Bleeding Heart

I've always been encouraged to “give back to my community”. That's a staple lesson for all us white middle class kids, one pounded into your head at a young age. I remember some sort of class field trip in elementary school where we walked to the food back, each clutching a non-perishable item and feeling very self-important about it all. We were making a difference, one can of creamed corn at a time! Soon, my involvement in my church's youth group meant I was spending a fair amount of time at a food pantry in a lower-income community twenty minutes away. Granted, this wasn't exactly out of the goodness of my own heart, because my mother worked at the church and often spear-headed these excursions. I went, sulking and complaining, desperate to show the other kids there that while I was the daughter of the overzealous church lady, I wasn't some sort of Jesus freak. I was unpopular enough due to a middle part and know it all tendencies, I didn't need another mark on the blacklist. Eventually, I started going on “mission trips” with the same church, traveling to a poor part of a state and volunteering for a week in some sort of charitable capacity. I managed to block out the “God” part, or at least play along well enough, and genuinely enjoyed the service aspect of it. I went to Washington D.C, Alabama, Mississippi, Honduras and a bunch of other places closer to home. I had eye-opening experiences in every location, and learned a lot about myself (like the fact that no one should let me use power tools and that eating unpasteurized eggs will result in the kind of excrement worthy of Alien vs. Predator). I'm not saying that this all made me a good person (the jury is still out on that one) but it was, without a doubt, a “good thing to do”and it widened my world beyond the confines of upper middle class suburbia, if only by guilt trip. These experiences have continued to manifest themselves in a unique way in my life today. Helping the less fortunate has become a knee jerk reaction, except the less fortunate I know tend to be of a different ill than a poverty stricken family. I am totally incapable of not buying someone a drink at the bar if they're broke. It doesn't matter if I even like them, or if they're already drunk, or if I brought twenty dollars out with me and only have five left. I will buy you a PBR. Or a shot of whiskey. And I will do one with you. I am also not able to resist giving someone a cigarette when they ask, which means I probably smoke about half my pack and the rest go to people at parties (you know who you are). I don't even want to estimate how much money I've spent on alcohol and cigarettes that weren't for me. Hundreds. Definitely hundreds of dollars. This is now my way of giving back to my community, I guess, because my community is a bunch of alt twenty somethings who make minimum wage. I could donate the money to a homeless shelter or the ASPCA or really any charitable organization out there, but those service trips conditioned me to believe that if there's no tangible evidence, you're not really making a difference, which is why I continually try to give homeless people food instead of money. It's not that I don't want them to buy a forty with my two dollars, I get it, their lives suck and they're thirsty, but it's a little more complicated than that. In Providence, the only homeless people you really see are downtown at the bus station and it is very, very clear they are on some heavy narcotics. My ex-boyfriend worked on a psychology study dealing with addicts, so I have it on good authority that there are people using PCP and bath salts with abandon around there, and I would feel terrible if my change got someone's face eaten off. I normally don't frequent bars in downtown Prov because, like every resident here, I think driving anywhere in a city where you can get across town in twenty minutes is too much of a hassle. Everyone I know goes out to places within a fifteen minute walking radius (at most). I've long since weeded out friends who live “across town” and if anyone mentions living on the East Side when I meet them, I just fake saving their number into my phone. I know I'll never see them and all the bars over there suck anyways. Two year ago, however, I was working at a restaurant in the heart of downtown and I realized there was more down there than a filthy bus station and a mall. I was genuinely surprised at the brisk business I saw everywhere. It was a concept I had never considered in my time in the city. But why would you come here, I asked myself while picking up a drink with 13 different ingredients, the beers by my house are two dollars. It was a bit like realizing some people in the world still use Yahoo email addresses. Nevertheless, my coworkers and I would head out somewhere around the restaurant after a long shift and I quickly became more comfortable with the area. One perk was the 711 nearby. Most convenience stores by my house closed early, resulting in more cross city drives for cigarettes at 2 a.m than I'd like to admit. It was a luxury to not have to check my pack hourly and estimate how long it would be before I had to bum a cigarette off someone smoking menthol 100s. Like every drunk person ever, I convinced myself I was great friends with the guys who worked there, standing in unflattering fluorescent light while drunkenly asking detailed questions about their previous lives in Pakistan. One night as I walked in, a humble looking homeless man called out to me. “Miss! Miss! You got a dollar for some food?” he asked politely. “Yeah, sure, hold on,” I slurred. So I added a prepared and sketchy looking ham and cheese to my purchase, thoughtfully adding packets of mustard and mayo in case the homeless gentleman liked condiments as much as I did. I felt pretty damn pleased with myself, in the way that only a privileged white person can feel right before they do something for the “less fortunate”. Here I was, spending my tip money on something more worthwhile than a martini with muddled fennel in it. I walked proudly up to the guy when he was standing on the corner and offered him the sandwich. Suddenly, he morphed from the pleasant homeless caricature of my dreams into a drug addled mad man. “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS, BITCH? I ASKED FOR MONEY.” He ran inside with superhuman speed, and I watched through the glass as he tried to return the sandwich. The man behind the counter turned around slowly and looked at me as I was standing on the sidewalk with an open mouth and unlit cigarette. The formerly reasonable man who had asked me for a dollar was screaming and waving the sandwich around over his head. He soon realized this wasn't going to work and stormed out of the store. He stopped ten feet from me, face to face and spat out the words, “Stupid bitch.” Then he full on pelted me with the sandwich. As I was hit directly in the chest with a ham and cheese, I reflected that this had never happened while I was under the supervision of Jesus. He continued his lunch meat assault by whipping the mustard and mayo too, the latter of which exploded by my feet. He ran away into the night, darting in and out of traffic in a manner I hadn't seen since I played Frogger last. I watched until he disappeared into the park and checked the time. I had just enough to make it back to the bar in time for last call. Feeling a bit peckish, I picked up the sandwich and ate it as I walked back, admitting to myself that it really would have been better with mayo.