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Last winter, I noticed that there was a man living on our street corner. It took me only a day or so to realize that he was in the middle of an acute schizophrenic episode. He paced back and forth, back and forth, in a tight pattern. He sat and rocked and talked to voices for hours and hours. The one intelligible thing I heard was, "Why do I have to keep listening to these tapes?" He rocked, back and forth, back and forth. And basically bothered no one.

I call him Blanket Man because he lay all winter in a striped blanket, through snow and rain and cold. Sometimes, on warmer days, Blanket Man would leave his blanket in his spot on the sidewalk, neatly folded. No one would ever take it. I thought this was real proof that there is community among the street people (plus I knew from another street person that they looked after Blanket Man).

Blanket Man was too ill with psychosis to beg, but people left cups of coffee next to him. He didn't seem even to notice this, but the coffee would get drunk eventually. I hope it wasn't cold by the time he noticed it. The cops were also nice to Blanket Man. Two cop cars would pull up next to him sometimes and the cops would try to find out how he was and bring him cups of Coca Cola.

I kept wondering if there was anything I should do to help Blanket Man. I knew what he was going through, I knew it was ghastly, and yet I walked by every day and did nothing. I justified doing nothing on the grounds that so often when people make you get "help" when you have a mental illness, you end up getting hauled off in handcuffs. I did not want to commit Blanket Man. As one who has been committed, I would not do that to anyone.

Later, I ran into a woman who lived down the street who told me Blanket Man had Schizophrenia and was an outpatient at St. Luke's Hospital. This is the very hospital that half-destroyed me as an inpatient. Now I was really glad I hadn't gotten "help" for Blanket Man because St. Luke's had a nasty habit of putting psychotic black men in four-point restraints for many long hours. So I did nothing.

Blanket Man was a very considerate homeless psychotic person. He didn't accumulate garbage, wasn't dirty, didn't smell badly. I wondered how he did it. He seemed to have a way to change his clothes. I think maybe he officially lives in a very bad SRO (single room occupancy) on the block and keeps his stuff there, but is too scared or too disgusted to sleep there. He was too sick to beg.

Then one day he asked me for money. Usually when a beggar asks you for money you are not overjoyed. But I could have hugged the man. I gave him some money. The next time he saw me, the first thing he said was, "How are you?" and not, "Can you spare some change?" He'd ask for money also, embarrassed, like he'd rather not. It turned out that Blanket Man, from the way he talked, was unlikely to be from "the underclass" but was probably middle class or at least from a family where people were intelligent and spoke well. He used words like "mismatched" when he regarded the bones of my broken foot and "defective."

The first sign that Blanket Man was getting better was when the cops were playing chess on the back of their squad car with another street guy near Blanket Man's spot, and Blanket Man got up and started to watch and it looked like he was following the game. After that, he had periods of calmness where he wasn't talking to voices. These lengthened, and eventually he got well. Right now, Blanket Man does not seem in the slightest bit psychotic. I don't know if he is actually taking medicine prescribed for him at St. Luke's or if his episode is just naturally over. He told me he had a terrible winter, but I don't know if he meant the mental illness or just the weather. As I've talked to him more, I've seen that he takes care of himself in a very orderly, planned way. He even did so to some extent when he was sick.

Given what I've heard about some shelters, I'd hate to see someone so essentially capable end up in one of them. But surviving a psychotic winter on the streets of Manhattan requires luck as well as savvy.

There are some programs that lead to decent housing without taking away clients' freedoms too much. I worked for one once, a very nice supportive housing residence owned by the Bridge, Inc. Such a place might be right for Blanket Man, but I don't know how he'd end up there from where he is now.

He is supposedly being followed by an outpatient clinic, so either he is waiting for housing, no attempts have been made, or he has refused an offer to be in a housing program. For whatever reason, he remains homeless. It may be that he does not want to be in a program, but there is no other way for him to get housing in the City. Some would say this is bad judgment. I think it involves risk-taking to give up your freedom to an agency, even a good one. Ultimately, the choice is his.