neighbors. None of his acquaintances can imagine him entertaining familial or romantic attachments of any sort.

Bogart and Man-man are enigmas to their friends and neighbors on Miguel Street. In fact, Bogart is so eccentric that he disappears twice without satisfactory explanations for his absence. When he returns after his first absence, he tells his friends that he had gone to British Guiana and had eventually become a cowboy of sorts. He also claimed to have smuggled some girls from Brazil to Georgetown in order to start a brothel. Bogart maintains that he was eventually betrayed by the police and arrested. When Eddoes questions whether Bogart had ended up in jail, Hat contemptuously replies that Bogart couldn't have landed in jail if he was still with them. For some reason, Bogart takes offense at Hat's comment.

From then on, Bogart's predilection for alcohol, gambling, and cursing becomes part of his newly aggressive temperament and the men begin to fear him. Like Bogart, Man-man also has a reputation for being a dangerous man to tangle with.  As a dog owner, Man-man is strangely obsessed with his black and white mongrel dog; he considers any insult to dogs an insult to him. So it is that when a cafe owner makes Man-man leave his shop for barking like a dog, Man-man gets his revenge by leaving dog feces on the counters, stools, and tables in the cafe. On another occasion, he sullies some of his neighbors' clean sheets by smearing them with dog feces. 

The one difference between Man-man and Bogart lies in how each man approaches loss and conflict. Bogart decides to flee when he is forced to marry the girl he has impregnated. Basically, he flouts conventions and rebels, while Man-man suddenly becomes deeply religious after the death of his beloved dog. Before long, Man-man can be seen sporting a bible and surrounding himself with religious paraphernalia; he also starts preaching to strangers. Imagining himself a Messiah, he makes known to everyone that he will be crucified at the Blue Basin, in a location northwest of the Port of Spain. Man-man reenacts the stations of the cross and imagines himself a Christ figure.

The people initially start pelting him with stones and pebbles, which elicit from Man-man a benign Christ-like prayer for forgiveness for his 'tormentors.' However, when some begin to pelt him with bigger rocks, Man-man suddenly changes his tune. He begins to curse so loudly that his audience freezes in mesmerized shock. Police officers eventually take Man-man away and the story ends on an ominous note; the narrator states that the authorities eventually 'kept him for observation...for good.'

So, while both men are mercurial and eccentric, both resort to diametrically opposed actions in response to loss and conflict.