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According to police documents, an officer field booked a man with the same first and last name as Eddie for urinating in public on Devine Street only a few days ago. The incident is published in our crime report this week. Eddie denied the charge.

Liquor, wine and beer

By Corey Hutchins

“Liquor, wine and beer.”

That pretty much sums up 56-year-old Eddie a.k.a “Rockbottom,” who City Paper met this week waiting for a bus after dark outside the Food Lion on Harden Street. “Liquor, wine and beer, that’s me,” he said.

Dressed in a tattered, dirty sand-colored jacket and wearing a brand new baseball cap pulled over his bushy hair and long scraggly beard, Eddie said he’d been on the streets for about nine years but hadn’t had a drink in two weeks.

“I haven’t had any damn money to buy none,” he said. “I definitely ain’t gonna steal none, tell you what.”

Eddie looks like he might as well be a permanent fixture in the bus stop and when he speaks his mouth opens to expose a set of crumbling yellow teeth. His eyes open a close looking like two jagged potholes filled with spoiled milk. He sits on the wooden bench swaying from side to side as if he’ll tip over and spill out into the street at any moment. The air inside the terminal smells like a sour mix of urine and booze.

According to police documents, an officer field booked a man with the same first and last name as Eddie for urinating in public on Devine Street only a few days ago. The incident is published in our crime report this week. Eddie denied the charge.

Eddie said he doesn’t do drugs and doesn’t act crazy. Others, he said, certainly do.

“People actin’ a fool. Shooting. Actin’ a fool,” he said about what he’s seen on the streets near Five Points in just the past couple of weeks.

“Cuttin’ up a damn woman. That the only thing there be about a fight down here, be about a damn woman,” he said. “They get down to smokin’ and drinkin’ and that’s when you get in trouble about the damn women and that’s when the fightin’ starts.”

While denying the public urination charge, Eddie said he has been arrested in the past while on the streets of Columbia. When pressed on what the charges were, he said, “Whatever they accuse you of,” and then broke it down:

“They come up and ask you, say ‘you had anything to drink today?’ Hell, you don’t even have to be damn drunk, say ‘Yeah, I had something to drink.’ [Then the police say] ‘Well I’m gonna have to take you to jail tonight.’” When asked if Eddie he thinks the cops treat him fairly he said, “Shit no,” and also said he’d been abused in the past.

“They charge you for a damn thing you ain’t never damn done,” he said. “Anything they want to accuse you of. OK, you fuck around long enough they’ll run up on you, you’ll see.”

When asked where he’s going to stay tonight, Eddie looks up over the closed-up, decrepit buildings across the street and waves his hand through the air.

“That big ol’ ass goddamn park right there that’s where the hell I’m gonna stay.”