The man’s leg was killing him, like it always does when it’s cold and damp. As he stood on the lee side of a brick building in Denver’s Uptown neighborhood, he talked a bit about luck, good and bad.
“Now look at this,” he said, brandishing a sleek purple umbrella. “I just found this lying on the sidewalk today, in perfect shape. You push this button and it opens right up.”
Which it did, with a compact “fwoomp.”
“Of course, it would’ve been nice to find it this morning, when it was snowing all over me,” he said. “I got real wet.”
His name was James Kelly and he was still drying out. His ballcap brim was soaked, and his battered Carhartt work jacket wasn’t exactly fresh from the Sahara Desert.
Kelly is homeless. Has been for eight years. At 51, he is nearly toothless. His sun-battered face is seamed and cracked like an alkali flat.
If he told you he was 70, you wouldn’t bat an eye.
I had seen him dozens of times around the neighborhood. Thursday afternoon I stopped and talked with him. His leg was giving him fits. I asked him how it was going, and it was the first thing he brought up.
“I was in a bike accident last March,” Kelly said. “I was hit by a car at Sixth and Speer at approximately 8:01 p.m. They put a steel rod in my leg because I busted my tibia.”
He pulled up the leg of his black jeans. His right kneecap was the color of lard and bore a nasty vertical scar.
Judging from his limp, the operation was more carpentry than surgery.
“Something’s still wrong with it,” he said. “It’s healed awful funny. It feels like a screw is coming through the skin. My ankle’s hurting too.”
Kelly told me he had an appointment today with the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless. “I’m hoping I can get disability, which will maybe help get me into housing.”
That would beat spending nights under bushes in a sleeping bag, which was how it went Wednesday evening.
Kelly is a wiry man with the strong hands of a machinist. That was his trade until he lost his job eight years ago.
His company moved east, and not all employees were invited along. Something about “right-sizing.”
Kelly was eating a peanut-butter sandwich, which he fished from a plastic bag containing a jar of Jiffy and half a loaf of Rainbo bread.
A woman had stopped and handed him the food. “That was real nice of her,” he said.
“Tell you something else,” he said, warming to his good fortune. “Last night I was going through a Dumpster and found a real nice AM-FM radio. I took it to a McDonald’s and plugged it in. It worked perfect, loud and clear.”
Kelly’s green rucksack was inked with Scripture references. Not the actual prose, but the literal chapter-and-verse: Colossians 2:6-23, Matthew 6:8-13, John 3:16.
The 23rd Psalm was also penned on his pack. It contains the line “thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
Kelly’s staff was his cane, but the rod in his leg offered nothing but pain.
I asked Kelly if he thought his luck was going to change.
“Yes,” he said. ” ‘Cause the good Lord’s watching over me.”
He shifted his weight and winced. “Oooh, my leg’s hurting bad.”
I wished him well and walked on, hoping warm weather would arrive soon.
The man deserved at least that.
William Porter’s column runs Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1977 or wporter@denverpost.com.
