regardless of the fact that it was next to a vending machine in employee lunch room #2, I intended to keep it.

Mondays around here always seemed to start the same.  Cheryl, the receptionist, always came in smelling like laundry soap.  I was never certain if she did that on purpose and, if she did, why anyone would bother.  Maybe she just waited until Sunday night to visit the laundromat.  It's 8:04 AM and a line has already formed.  Monday was always the busiest day of the week.  I'd check my appointment calander but I didn't have one.  Against company policy I think someone told me once.  And so, as each week began, there was always the uncertainty, the waiting; wondering what the dregs of the street would throw at you today.  I really hated using derogatory terms like that but once you stop fighting against the back office lexicon, you can't help but start using it.

The loudspeaker startled me as my name crackled over the airwaves.  It seems that my first patient of the day had arrived.  There was always a sense of bland anticipation that preceded me opening the waiting room door.  Who was it and what was wrong?  Was it Karl?  Jerry?  Maybe Frank?  No, Frank never arrived before 10:00.  He once made a joke that by arriving later, all of the bad condoms had already been given away.  We'd normally chit-chat for a few sterile minutes before he'd sheepishly look away and say that he had to go.  I have to admit that up until now, I never really thought much about Frank save for the five minutes he'd spend in my office each week, yet here I was thinking of him now.  Maybe today would be the day to change all that.  Maybe today would be Frank's day.