SANTA CRUZ — A decade ago, there was no more popular topic of conversation in downtown Santa Cruz than the Pink Umbrella Man. Around the time that all of those “Keep Santa Cruz Weird” bumper stickers starting showing up, a middle-aged man appeared on Pacific Avenue in heavy make-up, dressed in a flowery, luridly pink get-up like a Florida vacationer in a David Lynch movie.

There were two other things you noticed about him: 1) though he was constantly smiling and making eye contact with everyone he passed, he never spoke and 2) he walked in maddeningly slow baby steps everywhere he went, even in crosswalks under the glare of perturbed drivers.

The Pink Umbrella Man took his slow walk down Pacific every single day over the course of several years until one day he vanished, never to return. The fact he was unvarying in his routine and kept his mouth shut made him a kind of walking Rorschach test. The chatter on the street often told you less about Robert Steffen — the man under all that pink — than it did about those talking about him. To some, he was a sunny delight. To others, a tolerable annoyance. To still others, a creepy nutjob.

Though the Pink Umbrella Man social experiment is now a thing of the past, Steffen is still alive, still in Santa Cruz, still walking every day. His daily route is different — he’s a regular on the Wharf and West Cliff Drive now. He’s less pink than he used to be. His strides are normal, and he’s quite pleased to engage in conversation.

“Almost daily, people will say, ‘I haven’t seen you in years,’” said Steffen, enjoying a cup of green tea at the Ideal Bar & Grill. “They’re surprised to see me because they thought I had disappeared.”

These days, he’s not the mystery that he was in his baby-stepping years.

“The interactions with people are quite a bit different now,” he said. “On Pacific Avenue, I was more of an object. People would project a lot more.”

For a guy whose sole aim was only to spread a little happiness, there’s not a ton of happiness in Robert Steffen’s story. Once a promising electrical engineer, he has struggled with mental illness including crippling depression for years. He’s been homeless for extended periods twice. While doing the Pink Umbrella Man, he was subject to all kinds of pranks, hostility, verbal abuse, even physical assault. For as many people who find him endearing, others find threatening, or a just an easy target for harassment.

Steffen grew up in a military family, moving around a lot. He attended college in upstate New York, and landed a job at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View. He pursued art in his free time, but still contentment eluded him, until something cracked, and he walked away from it all.

He first showed up on Pacific Avenue in 1999, not as the Pink Umbrella Man, but as the Black Plastic Bag Guy. Homeless at the time, he sat on a bench under a plastic bag, hanging a sign on his shopping cart reminding people he was running for president.

He said the plastic bag thing was a coping mechanism.

“It was a way to give myself some space, some freedom. Being homeless there is no place to go to retreat to. You’re continuously exposed to other people, which is a problem because there are people who will go after you even when you sleep. Even being completely non-threatening, there are people who feel that your very existence is anathema.”

Eventually, he got a room at the Palomar Inn. That’s when Pink Umbrella Man was born. Besides an urge to brighten people’s day and to keep his own interior demons at bay, he said that the persona was an effort to test people’s tolerance for personal freedoms by subverting social norms in everything from how people dress to strangers making eye contact in public.

“People need to be more open to the ways of others,” he said. “As long as people are nonviolent, they should be able to do anything they want. Basically, the model to me is children playing. As long as they’re not hurting anyone, let them do it.”

As the Pink Umbrella Man, Steffen has probably been subject to more random human cruelty than most of us — from kids throwing rocks at him, to adults assaulting him. Still, what does it say about a man who has endured all that and still feels the need to engage the public every day?

“Where else in the world can one go to find a population of people so completely accepting of others?” Steffen said of his love of Santa Cruz, despite all the ups and downs. “Tell me where it is, and I’ll move there.”

Getting to Know Robert Steffen

Home: Santa Cruz

Claim to fame: The Pink Umbrella Man, a well-known presence on Pacific Avenue for several years during the 2000s.

Today: Steffen still walks every day, this time along the Wharf and West Cliff Drive, engaging tourists and locals in conversation.

Originally from: Born in Las Vegas, but moved around with his military family to Japan, Texas and California.

Background: Graduated as an electrical engineer from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. Worked as an IT specialist at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, and part time in other capacities.

Free time: He likes to read about scientific advances, and is also a fan of young-adult fiction and fantasy on audiobooks.

His message: ‘I want people to live in a brighter, lighter world. And to be free. We are all gray matter in these colorful boxes. We all have brains, that’s what unites us. Why are we always making such a distinction about the outer outfit?’