What Difference Do It Make? (7 page)

Still pretty new to the streets, I pasted on a smile and, with Denver at my shoulder, said to the Hispanic man, “What can I do for you today?”

As the man tried to focus his eyes on me, a thin strand of drool slid from the corner of his mouth and began traveling south. “I needsh a reedle moony,” he slurred in a heavy Spanish accent.

I didn't quite catch what he said and asked him to repeat himself.

“He say he needs a little money,” Denver said over my shoulder.

I am not giving a drunk a twenty-dollar bill,
I thought as I watched the drool reach the Hispanic man's chin. Smiling away, I dug into my pants pockets, feeling for smaller change.

Finding none, I pulled out the twenty-dollar bill and surreptitiously showed it to Denver. Glancing back at my mentor in the 'hood, I tried intently to telegraph a message with my eyes:
If I give him my last twenty, all he's going to do is go down to the liquor store and buy some more booze!

Suddenly Denver leaned in, and I felt his breath at my ear. “Don't judge the man,” he said, low and quiet. “Just give him the twenty dollars.”

Reluctantly, I held out the money, and the man took it. Just at that moment, the southbound drop of drool detached itself from his chin and hurtled toward the sidewalk.

“Shank ew,” he said.

I had never stopped smiling, but now my grin felt as fake as a plugged nickel. I felt like I'd just given a push to a suicide jumper.

Denver and I bid the man good-bye and headed down the street toward the mission. We hadn't gone thirty yards when Denver stopped. “Turn 'round here and look at me, Mr. Ron. I wanna tell you somethin.”

I stopped and faced Denver, and in a way that was becoming familiar to me, he pinned me with one eye while squinting the other like Clint Eastwood. “That man you just gave that money to—his name is José. And he ain't drunk. He's a stroke victim. And he's one a' the hardest workin men I ever knowed.”

Denver went on to tell me that before a stroke got him, José had been a bricklayer and a rock mason who worked hard, lived cheap, and sent all his money home to Mexico to support his family.

“He don't even drink, Mr. Ron,” Denver said. “He depends on people like you to eat.”

Immediately, I thought of Deborah. From the moment we set foot in the mission, she had looked beyond the ragged clothes and the scars and the dirt and the smells. It was as though God had given her X-ray vision to see right past all that to the people underneath.

She never asked them, “How did you get in the shape you're in?” Her thinking was, if you condition your offer of help on how a needy person got that way, you're probably not going to help very many people. The question Deborah asked was, “What is your need
now
?”

Now Denver completed his verdict and gave me an ultimatum. Keeping me pinned with that eyeball, he said, “You know what you did? You judged a man without knowin his heart. And I'm gon' tell you somethin. If you gon' walk these streets with me, you gon' have to learn how to serve these people without judgin 'em. Let the judgin be up to God.”

Denver's pronouncements on judgment reminded me of a letter that the painter Vincent Van Gogh once wrote to his brother, Theo. The subject was idleness and whether anyone can truly look at a man who appears to be lazy—or drunk or otherwise indigent—and make an accurate judgment:

Sometimes . . . [a person's] right to exist has a justification that is not always immediately obvious to you . . . Someone who has been wandering about for a long time, tossed to and fro on a stormy sea, will in the end reach his destination. Someone who has seemed to be good for nothing, unable to fill any job, any appointment, will find one in the end and, energetic and capable, will prove himself quite different from what he seemed at first . . .

I should be very happy if you could see in me something more than a kind of . . . [an idler]. For there is a great difference between one idler and another idler. There is someone who is an idler out of laziness and lack of character, owing to the baseness of his nature. If you like, you may take me for one of those. Then there is the other kind of idler, the idler despite himself, who is inwardly consumed by a great longing for action who does nothing because his hands are tied, because he is, so to speak, imprisoned somewhere, because he lacks what he needs to be productive, because disastrous circumstances have brought him forcibly to this end. Such a one does not always know what he can do, but he nevertheless instinctively feels, I am good for something! My existence is not without reason! I know that I could be a quite a different person! How can I be of use, how can I be of service? There is something inside me, but what can it be? He is quite another idler. If you like you may take me for one of those.

