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Take a seat on a park bench — if you can find one — and listen to the stories of Jack Fuquay and Soapy.

Fuquay was for real. He and his homeless buddies — all without roofs by choice — tormented police and merchants for decades on Greensboro’s Hamburger Square.

Fuquay was not a bookish man, but one can’t help wondering if he read “The Cop and the Anthem,” a short story written in the early 1900s by former Greensboro resident William Sidney Porter, better known as O. Henry.

The story was about “Soapy,” a homeless man who spent most of his days on a bench in New York’s Madison Square.

As winter approached, Soapy decided to get himself arrested to enjoy the warmth of a jail cell for three months. Getting arrested had always been easy for him.

Darn it. He couldn’t get collared this time. He enjoyed a meal at an expensive restaurant and declared, in O. Henry’s word, “insolvency” when the check arrived. But instead of calling police, the waiters tossed Soapy into the street.

Next, he busted a window with a rock. The police officer who investigated refused to believe Soapy was the culprit. What fool would break a window and then linger, the officer surmised.

A saddened Soapy straggled back to Madison Square and prepared for a winter on the bench. Suddenly, he heard beautiful music from a nearby church. The sounds inspired him. He vowed to clean himself up, get a job and forsake his drunken ways.

At that moment, just as Soapy was deciding to turn his life around, a policeman slapped him on the shoulder. He charged Soapy with loitering on a park bench and hauled him away to jail.

During the 1970s and before, Jack Fuquay and his friends made themselves at home on the benches that were once plentiful in the two small parks next to Hamburger Square, at the corner of South Elm and McGee streets.

They’d pass out day and night on the benches. Merchants complained. They feared those ragamuffins would scare customers away.

The city removed the benches. Phil Coleman, who owned the Weathervane, an antique-hardware business on the square, remembers protesters showing up to demonstrate for the rights of the bench-sitters. The city wouldn’t budge. The benches stayed gone for years.

Jump forward to the present. The city recently installed and then removed five benches, created by an artist and paid for by Action Greensboro, along the Downtown Greenway in the Warnersville community.

The city was responding to complaints about prostitutes, drug dealers and other undesirables occupying the benches. In a repeat of history, there was a protest of the removal.

Thirty years earlier, Fuquay and friends adjusted to the loss of benches by flopping on the grass in the parks. Coleman, whose former building now houses Natty Greene’s Pub and Brewing Co., let them sleep in the winter under a loading dock in an alley that ran behind his building.

The Weathervane occupied the northeast corner of Hamburger Square. The name Hamburger Square isn’t heard much anymore. It came from two food joints, Jim’s Lunch and California Sandwich Shop, being on two corners. The hamburgers and hot dogs were good and greasy, the beer cold and the fracases frequent.

The square’s rowdiness, or its reputation for being so, kept polite society away. Now, with new restaurants, condos, apartments and upscale shops, the square has moved into the mainstream. Newcomers to the city look puzzled when old-timers refer to the area as Hamburger Square.

Jack Fuquay had run-ins with the management of Jim’s Lunch and once took a crowbar to the establishment’s plate-glass windows. But Coleman says Fuquay was no trouble if treated respectfully.

He deserved respect. He had served his country in the Army from 1944 to 1948, and was one of 17 children in a family who loved him and wanted to care for him. He refused that help.

Coleman’s favorite story revolves around Fuquay’s always aching stomach. Coleman and his wife, Nixie, would give Fuquay money to buy milk, which eased his pain.

They say Fuquay always returned with the milk to show he hadn’t bought wine instead.

Fuquay’s resemblance to Soapy came when a bellyache became so severe that Fuquay decided he must get arrested. That would lead to free medical treatment in jail.

As Phil Coleman remembers the episode, Fuquay first went to the Woolworth dime store on South Elm and shoplifted noisily and in broad daylight. He walked out with stolen goods, and no one pursued.

He returned to the square and broke a window. No one called a police officer.

So Fuquay sought out an officer himself. He asked: “What do you have to do in this town to get arrested, slug a cop?” And that’s what Fuquay did, decking the officer. Fuquay got his medical treatment.

Coleman says Fuquay always looked great after three months at the county prison farm, where he ate three squares a day, slept in a bunk, soaked up sunshine and stayed free of alcohol.

Once back on the square, however, Coleman said, Fuquay soon could be found passed out. One time, he was wearing a suit that Coleman and other merchants had rounded up for him to wear to the funeral of a respected grocer, Fuquay’s brother.

Fuquay died in 1992 at age 65, in the restroom of the county courthouse.

There was strategy in Coleman’s decision to allow Fuquay and his friends to sleep under the loading dock. They became a burglar alarm system. One night, an intruder tried to enter Coleman’s business.

Fuquay rummaged through his pockets but could not find a dime to call police. Instead, he pulled the lever on a fire alarm box. Soon firetrucks, followed by police, were swarming over the area.

“Jack was kind of a character,” Coleman says. “We really weren’t afraid of him and his friends.

“They were humans just like us.”

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net