Charity

I saw a man on the side of the road today, dressed in dark blue coveralls unzipped to the waist, maybe two sizes too baggy, and a torn, grungy undershirt, formerly known as white. He had a crutch under one arm, his right foot turned out from his leg so that he walked on his ankle. He had steri-strips on his head, the thin white bandages that pull your skin together when you almost need stitches, and his head had been shaved haphazardly, leaving little tufts of blond hair at odd places and a square swath of the stuff in the back, like a mullet cut by a deranged stylist.

I had seen him before, but never like this. With the crutch, sure, and needing new shoes, but never with his foot turned out like that. Never in such bad shape.

He had a cup, as usual, fished from the garbage I'd guess, which he held out in the hopes of a donation. I gave him one, two dollars, not nearly enough to do any bit of good. He said he'd had a terrible night and had to go to the hospital.

I can't help thinking, how does this guy get up in the morning? How does he face his day, gear up for standing on a street corner, hoping for a handout?

And how is it that someone who has most of everything, a job, a home, people who care enough about him that he'll never have to stand on a street corner and beg, how is it that someone like that can't bring himself to face another day?

Sean

I am sitting in the waiting area of the mechanic's, thinking of Sean. Sean and his damn VW bug with the rear-mounted, air-cooled engine that no one has any right to attempt to drive in the Phoenix heat. I can still hear my dad cursing that car which seemed perennially scattered in his father's driveway.

Sean, I think, looked up to my father the same way I did, saw his busted knuckles as a badge of honor, the result of a victorious tussle with a carburetor, alternator, or some other mysterious and probably dirty car part ending in -ator. I was a little jealous of Sean, consulting with my dad, the sage of all things mechanical, working side by side, bonding with him in a way I never could, bleeding and cussing and finally, triumphantly, making the damn thing WORK!

From the day my dad taught me how to clean a carburetor, (I think I was five), I have been hooked on muscle cars and gearheads, like my dad. He smelled of grease and gas and WD-40, black grime in the whorls of his fingertips, burns and divots on his stubby plump fingers. When he'd clean up, he'd carefully scrub his hands to the elbows like a surgeon, studiously comb his hair into place after a shower, emerging smelling of Brute and hairspray. Sean was a young, blonde version of him with tousled hair, a smear of grease on his forearm, but most importantly fluent in the language of car.

And, oh, what a crush I had on him. My ears pricked up like a bird dog's every time my dad mentioned his name. Usually "Sean" and "that damn car" appeared in the same sentence. I never understood about that car anyway. It seemed so un-Sean-like, seemed like he needed something more muscular, like a Nova or a Chevelle. I'd say something more reliable, but the bug very reliably sat.

And now Sean sits, or lies more specifically, perhaps yet in a hospital bed, waiting for a surgeon to harvest his organs, much like he would have pulled a part from a dead car in a junkyard to give life to another. More likely this has already occurred and he is lying in the morgue while someone else is living for him, because of him, a life he no longer wanted.

Hard to say why, but I think he came upon a problem he didn't know how to fix. I think he should have called another mechanic.