WASHINGTON -- The shoeshine boy was no boy; he was 55. He was kneeling in front of me on the sidewalk of 4th Street Northwest, outside the District of Columbia courthouse, wearing a black ball cap with embroidery on it that read "Once A Marine" on one side and "Always A Marine" on the other.
"A guy passed by one day and started heckling me," the man in the cap was saying. "He said, 'You out here shinin' the white man's shoes? I told him, 'This is my business. I'm making five dollars. What are you making?' "
"Look behind me," he said to me LED Flexible Strip Neon Series Neon 335 now. "There's no chain and anchor."
It was warm for December, mild enough for a long walk through a small world. The man on his knees told me he also grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., and soon I learned he had gone to the same high school my father attended in the 1920s, after being thrown out of another academy for pulling a .22 on a couple of classmates. That was Eddy with the gun, not my dad.
Sitting there while he worked on my lace-ups, I started humming an old Johnny Cash tune: "Little shoeshine boy, he never gets low-down, but he's got the dirtiest job in town..."
Eddy Bennett pulled me up short.
"I was on 13 medications," he said, "but now I got it down to seven."
The ball cap didn't lie. Eddy Bennett -- "No relation to Tony" -- had indeed come home from service in Lebanon and Vietnam in the '70s, scarred outside and in.
He showed me the dimple in his chin where the shrapnel bored through and tore his teeth apart and he told me about the drugs and the counseling that were designed to patch him together through the worst days of a broken life.
"I'm an ex-Marine," he smiled. "No such animal. I'm a Marine."
Eddy Bennett said he was sleeping in a shelter near the Capitol dome because he didn't want to burden his mother, up in the Maryland suburbs. He was collecting a pension of $980 a month as a "75 per cent disabled" veteran and earning a few more dollars shining shoes every weekday outside the courthouse, which teemed today, as it always did, with the overwhelmed underclass of this classic city.
"Some of them go in crying and come out laughing," said the shoeshine man, "and some of them, it's the other way around."
We were only four blocks from the halls of Congress, yet perched in a part of the capital that school groups and tourists -- and the Congressmen -- rarely see.
On a little table, Eddy Bennett had arranged the Holy Bible, a big bottle of cranberry-pomegranate juice -- "I'm cleaning out my insides" -- and a copy of one of those newspapers they give out free on the subway. The big black headline read OBAMA'S WAR.
"That's right, that's right," Eddy Bennett said. "It's his war now."
"How is he doing?" I asked, a year after there was dancing in these streets.
"He's becoming a Republican," said the shoeshine man. "He's got too much on his plate, he's not getting a full meal. He takes a bite, but he's not digesting."
"When he was elected," I asked, "did you really think he'd change anything?"
The shoeshine man touched the skin of his wrist as if trying to rub off the colour.
"Nah," he said. "This still America."
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