I am walking down the street in South Savannah not far from the library. It is near noon. I don’t have enough cash for a “senior coffee” (80 cents) at the McDonald’s down the road. I have 30 cents, counting the pennies – not even enough for a senior coffee from Burger King up and across town on MLK Drive (55 cents). My food stamps are almost gone, I used the last of the insect repellant last night, and cigarettes are about to become nothing but a memory (I smoked the last one sitting in the park next to MickeyD’s about 15 mins ago). An online friend offered to send money (I accepted, of course; no amount was mentioned) but it probably won’t be here earlier than Tuesday or Wednesday.
Today is Monday. Memorial Day.
As I cross the empty parking lot of a liquor store, a shiny new red Buick pulls in and swings around in front of me. I stop, thinking he’s turning around and will be pulling right out again. But he doesn’t. He stops. The window slides down. He extends his arm toward me but says nothing. In his hand is a bill. I move toward the car. He holds it steadily, bent slightly by his middle finger. There is no expression on his face.
I reach for it, thinking it is a one or maybe, if I’m lucky, a five. When I take it between suddenly nerveless fingers, I see it is a hundred.
A $100 bill. A C-note.
I am, not to put too fine a point on it, stunned. Flabbergasted. Floored. I stammer some kind of thank you. His expression hasn’t changed. He is my age, perhaps younger but more worn. His eyes are dull. He is giving what he must know is a great gift yet it gives him no joy. No emotion is betrayed by those listless eyes, the dead creases of cheekbone, the thin mouth. He is slumped in his seat. He hits the button and the automatic window reels closed. He drives away without saying a single word.
Why? What made him do such a thing when he clearly didn’t care whether he did it or not? When it gave him no joy, eased no pain, made him no calmer, no more content?
I don’t know but he has made my idea of driving a cab a possibility when I thought it little more than a day dream. A hundred dollars is almost enough to pull it off – the licenses, the fees, the physical.
We are all, down here, in some immoderate and desperate way, dependent on the kindness of strangers. It keeps us in beer, cigarettes, food, health and hope. Without it we will starve, shrivel, stutter and fall, perhaps never to rise. Or perhaps we will rise but with useless legs and abandoned faith.
When the homeless get together and talk (as we do endlessly, endlessly, our lives filled with waiting, waiting, waiting – on food lines, shower lines, lines to collect clothes or shoes or a bed), we have only a few topics of conversation. The most common is work. The work we’ve done in the past, the jobs we’ve had, the accomplishments that came with them, the jobs we want, the jobs we’re currently trying to get. Second most common is shelter-talk. Where to get the best meal, which ones make you sit through services for how long before they give you a meal or a bed, which ones are safe, which unsafe, the rules each runs by (they’re all different), and which ones will actually try to help you get on your feet and which are in it for the money, for themselves, like the Salvation Army no matter where you are. Third is cops. Where they hang out, who will arrest you and who won’t, what the judge said that time when you got arrested at a bus stop when you really were waiting for a bus.
But then there is the kindnesses that you’ve been shown. They shine out of these dry, jaded faces, the faces of men just barely hanging on, as if they had been lit by unlikely shards of a sacred crystal. They cling to them as they never clung to wives or children. They are hope on a string, tied to you forever, keeping you connected to the idea that possibilities haven’t run out yet. No matter how many people treat you as if you’re invisible or the scum on the bottom of a grimy, sewer-drenched shoe, you know you’re still human when somebody gives you something they didn’t have to give you. Money, a ride, a job you know you don’t deserve. We are almost absurdly grateful even for the smallest favors and the big ones leave us breathless. We tell their stories for years afterward, garnish them with detail, polish them like trophies. They prove something. They prove our worth after all.
Philly – The Bag Lady
I spend the night in the bus station, cramped and uncomfortable in tiny chairs for smaller-bottomed people, wishing for nothing more in this life than someplace to stretch out and close my eyes.
I don’t find it.
It is a long night, a night that cuts. A woman dragging a large shopping bag sits at the table next to mine. I am watching a tv high on the wall. A black minister is telling me how much God loves me but he’s yelling so much I get the feeling he’s more trying to persuade himself than me. The woman is quiet at first, her feet demurely together on the floor as if they’re connected by invisible wires wrapped around her ankles. She occasionally looks up shyly and gazes at me. I ignore her.
She is old, black, wrung out. Her skin wrinkles like wet cardboard, a splotchy brown that reminds me of cigarette butts that get rained on and then dry out. Her eyes are restless, wild. They roam like animals watching for predators. Her hair is short and patchy, as if she’d cut some spots with a dull knife and ignored others altogether. I glance down and see the long neck of a vodka bottle peeking out of her bag but there is no smell of drink on her.
It is about 3am. The security guard comes over, a small black man about 30. His eyes are more on her than me but I am who he addresses first.
“Do you have a ticket, sir? I’m sorry but you can’t sit here unless you’re waiting for a bus.” Oddly, it seems to be the absence of the pack that stirs his suspicion. Normally it is the pack that marks me for a street person, but at the bus station the fact that I don’t have any luggage to cling to looks weird to him.
I open my winter coat where the top of the ticket cover (of the ticket that brought me to Philly, not the one I will leave on to go the next leg since that won’t even be a bus but a train, which I don’t tell him) pokes from my inside pocket. I make no move to show him the ticket but the cover seems to satisfy him. He nods and turns to the woman at the next table. He seems to know her.
“Lucy, you know you can’t stay here tonight.”
“It’s cold outside.” Her voice is surprisingly deep and strong, yet there’s the twitter of a child’s complaining in its tone.
“I know it is,” he says, “but you’ll have to go in a little while. You know that, right? It’s real cold so I’ll let you stay long enough to warm up but then you’ll have to go. Lucy? You hear me?”
“I hear you,” she says.
He wanders off into the other half of the station.
“He’s a prick,” she snarls to me. “One of them.”
“One of who, Lucy?” I ask, drawn in despite myself.
“They want to get me, all of them. They’re the reason I’m here. All of them.”
“He was nice to you just then. He said you could stay ’til you warmed up.”
“They aren’t real,” she says. “They’re robots. I know.”
Does she mean that literally? Or does she just mean “they” follow the rules, blind to kindness?
“They have tapes in their skulls that make a noise.” She hisses to show me how it sounds, her face screwed up into a fist. “I can hear it all the time every time one comes near me. The tapes tell them what to do, who to hurt. They tell them to hurt me.”
“Why you? Why would they want to hurt you, Lucy?”
“Because I know things.” She becomes wary, secretive, shakes her head. “You don’t want to know. If you knew then they’d get after you. All of them.”
She goes on for some time like this. It’s obvious she needs help and just as obvious she isn’t going to get it. I can’t help her, neither can the guard. We can only watch when he eventually ushers her out into the icy night as she lumbers away, muttering to herself and glaring back at us, the enemy.
There are, it seems, limits to the glory of kindness.
