The Grate Men : 2013-09

So there's these guys, homeless guys (or SDF, sans domicile fixe, in French) which live around my house and they're quite interesting. There seems to be a summer crew and a winter crew. I call them Grate Men because they tend to hand around the subway (métro) ventilation grates. They tend to be warm. The pictures are low resolution as they're taken from a cell phone. And, more interesting to me, they're always sent to me from a friend. I don't take their pics.

On the left is a first. She's a Grate Woman and she was actually about 3m from my door. Cool. And yes, I took this picture. I just don't take pics of Grate Men. On the right, a great group shot of the summer crew. These Grate Men aren't here in the winter.

Here's the legend...the original Grate Man (in both shots). You can see we're in the summer/winter transition because the picture on the left has a summer Grate Man. And our winter Grate Man has a new Mohawk (left photo). On the right, a classic. The original Grate Man on a grate (and with a phone). Awesome. Kinda the road America is taking.

Sad day for the original Grate Man...He has a radio (usually) but as you can see, it's broken. Maybe he did it - since he's always drunk. He can, however, read, which he's actively doing on the right (with alcohol of course). And he's a self-talker who really gets into it - hand gestures and all.

Update 2013-11-21, a couple shots - day and night - of the Grate Man.

As usual, he has a bottle of something and it looks as if he has a new radio! Good for him!

Update 2014-04-03, our famous Grate Man actually found a bed and since

the weather was unusually warm, he also did some napping on the grass.

Here he is laughing (probably about something he read) and racked out hard on his bed. I was impressed that he could manage to get a mattress and that the mattress would stay as long as it did - it was about a week.

Profiting from the sun just outside the Ecole de Guerre.

-mm-