Whenever I write and I find things go…less than admirably….I find myself walking. Most often I walk the twelve blocks to 39th Avenue, thinking, and muttering to myself. I work through snatches of dialog, plan out sequences of events, and once I’m at 39th it’s a simple matter to turn north, walk two more blocks, and pick up some groceries from the Safeway.
Three days ago I took the trip, picking up a rasher of bacon and some tortillas. I paid with plastic and caught the bus back home, being too lazy to walk, my head too full of ideas. I was thinking about giant monsters, scientists and the way the afternoon light fell flat as a flapjack on my neighborhood’s sidewalks.
I found a homeless man sitting outside my house. Right outside, on the treated wood planter the keeps the English ivy from swallowing the sidewalks and rampaging, in a very prim, proper, English way, down the road.
He word red and black plaid—a long sleeve shirt I’m sure feels much colder in the dead of night when one is sleeping on the ground—and faded pants, once black, now as gray as the hair sprouting from his head and beard. “Excuse me, man,” he asked. “You have a quarter?”
I’m not afraid to say I lied. Of course I lied. I lied to him as surely as I lie to his kith and kin downtown who regularly troll through the human sea of commuters, asking similar questions. At times I think the only upside to my not smoking (other than the decreased risk of catching every form of cancer not caused by the sun) is the ability to tell those homeless that, honestly, no, I don’t have an “extra” cigarette. Even when I, theoretically, did I bought them all for myself and was never in a mood to share. I don’t believe in assisted suicide when doing so is inconvenient.
It’s a simple thing, lying to the homeless. Practice awhile and it’s as easy as slipping on shoes. So easy it becomes an autonomic response, as it has for members of my class from time out of mind.
“No,” I said, adding, “I’m sorry,” though I was not. I was thinking, Shit, man, I’m not doing so well, myself.
Except that was a self-severing lie, and I can’t lie to myself. I caught myself before I even made it the twenty-plus steps to my doorway. As I put my food into the ‘fridge I peeled off the layers of my lie until it stood naked in my mind and shivered.
After all, I thought, you’re miles from that man out there. That man who’s out there, not fifty feet away, wearing all the clothing he owns. Who sleeps on wet grass when he can find it and hard concrete when he can’t. Who’s come to here, to this neighborhood, in search of peace, out of some vain and fleeting hope he’ll be unnoticed by the policemen. As if the police in my ‘hood were some mystical, benign sub-species that doesn’t get drunk on its own power, that doesn’t rouse you out of concrete sleep to present you with the immortal choice of, “Move it, or loose it.”
I looked at my ‘fridge. Dirty, sure. A little light on the protein, but stocked, running. Humming blithely along, putting paid to my lie and shaming me into action.
I peaked into my wallet, thinking, Is this how Bruce Wayne feels? Five, six, seven, eight dollars total. No, I thought, Bruce Wayne is moved by grief and honest-to-God compassion. If there’s any guilt moving his hands it’s the gnawing, niggling guilt of plane crash and earthquake survivors. Not at all what I felt as I stood in my kitchen and counted my money again.
—Eight dollars, my mind said. —Great. Why not just escort Mr. Red-and-Black to the nearest ATM, pass him your card and say, “Have at it”? It’ll do more good. Or just as much, considering the old bird’s probably drunk. Or insane. You see that brown paper bag next to his feet?
I had. But at that moment I didn’t care. I put my money in my pocket and stepped back outside. These are the moments, I thought. When the wolf is at your door that you have to stand and see what you’re really made of. And you have to be honest with yourself. Talk is cheep if you’re not prepared to walk the walk of the honest, the just and the damned.
—Which one are you? My head asked. I didn’t know, and that vaguely frightened me as I walked down the parking lot and turned left.
Mr. Red-and-Black was gone. Phlegm and the brown paper bag were all that marked his passage.
—Too late, too late, my head told me. At times I think of this as my Joker voice. We’re connected, that voice and I, like comedy and tragedy. It derives comedic pleasure from my occasional tragedies.
I turned right and there he was, shuffling up the block, past the Japanese restaurant and its neighboring bar. Past the once-thriving Korean market that’s now a hollow, boarded up shell, to the grass and sidewalks of the next block. There he half-sank, half-fell to the grass in an apparent dead faint.
—Or stupor? I nodded. Or stupor. Big deal. Because you can mouth pretensions of charity until the vaults of heaven fall down. As the dead rock star once asked, who needs action when you’ve got words?
I do. And so I shook the homeless man’s shoulder. “Man. Hey, man.”
It took three shakes before his gray, watery eyes fluttered open. “This is all I had on hand,” I told him, slipping the money into a dirty, yellow-nailed hand. “But you better move on, yo. Some of my neighbors aren’t as…gracious as the rest of us.”
Mr. Red-and-Black blinked twice and his eyes were the color of cataracts. “Sorry,” he half-muttered, speaking through nubs of teeth and a tongue as red as the checker board on his shirt.
I shook this off and turned away. No, no sorry necessary. Hell, I’m sorry I keep blinking whenever I come face of face with poverty. Real, honest to god poverty of the kind you can rarely find in the woody creeks that birthed me. I’m sorry I cannot do more. Or will not do more, as the case may or may not be. I’m sorry I couldn’t express any of this to Mr. Red-and-Black at the time. I’m sorry for the fact that he probably wouldn’t have understood me, anyway.
I went back into my house, my clean, pristine, paid for apartment with its dirty but-stocked ’fridge. I mixed myself a drink, sat down and fired up this humming box of a machine, all the while wondering if I’d done something noble…and if I had then what was this ambivalence in my guts? More middle class guilt? Or some other, more malignant species?
I began to wonder as I began to write. I’m still wondering now, as dawn breaks over My Fair City and the homeless shuffle toward downtown with its kitchens and its haunts.
Tag it and bag it: Personal: the homeless: poverty: class warfare:
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