I never give homeless people money. I know this makes me heartless. For the most part I have come to grips with this. The rational explanation is that if I gave one person money, I’d have to give everyone else money, because how can you judge these things? How can say one person deserves help and somebody doesn’t? But I know that’s a bullshit argument, it’s just an excuse to tell myself to not worry about these people’s problems, they’ve got nothing to do with me. (When they very much do.)
I don’t even know what I want to write about the people who see a white man in business casual and hit him up for twenty-five cents, always twenty-five cents. They’ve got homes, almost certainly jobs too, but they’re poor and all they see is rich, somebody who can give them money without worrying too much about it, and what are they going to do to you for just asking, call the cops? And I in turn am heartless again.
One guy was different because he was pushing a stroller. He called me sir, which isn’t uncommon, but he showed me an id from the VA hospital down the way and said that he had just got discharged from the military and had ended up homeless.
“What branch of the service were you in?” I asked.
“Special forces.”
I frowned and peered down at the stroller. There was a tiny crocodile, not just a crocodile, but a sleeping one with its tiny legs hanging in the air. One of them stuttering like a dog dreaming. I startled back, thought I was seeing things.
“She’s my daughter,” he said in a voice only an uncrazy person could possess.
I bought them lunch, a tuna salad sandwich and a bag of pretzels, from a place down the way. He waited outside, seemed anxious or perhaps unhappy that I was giving him food and not money. I felt no trust for him and yet — he had a baby crocodile.
“Where’s your wife?” I asked.
“Turned into a reptile too,” he said. “Everybody does, in their time.”
Permalink
·
0 comments
Tagged food, poverty, transformations
When I first started going to Mem Sahib, it seemed a secret place. It’s right by Lexington Market but it was quiet inside — the first time I went, I think there was maybe only one other set of people in the place, and though you can see the market’s hurlyburly if you look up through the interior windows, you can’t hear a word of it. The walls were painted a reflective sort of blue that made me think of being a kid again, diving to the bottom of the deep end of the community pool, staying down there as long as my breath could hold out. And the food was good, not necessarily superhealthy but also not superdeadly, which can be hard to find. Grease sells in Lexington. It’s just a fact.
It was, in short, a refuge from work and from Baltimore.
There was a waitress who I named Amy in my head — she never introduced herself or anything and it seemed dumb to ask her name. Why I chose Amy exactly is a story for some other time. She was devastatingly pretty and also really nice, would sometimes have short little conversations with us about where we worked, that kind of thing. She was just one more reason to go.
One day I was eating there with a coworker and talking about the Back to the Future movies, how the past could be in a partially broken state, ostensibly preventing Marty McFly from existing but allowing him enough time to fix the inconsistencies in his backstory, and I asked my coworker: “Well, what’s your theory on time travel?”
It was at this particular point in time that Amy had come back to refill our glasses, and at my question her face took on a peculiar expression of wtf.
“We’re time travellers,” I joked because my coworker was shooting me a look that said: you’re screwing up a good thing here.
She hesitated for a second then said, “So am I,” and then it was our turn to wear the wtf expressions. “Where, um I guess when are you from?” I asked, not really sure if she was playing along or secretly crazy all along or something else.
“2139,” she said. “What about you guys?”
“I’m from — I’m a little later than that. He” — indicating my coworker — “lost his memory a couple jumps ago.”
“Oh, cool,” Amy said. “Do you have any artifacts?”
“Err, not with me.”
She pulled out a driver’s license that said she was 16 in the year 2145 and handed it to me. It was different, with weirder holograms and a longer zip code — I kept looking at it, trying to see where the fake part was, the part that would identify it as just one of things you’d pick up on a boardwalk somewhere, but I couldn’t find one.
“That’s pretty neat,” I said. “So… what are you doing in town?”
“Secret project,” she said. “For now just waiting tables. It’s kind of quaint.”
“Yeah — yeah, it is,” I agreed.
Permalink
·
0 comments
Tagged food, nerds
