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“It looked like a monster. Like a monster movie but it wasn’t a movie,” he says. “I was just looking at his face, I was so shocked. It had eyes and a nose and ears [pointed] this way and a thing sticking up, you know. It looked like a gargoyle. I wasn’t on drugs.” When the spaceship touched down Dreadlock tried to run to catch it to see what it was. But “it didn’t pay [him] no mind.”

By Corey Hutchins

It’s quarter to 10 on a balmy spring evening when City Paper catches up with a man known as “Dreadlock” as he picks through a to-go box and sits on the steps of the newly built homeless shelter in the Vista. Problem: the shelter has just closed for the spring.

This is the first Dreadlock’s heard of the closing and now he’s not too sure where he’s going to sleep tonight. A massive black man with burning red eyes, a short, bushy, white afro and a gargantuan build all stuffed into a dirty denim jumpsuit, it’ll be heard for him to curl up under a bench or shrubbery to escape police search lights in the park. If the shelter were open, he says, he’d be in there watching TV, chilling out, and able to get a bite to eat or a glass of water. Not now. Now he’s on the street.

It was about 19 months ago that a neighbor’s house caught fire and burned down reducing Dreadlock’s home to a pile of ashes right along with it. He’s tried programs to help him get back on his feet but he admits it’s hard to navigate the bureaucracy of it all.

“It ain’t what you think,” he says, his teeth clicking and grinding back and forth, an excruciatingly audible nervous tic. “It’s hard to concentrate on it.” When Dreadlock speaks it seems merely a pause between those tics. He grinds his large teeth so loudly it may explain what happened to the ones that now only act as gaping holes in his smile.

He’d get a job, or he’d try to, but since he’s been homeless he’s gotten “kinda sprung” by a sickness he picked up on the street, one that sent him to the hospital. For him, the hardest part of being out there is keeping himself cleaned up, but not in the rehabilitation sense, just his physical appearance.

And as for the police: “Well if you ain’t really doin’ nothing wrong; if you ain’t doin’ no foul language or drinking or anything they kind of don’t pay too much attention.”

While Dreadlock, who says he’s in his late 30s but looks much older, says he’s seen a lot of crazy things happen while being a ubiquitous observer of Columbia’s late-night goings on, one in particular recently shocked him to the core. It wasn’t the fights he’s seen started by drunken college kids or boozed-up politicians rolling around on the ground outside Oyster Bar. It wasn’t the time he saw some crazed lunatic break into a restaurant looking for money. It was something else entirely. Something he saw just a few weeks ago.

“I seen something called a UFO,” he says, those teeth clicking and grinding away. “You ever heard of that?”

This wasn’t your ordinary light streaking across the sky, either, and Dreadlock says he wasn’t on drugs at the time. Besides, he know these things exist out there because, well, he’s seen them in Weekly World News and the National Inquirer, he says.