Charity stops here

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about poor people lately. I’m not exactly sure why. OK, I know why. Because we are in a recession and you cannot stop at a red light or enter a store without someone asking for money.

Also, there was a moment in Popeyes Chicken that I have been regretting for a while now.  It’s a long story, which I will get to momentarily.

There are no statistics to back this up, but there seem to be more homeless people in Fresno during the winter. A lot more. In my mind, that’s because it is warmer here than in most parts of the country, and homeless people migrate to the West Coast* from North Dakota or Vermont or Russia. Somewhere cold. In downtown Fresno, there are little towns of people living in tents and boxes under the overpasses and sometimes I drive around down there and gawk. It’s unbecoming, I realize, but I justify it by thinking that I am at least aware of the homeless problem, which is something. It’s not helping, but it’s something.

*This could be because there are so many train tracks downtown, but I also figure people get to Fresno riding the rails from some exotic location. Do people still ride the rails? Do they carry their belongings in a bandana tied around the end of a stick? How many more of my cultural references are stuck in black-and-white movies from the 1940s?

It just amazes me that in the year 2009, so many people could be living like that. Although I have no idea why the passing of time or the advancement of technology would have an affect on the homeless population. It is not just the homeless who are asking for help, though. At intersections, boys and girls hold signs asking for donations to pay for funerals. Some have car washes. Others just want help. A mother and son were selling candy outside a grocery store last night and I was in such a hurry to get to a house to watch the national title game that I didn’t even find out what the money was for.

I’ve seen middle age men with signs that ask for help for a single dad, and women with signs who ask for money for an out-of-work mom. I don’t know if they are really single dads or out-of-work moms. There is an urban legend, I guess you’d call it, that there are panhandlers who make a great living begging for money. I’m not sure if that comes from movies or just our worst suspicions of human nature*, but I doubt there are many people dressing up in dirty clothes, writing desperate messages on cardboard and making $70,000 a year.

*I had two extra tickets at a college football game a couple years ago, and a man came up to me and said he and his son wanted to go to the game, but couldn’t afford it. I gave him the tickets and he walked back to the street corner and started to sell them for more than face value. There was no son. I suppose we all have stories like that, where our good intentions were taken advantage of, and I was more upset about having my trust eroded than losing two football tickets under false pretense.

In situations like that I am reminded of two stories, the first told by Joe Posnanski, the Sports Illustrated writer, who was sitting by the late Buck O’Neil at a baseball game. Buck was old by this time, in his final years, with many reasons to hold at least a little bitterness. He had seen racial injustice as a young man. He had been kept out of the Big Leagues as a player. He had not yet been inducted into the Hall of Fame, even though everything about his life and personality and career made him a wonderful choice. Posnanski was writing a book about O’Neil and so they were sitting at a game together when they saw a man get a foul ball and not give it to a boy nearby. Posnanski was irritated, as many of us would be, but O’Neil told him, wait, maybe that man has a son at home. Maybe his son is sick and the ball will make his day. Who thinks like that? Buck always saw the best in people, even strangers. He was a rare human being.

The second story happened several years ago. I was writing about a blind Creighton University basketball fan. He and a friend went to the games and sat together so the friend could do play-by-play and he could follow the action. Yes, he could probably have listened to the radio broadcast on headphones, but it wouldn’t have been the same. He wouldn’t have been able to feel the crowd, or hear when the players changed direction on the court. During the interviews, I found out that it had been a medical error that blinded the man as a child, that too much oxygen had been pumped into his ventilator. I forget the exact details. But I asked him if his family sued the doctors, if he’d received some sort of settlement from the hospital, and I’ll never forget his response: Why? It’s not like they meant to do it.

Of course I never think of those two stories at the time. I get angry at the con-man stealing my tickets, but I hope that at some point in my life I’m able to have even a bit of that understanding, that I’m able to see light where there only appears to be darkness.

I think about beggars a lot. I saw a man the other day in a wheelchair in Merced, Calif. It was late at night and it was raining lightly and I could see him on a narrow median in the middle of four lanes. He was in a wheelchair and missing at least one of his legs. He had a sign that I couldn’t read. How did he get there? What happened to him? Was he a nice man? Were there no other options better than sitting in the dark and the rain at a remote intersection with no street lights? But I was in a hurry with two friends and didn’t give him money, or buy him food, or see if he needed a ride.

One of my favorite writers in the world, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll, writes a piece every year about something he calls The Untied Way. That is not a typo. It’s really just an idea where he encourages readers around the holidays to go to the ATM and take out an uncomfortable amount of money and then hand it out in $20 bills to people who ask for money. Will some of them use it in unsavory and foolish ways? Sure. Have I spent money in unsavory and foolish ways? Probably more than most people who beg for money. Just this week I made a $50 bluff on a busted straight draw.

Here is the 2009 Untied Way column. His point is beautiful and simple. You don’t have time to figure out who might use the money to buy booze, or which person has a hard-luck story, or who is good or bad, and who are you to be deciding who is good and bad anyway? You either have compassion or you don’t. You either help someone else or you don’t. You either give or you drive past. I’m not saying The Untied Way is what you should do, or that you’re a bad person for not giving to beggars. You can’t give to everyone. I think about that sometimes. Well, what if I gave money to everyone who asked for it? My PG&E bill was $260 last month. I’d be broke. I can’t do that. So I should just not give to anyone, to be fair. Besides, don’t our taxes pay for homeless shelters and programs? I’m not even sure if I think about that stuff, or it’s just my justification.

I think we all get that way a little sometimes. There must be a reason I’m driving this Volkswagen and that person is on the corner holding a sign, hoping a stranger will hand them a dollar out of a moving car window. They must have taken some evil path, made some bad choice that led to this. It’s more soothing than thinking of the world as a big spinning ball we could all fall off at any point. If there’s anything good about a recession, it’s that the people in need aren’t just shadowy figures we can ignore. They aren’t just people with chemical imbalances who talk to themselves. We all know people who have lost houses and jobs, people who’ve had family meetings around the kitchen table to figure out bigger issues than voting on the summer vacation.

All this to say that one day in December, I was sitting in Popeyes Chicken, listening to a couple fight. I’m assuming they were a couple, because at several points they discussed whether “this” was really going to work, and the many issues with each others’ behavior. They were sitting in a booth and both talking loudly, but awkwardly, like they were performing in some sort of street theater and wanted everyone in the audience to be able to hear. But it was only the three of us there. At one point the man, with dirty overalls and a pony tail, went to the register and asked the girl with a headset if she would change the music to blues. The jazz they were playing was obnoxious and terrible, he said.

It was so distracting that I didn’t see a woman come in, didn’t see her until she walked up to my booth and asked for a piece of my chicken. And even though it was my last chicken strip, and I was already full, and I probably shouldn’t have been eating fast food anyway (especially not finishing fast food), I said no, I wanted to eat it. I’ll say that I was caught off guard. Maybe it was the brashness that surprised me, that someone would ask to eat my food from my plate in a restaurant. I’m kind of a push-over most of the time, and I got defensive there for a second, decided I wasn’t going to let someone’s forwardness pressure me.

But now I’m thinking how hungry that woman must have been to ask that way. I’m thinking she probably had children. I’m thinking about all the times I wondered what the person asking for charity might do with the money, whether they would buy food or drugs, and here I turned away someone who asked for the very item that I had predetermined was suitable for my charity.

I’m still thinking about the woman, a month later, still thinking about our chicken encounter, still thinking I’m the one who needed help.