I wait all day and into the evening and don’t receive a call
to come into work the following day, which isn’t great financially speaking.
Having not been called in the day of I listed things for sale; things of minor
value that I don’t care about like a skateboard and a baritone ukulele. It’s
past ten, the cutoff for calls, and I head out to a liquor store.
Earlier in the day I thought of all the times I’ve been out
in city streets, drunk and young, feeling like violent crime was some Hollywood
hype. It seemed hardly less than legendary, and I watched out for it like comic
book fiction. I’d been in fights, they were all white privilege, weekend fist
fights. I’ve never had a weapon pulled on me and I had never been attacked for
money. I’m surprised, considering all of the stupid situations I’ve put myself
into.
Now I’m imagining the reality of real violence. It might
just be another thing that comes with traveling the path of age and getting a
closer view of your mortality. I pull into an empty parking lot, and I vaguely
see a guy with a spray bottle sitting on the side of a curb. I don’t feel
alarmed at all, but I get an odd sensation of my present scenario and think how
this must be the token “other” character present for the situation. The cue for
us to speak is going to happen when I come back to my car.
There is no reason to feel threatened by this character, and
I don’t know how I know these things, but I know. Still, I sense his thoughts
directed toward me, even with his head turned away. I consciously sink into a
leisurely rhythm as I turn and shut my car door, if only to draw my attention
back to myself.
I go inside and buy a pack of three tall rather than a
twelve pack to avoid breaking a twenty. Spending singles feels less like
spending money and more along the lines of getting rid of the coins on the
floor of your car. I even cash in a two dollar scratcher: one that I have and
don’t know where it came from.
I step outside and I hear a gravelly voice call out to me,
“hey man”. I look in the direction and it’s the guy with the spray bottle. He
has piercing blue and almost bulging desperate eyes “Look I’m not homeless,” he
pleads in his approach, “I’m a disabled veteran, my name is…” and I forget his
name. He puts out his hand to shake mine and I look down and see so much
discoloration that I don’t know what colors are his skin and what colors are
the shit his skin touched. I’ve shared a beer with a homeless bum six years
before, but I was drunk at the time. Though still, the man just wants to shake
my hand, and so, on the surface, I don’t skip a beat. I reach out and shake his
hand and feel that it’s dry. He goes on with what might be a schpeel.
“My wife and I have
an apartment we’re waiting to get into and I got a job, but my wife just had
her appendix removed and we’re trying to get into a motel tonight,” He looks
like he’s emotionally pained to say all of this. “Look man, I hate being out
here, but can I please wash your windows for you or something?”
“Aww, you don’t have to wash my windows. I’m on a budget
myself,” I say as I open my door and set my beers on the seat, “but I can give
you a dollar.”
“Ah, man. You rock,” he rejoices. I feel sick with the
amount of joy that flooded his voice as I agreed to give him a dollar. I’m
upset with myself that I’m not willing to give him more and that he’s so
satisfied with what is just a token of generosity. While a dollar might be
worth shit, the memory of the paper one dollar bill being a worthwhile monetary
milestone still sort of lingers on. I certainly wasn’t trying to appear
generous, but I was trying to trick myself into thinking I hadn’t turned my
back on him. Maybe he subconsciously knew that it was all an exchange of
tokens, and that the dollar really only represented the fact that I didn’t want
to say no to him.
In times like this I imagine people I know, even family
members, and think of what they might say this guy really needed the money for.
I also start to wonder where my cynicism goes when I’m confronted by someone
like this. I think of how plausible it is that this guy has a totally different
situation than the one he pitched to me, but the vibe I picked up from him
detailed the sincerity of his claims. I kind of think that, maybe he was lying
to me on the surface, but that the desperation of whatever he needed was along
the lines of that sort of urgency, and that I’d only understand if he could
speak in universal textures.
His story sort of
goes like this. He has a wife that he’s trying to help, so he isn’t selfish and
someone cares about him. He doesn’t have a place to sleep, but it’s temporary,
so he can’t be identified with a homeless lifestyle that would isolate him from
humanity. I guess that’s the extent of my cynicism when I try to think of how
the guy might be a liar. The guy might be living the life of hardship and pain
that he explained to me or he went to great lengths to bridge the gap to
another one. Either way, all I gave him was a dollar.
“You don’t know what this means man,” he expresses, “I mean,
when it rains it pours.”
“I know man. I really hope things start going better for
you, seriously.”
I meant it when I wished him well, though I don’t know what
it’s like to have it rain and pour like him. I think it’s weird that everyone
wants to equate their pain to “The pain”. It just isn’t true. Some people never
feel pain like others, and you’ll never know in the instance of having the pain
inflicted on you, you’ll only know in the measure of frequency you have to
leave the pain behind with a steady state of mind.
I drive back the short mile back to my house and think about
this guy and how I’m going to write about him, and I think about whether or not
I’m treating life with sincerity. I think about the two dollar scratcher
bestowed upon me and the one dollar whim I gave to the man, and what that says
about me. I think about the beers I’m about to drink, and the warm made bed I
get to sleep in when I get home. When I get home, and see my healthy wife that
I love so much.
I look about my house and I see an aircraft leaving the
nearby airport. It’s lights are yellow and green, and they twist in a way that
defies the direction that the aircraft is moving. I think about life on other
planets, and I believe that it exists, but because I’ll never get there, it
seems like nothing more than a very good tale.
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