A caged bird in spring knows perfectly well that there is some way in which he should be able to serve. He is well aware that there is something to be done, but he is unable to do it . . . “What a idler,” says another bird passing by—what an idler . . . But then the season of the great migration arrives, an attack of melancholy. He has everything he needs, say the children who tend him in his cage—but he looks out, at the heavy thundery sky, and in his heart of hearts he rebels against his fate. I am caged, I am caged and you say I need nothing, you idiots! I have everything I need, indeed! Oh! please give me the freedom to be a bird like other birds!

A kind of idler of a person resembles that kind of idler of a bird. And people are often unable to do anything, imprisoned as they are in I don't know what kind of terrible, terrible, oh such terrible cage . . .

A justly or unjustly ruined reputation, poverty, disastrous circumstances, misfortune, they all turn you into a prisoner. You cannot always tell what keeps you confined, what immures you, what seems to bury you, and yet you can feel those elusive bars, railings, walls . . .

Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives. Moreover, the prison is sometimes called prejudice, misunderstanding, fatal ignorance of one thing or another, suspicion . . .

If you could see me as something other than a idler of the bad sort, I should be very happy.

DARLENE

Skid Row Samaritan

During the Gold Rush, Sacramento, California, was a thriving place, the westernmost stop for stagecoaches and wagon trains, for the first transcontinental railroad and even the Pony Express. Sacramento still thrives today, but like many cities, it has also become the last stop in life for thousands of homeless people.

Homelessness is not new to the city, but in early 2009 it was getting worse. National attention focused on a tent city that had sprung up on the city's outskirts. As many as fifty new people a week moved in, some of them as a result of the avalanche of home foreclosures, a phenomenon that hit Sacramento harder than most US cities.

But the tent city was not the only part of Sacramento where homelessness was a problem. The wedge of town west of the capitol was a motley mix of redevelopment and still-derelict, a place where attempts at gentrification competed with rundown motels that doubled as low-income housing for transients. The city was working to fix up the area, but for longtime Sacramento residents, those streets still meant drugs, prostitution, and shabby bands of the hardcore homeless. It was a part of the city, Darlene Garcia told us, that she preferred to avoid.

But Darlene, age sixty-six, did find herself driving through west Sacramento on her way home from on errand on a cold, cloudy day early in 2009. And sure enough, as she drove along a seedy thoroughfare near the Pickwood Hotel, she saw a man sprawled on the ground in a narrow vacant lot between buildings.

“He was lying on the ground close to the sidewalk,” Darlene remembers. “If he had been under the tree that was nearby, I would have thought he was lying there sleeping because that's what people do in that area.”

As it was, Darlene's first thought was that the man was probably a drunk who had passed out in public. But something about the way he was lying there stirred her concern. Then Denver Moore flashed into her mind, and something about his story, which she had just read, helped her think twice about snap judgments.

Darlene slowed her car. “There was a lot of traffic, people driving right past this man, walking past him on the sidewalk.”

Forced to keep driving because of the flow of traffic, Darlene sped up again. But the farther she advanced down the block, the more she knew she had to go back.

Darlene circled the block and returned to the spot near the Pickwood. The man hadn't moved. She parked along the curb, cars whizzing past, and got out, intensely aware of being a lone woman on foot in a “bad” part of town.

She walked to the man and stood over him. He appeared to be sleeping. His clothes were older but not ragged. He appeared younger than Darlene, but his face was haggard and pale.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

The man opened his eyes very slightly and whispered, “I'm having a heart attack.”

Darlene's pulse quickened. “How do you know?”

He raised his hand to his chest. “Because it . . . hurts . . . right . . . here.”

