He ambled half-naked down the middle of a main road, with long white whiskers and bushy white hair blowing away from his weatherworn face.

“They call me Santa Claus,” he said, and he does indeed share a resemblance, though he’s an inner-city Santa, with a shopping cart full of rusting scrap metal in place of a sleigh.

His name is Harold Ogburn, on-and-off Detroiter, who on a sweltering day was on his way to a scrapyard to cash in his haul. He figured he had about $70 worth of metal collected. Cars swerved around him. His dirty shorts were soaked with something. He didn’t care.

Despite his appearance, he wanted it known that he is neither deranged nor homeless. “Hell, no” he spat when asked. “I live on Cadillac. Retired, man. Retired from construction. Eighty-five years old.”

He doesn’t need to scrap, he insisted. He does it out of boredom. “Hey, somethin’ to do, man,” he said. “I don’t like sittin’ around. Pick up a piece here, a piece there, pick up the cans. I don’t go around looking for it. I see it, I just pick it up, that’s all.”

He was born in the coal fields of West Virginia, he said, and he’s still got a mountain accent to prove it. He served in the military in Korea, came to Detroit, then went to New York to find work. “I worked 42 years in construction,” he said. “Those buildings they ran the airplanes into, I worked them 11 years. I have a picture of me putting the last piece of steel in place on the North Tower.”

He came back to Detroit 13 years ago, and lives with his brother on a run-down part of Cadillac Avenue. “Ain’t no neighborhood,” he said. “There’s fields, quite a few houses, but the houses are falling apart. No use fixing these houses up, they’ve got these all deteriorated inside. Knock ‘em down.”

Despite his age, he’s a tough guy. “I carry six brothers with me,” he said, referring to his gun. “I got six brothers in my pocket when I go out, and I will use it too. One guy tried to rob me right in front of my house two winters ago, shit, he had an automatic at my shoulder, I reached down and grabbed it like that, I beat the dogshit out of him and put him in a garbage can. He was a young fella, maybe in his late 20s, early 30s. I don’t take no shit out of nobody.”

After dropping off the scrap, shopping cart and all, he planned to take the bus back home.

“Gonna have a nice cold beer, go down to my basement, take me a shower, go in the backyard, stretch out, smoke me a cigarette, drink me a nice cold quart of beer, then I get ready to go to bed, watch channel 31, Friday night fights. I watch the fights.” He peered down the long road, politely excused himself and slowly pushed the cart forward, a couple miles still to go.