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“The thing is,” he says in a jangly accent through a mouthful of teeth that looks like string of busted fence posts, “it’s illegal to do what I’m doin’…

It’s 2:30 in the afternoon and 89 degrees on the corner of Huger and Hampton streets where 49-year-old Wayne, a homeless man who’s been on the streets of Columbia for five years, sits on a fire hydrant next a patch of burned grass. He’s holding a sign that reads, “Homeless change please help,” in sloppy lettering scribbled with harsh strokes in dark blue pen.

“Direct [and] to the point,” Wayne says tapping the folded sign and wandering over to the shade of a large tree to talk with City Paper about his current situation.

“The thing is,” he says in a jangly accent through a mouthful of teeth that looks like string of busted fence posts, “it’s illegal to do what I’m doin’ but I feel like it’s better than taking from somebody. You know I, I, I… I radder axe. You know I don’t feel like I’m doin’ nothing wrong by asking cuz the people got a choice. They either give [to you] or they don’t have to give.”

Wayne, an extremely skinny black man of average height, is dressed in a blue T-shirt that hangs off him as if his body were a wire coat hanger. His tight black jeans are splattered with paint and so are both his hands. A thick, curly black beard full of white whiskers pokes from his face like a handful of speaker wire. When he talks his breath reeks of stale alcohol. The whites of his eyes look like yellow cottage cheese.

Sitting on the fire hydrant with his sign facing toward the street, cars stopped at the light honk and call him over. Drivers wave dollar bills or handfuls of change. On an average day Wayne can make $40 in two hours on the street corner without every verbally asking for it. He’ll say Thank You though and he’ll nod his head up and down. “Thank you, sir. Thank you, ma’am. Thank you.”

Unlike the aggressive pan handling of the Five Points and Vista crowd all Wayne says he has to do is sit back and let his cardboard sign do the work for him.

“The sign doin’ the talking and they got a choice,” he says. “They can keep on ridin’. I’m not twistin’ nobody’s arm.”

Wayne has been homeless in Columbia since 2002 when a string of misdemeanor charges added up and eventually financially crippled him to the point where he couldn’t keep up a stable living situation.

“Public drunk here; public drunk there,” he says about his run-ins with the law. “And then it built up and then it’s hard to get a job. Then nobody wants to hire you because you got a record. You can’t hold what a man did before 10 years ago against him all the time.”

As for the statute of limitations you’d expect Wayne would have learned his lesson by now but he still hits the bottle hard. Even though it’s Sunday his speech is slurred and he smells like a week-old keg tap. And he admits it too. And there is, of course, a reason.

“I drink a lot,” he says. “If I didn’t drink I wouldn’t be able to cope. I wouldn’t be able to cope with my situation.”

Wayne has a dusty backpack that sits on the ground next to him and it’s anybody’s guess as to what he’s got inside. For Wayne alcohol doesn’t make his problems go away but it sure helps. It dulls the sharp pain of worry that haunts him all day long about where he’s going to lay his head at night. Most of the time, he says, it’s just wherever he wants to.

“It’s hard. Ain’t got no shelters,” he says. “Every night when you try to lay your head down you got to worry about the police. You got to worry about the people on the street. And you know during the summer you gotta worry about he insects and everything and during the winter you gotta worry about keeping warm.”

As for life on the Columbia concrete he says it doesn’t get too crazy. He keeps to himself and doesn’t wander in a crowd or buddy up. It’s his own journey and he’s going to get through it by himself. Just him and his sign.

As Wayne is explaining how he likes it better alone a gray Cadillac sedan pulls up to the red light and toots the horn several times. Wayne runs up to it and a tinted window lowers to a blast of air conditioning and the driver, a black man in a dress shirt, hands over some folded-up bills.

Wayne nods and says Thanks. The lights turns and the driver speeds off and Wayne takes up his seat again on the fire hydrant, his baseball cap shielding the sun from his eyes, his “Homeless change please help” sign pointed toward the road.