Darlene snatched her cell phone from her purse and quickly punched in 911. Then she ran to the curb, waving her arms, trying to flag down help. An older gentleman stopped and joined Darlene; his presence made her feel a little safer. The two waited a few more minutes as emergency crews rolled up to the scene and began treating the man.

When she saw he was in good hands, Darlene got in her car and drove home. On the way, she reflected on the step she'd just taken. She had helped people all her life, spending decades teaching preschool in a state program for low-income families and even buying shoes, clothes, and food for some families who had none. But before she read about Denver, she says, “I would never have had the nerve to go back. I wouldn't have felt safe stopping in that area. But this time I wasn't scared. I thought,
I have to do this.
”

Darlene went home and telephoned her best friend to share what had happened. “I think I might have saved someone's life today,” she said.

“That's good,” her friend replied. “But you have to be careful in that neighborhood.”

“I know,” said Darlene and smiled.

10

Denver

Don't get me wrong. Wadn't like I was clean and sober all the time, neither. Just 'cause me and Mr. Ron was friends don't mean I turned into no overnight saint. We might a' been goin out to fancy places in the daytime. But at night I'd still go out to the hobo jungle and pass around the Jim Beam with the fellas.

N
ow, I ain't sayin that ever time you see a drunk you got to give him a dollar. I'm just sayin everbody you give a dollar to ain't necessarily a drunk. I remember that time Mr. Ron didn't wanna give José that twenty-dollar bill, and I told him to quit worryin about what the man was gon' do with the money and just be a blessin to him.

I know a lotta people worry 'bout the same thing. If I give that homeless man some money, what he gon' do with it? Buy hisself a half-pint or a beer?

Since my book came out, I been to a lotta parties and sophisticated places, and everbody in there be talkin 'bout, “Gimme a glass a' red wine.”

Now, how come ain't nobody sayin somethin 'bout them havin wine, but they got a problem with a homeless man havin wine? Ain't you ever seen a rich alcoholic? And who you think needs the wine worse? You think anybody
wants
to be a drunk? You kiddin me, right? They ain't havin no fun.

Now you might say, “The homeless man ain't got enough money to be spendin none on wine. That's irresponsible. If you give money to a homeless man, he needs to be spendin it on food.”

Maybe you right. The thing about it is, though, gifts is free. When you give a person a gift, you is also givin that person the freedom to do whatever they want with it. When you give a homeless man a dollar, you ain't sayin, “Here. Go buy yourself a chicken.” If you really wanted him to have some food, you'd take him in the McDonald's and buy him a Big Mac and a apple pie.

No, when you give a homeless man a dollar, what you really sayin is, “I see you. You ain't invisible. You is a person.” I tells folks to look at what's written on all that money they be givin away: it says “In God We Trust.” You just be the blessin. Let God worry about the rest.

Sometime, when you reach out to a homeless person, might seem like to you she's throwed off in her mind. Like she ain't got no sense. But sometimes things ain't exactly the way they look. Like a friend a' mine asked me one time, said she seen a homeless lady standin at a intersection. This lady was real skinny and her clothes was dirty and they didn't match. She didn't have no sign that said, “Will work 4 food” or “God bless!” She was lookin up at the sky, swayin back and forth, and talkin to the clouds in a voice like a little girl.

My friend said she felt bad 'cause she was scared to give the lady any money, scared she had somethin wrong with her.

“Wadn't nothin wrong with her,” I told my friend. “Sound like to me she just didn't want to be bothered.”

But a lotta times there
is
somethin wrong with homeless folks. Mr. Don Shisler down at the Union Gospel Mission told me one time he thinks about six or seven outta ever ten homeless has got some kinda mental problem. At one point, they was regular folks like you that might sit around and read a book 'bout folks like them. But somethin happened to em that got em throwed off.

Maybe a fella's wife throwed him out, so he went to live with his cousin. Then his cousin throwed him out, so he wound up on the street. I ain't sayin he didn't do nothin to deserve it. Maybe he did, but that don't mean he ain't still one a' God's children.