Moxie's Pops on Kafka & The Homeless

My dad was in the city a few weeks ago. We met for a lovely, very old-New-York dinner at El Quijote, and then sent dad up 8th avenue to walk off the Sangria before heading home to NJ. He reported back about his adventures on that walk, which I've pasted for you below. To get the full picture, one must picture the speaker as an eccentric, greying psychoanalyst for whom this event would be one of the highlights of his whole year.

Over last weekend I was in Manhattan, walking along 9th and 24th, and a homeless guy approached me, with hair out a foot on either side of his head, seriously raggedy clothes, big leather boots all scuffed up, and he stared deeply into my eyes and shouted: "Kafka, Kafka, Kafka ... Fuck Kafka ... Fuck Fuck Fuck!" I wanted to follow him, discreetly, check him out, find out why he was cursing at Kafka. I wondered: why would a homeless guy be shouting these things?

I thought about Kafka, whose literature I read in my German classes decades ago. Kafka was an annihilated soul, and his stories and novels are filled with images of his own annihilation, for example, the vision of Gregor Samsa being turned into a giant, horrid bug in The Metamorphosis. He was obliterated by his family, especially his narcissistic, overpowering, invalidating father, and he recorded the violence he suffered in the symbols of his writings. But he asked a friend to please burn all his texts after he died, and his friend did not oblige him.

I was thinking the angry homeless guy was the reincarnated spirit of Kafka himself, furious at seeing his work having been turned into an industry, at being assigned as required reading in German classes like the ones I took. He was angry at the publically famous name, "Kafka," when it was his heart's desire that all his writings be destroyed, as he was. So no wonder the poor guy was yelling and cursing at me. Once I realized what was going on, I no longer needed to follow the poor fellow. But it is kind of neat that I ran into Franz Kafka in New York City.

Photo of Eighth Avenue courtesy of EKH via flickr.