Fact or fiction?

I used to work in San Francisco in an office that was actually an old Victorian house, in the Inner Sunset District, if you know the city. It was right on the N-Judah streetcar route, so the nearby corner attracted a lot of interesting humans. One of them took to sitting on our front steps every day for extended periods, muttering to himself and occasionally shouting rude things to passersby. (He turned out to be the mayor [no, not true].) We tried to be nice to him, to keep him on our good side, but he was basically a smelly homeless man who was using our house as a panhandling station.

Imagine our amazement when we discovered that when he got up from the steps, he left a moist brown stain behind. His sky blue sweatpants were soiled with Hershey’s Syrup… or something.

I was the manager of the office group, so it fell to me to tell him he couldn’t sit there anymore. I went out to ask him to leave one day, and he got angry. Expletives abounded. I was a little afraid of what he might do, but suddenly he stopped his tirade and asked me, “What’s your name?”

If it pacifies him, I thought, what difference does it make if he knows my name? I’d take the chance. “Kevin,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“George,” he said. “George Brennan.”

A cold lightning bolt went down my spine. I recovered enough, quickly enough, that I didn’t tell him my name was Brennan too. Instead, I said, “Well, George, I’m really sorry, but you can’t sit here anymore. It’s an insurance thing.”

“Bullshit,” he said, but he walked away, leaving his usual damp stain. (It was kind of in the shape of a heart.) I went in to get a bucket of Mr. Clean water and the mop we’d dedicated to this single task, but that was the last we’d see of George Brennan.

Fact or fiction?

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