The van lurched and went silent just after rumbling across the metal surface of a bridge connecting my island home to the big city, and I cursed myself.
“Fool! Why didn’t you fix the fuel gauge?”
Out of gas, the van coasted to a stop in the middle of a one-lane road lined with homeless camps, impoverished people holding signs begging for help, and migrant laborers seeking work. Drivers honked and cursed me even more than I did. A knot of migrant dudes in blue jeans watched from the sidewalk as I ran to the van’s rear and began pushing.
“Amigo!”
One of the men, with polished cowboy boots and gray-flecked black hair, was next to me, pushing harder. “Steer!” he commanded. I barely had time to jump in as the van accelerated toward a gas station we turned into about a minute later.
“Gracias, gracias,” I said, reaching for my wallet, which my mind’s eye spied on the kitchen table even before my hand touched the empty pocket. Angry and ashamed, I cursed again.
“Amigo,” he said gently, pulling $5 from his wallet. “This will get you home. Pass it along when someone else needs help.”
Pass it along? My heart thudded. Suddenly, it was April 1973….in Guadalajara, Mexico…I was hitchhiking home to the United States from Central America.
———
It was near midnight on the edge of a plaza where a truck driver had dropped me. He was my second ride. The first left me on a Vera Cruz beach I fell upon until dawn when a soccer player kicked me in the head. The whole team was yelling at me to get off their field, which only appeared for a few hours at low tide.
Now, I was alone again, except for bugs clattering against the yellow street lamp above my head. A fountain splashed somewhere in the gloom. Without any sense of direction, I started walking that-away.
It was a short walk.
“Yoo-hoo, gringo, are you hungry?”
A taxi was keeping pace with me a few feet away, and out of its rear window hung two, beautiful, jiggling breasts.
I laughed. So did her ruby, ruby lips.
“No gracias, señorita.”
The taxi disappeared around the plaza as I strode with lighter steps. Pockets empty, stomach empty, mouth full of grins.
“Come close, gringo, have a taste.”
They were back and she was shaking them like maracas.
Oh how hungry I was. Not for the delights of warm, nippled loaves but for street tacos – al pastor! – or even the scrap of a tortilla fallen on the street that dogs would fight over. That I would fight the dogs for.
“Not tonight, querida.”
The taxi took off for another circle of the plaza, joined by two others who fell in behind it, flashing their lights and honking. A parade of prostitutes? I leaned into the straps of my pack and hot-legged across the street to a cemetery surrounded by a high brick wall and flattened myself against it with my arms stretched out. Slowly, I sidestepped until the honking and cries of “Gringo, Gringo…” faded and the only sound was of whiskered cheek on rough concrete. Not a loud sound. Barely loud enough for my ears… and two on the other side of the wall, tracking my passage along it.
My left fingertips touched the twisted iron rods of a gate that began shaking in the fangs of a snarling, eye-bulging black dog trying to bite through at me. I jerked away – more mesmerized than afraid – as a soft whistle sounded.
The dog vanished.
Out from among the tombstones a vague figure appeared with bright eyes peering though the fence – assessing a lengthy, long-haired, dirty, skinny, young apparition trying to be brave. He nodded, dug into his pocket, and produced something at eye level between his thumb and forefinger. It glowed yellow as a harvest moon in the incandescence of street lamps and glinted as he turned it back and forth.
“Do you know pesos, señor?”
“Pesos?”
Flicked by his thumb, the golden object tumbled over the fence into my cupped palms where, shielded from the street light, it turned silver, and though my Spanish was poor even I knew what the embossed word CIEN meant. One hundred pesos! Nearly 5 dollars. I could eat extravagantly for a day or humbly for three.
He was gone when I looked up, but his voice floated from the other side.
“Give it away when you aren’t hungry.”
I wrapped my right fist around the coin, thrust it into my pocket and – struck by being told for the first time in my life to pass it along – turned the coin over and over and over in my mind as I walked at a ponderer’s pace, following a wall that pointed like a compass needle into the night.
Another truck driver dropped me off the next morning 300 miles away in Mazatlan, where a swirl of people gathered at a bus stop under the gaze of two uniformed police. One of them caught my eye and sauntered over with a crooked smile and a sneer in his voice.
“Hey, heepee, you got drogas?”
‘Heepee’ – hippy – is how they addressed white guys with long hair back then – back when drinkin’, sexin’, druggin’ Americans wandered through Mexico like sloven dogs. I was often sloven and sometimes drunk, but…
“No drugs.”
He asked for a cigarette. I gave him one and lighted it.
“Look at them,” he said, spewing smoke at the throng.
A dozen or so were men in blue jeans. A few older women had dresses that came halfway between their bowed knees and sandled feet. There were some family groups of small children, mother and father. All carried meager belongings and looked like people I had seen in village plazas, in fields, along roads, and in humble homes everywhere I visited.
“See anything suspicious?”
“No.”
“Conejos are easy to see.”
‘Conejos’ are rabbits – on the run to the U.S. border.
I looked again.
“No.”
“Ha!” he said, and explained how to tell a rabbit from the rest.
“Look at their eyes, heepee,” making a circle with each thumb and forefinger and putting those circles up against his eyes like glasses.
“O’s, heepee, look at how their eyes look like O’s.” Eyes round and bulging with fear.
The policia wandered back to the group and, with his compadre, began putting hands into bags and pockets and purses and blouses, pulling out coins and bills before letting them on the bus. I was last.
“Hey, heepee, why your eyes so wide?”
He laughed as I boarded and paid the fare with that silver CIEN coin – just enough to reach the open arms of a border that welcomed me but not them, knowing I had been treated like a prince along the same path others are treated like rats.
———
Four decades later, I started the van and drove back back over the bridge past the signs and camps and work seekers, feeling a weight in my conscience grow heavier as the road home became smoother. In all those years, I had done what many do to help others – run food drives, donate turkeys at Thanksgiving, stuff money into kettles at Christmas, rage at the treatment of migrants at the border. All things to feel good about, and, yet, so impersonal – such a stand-offish way of helping people who exist in another dimension…on the other side. From that moment on, I decided to always keep a pocketful of ones and fives, especially on the half-mile walking-part of my commute past scores of street people in San Francisco.
Rodney was the easiest. He played sweet saxophone music that made me feel as if I were at a concert, so I started giving him a buck each day – a fair price of admission. No music flowed from the others, who pushed carts full of their lives or just … were there. Michele for instance held a sign: “Lost everything. But not my best friend. Please help.” Her best friend, Bella the boxer dog, was at her side. I gave her $5, but my friend Ray launched an online campaign that raised a bunch of money. You do what you do.
The woman with the blue face was hardest. She sat splay-legged on the sidewalk in front of the Subway sandwich shop, staring at people walking by. Her gaze painted everyone like sonar seeking a target, which we were and could feel it.
“You! Yes, you. I mean it!” she barked once with her hand held out. Like a holdup victim, someone gave and escaped. Others stayed far out of range. Me, too, until the day she wasn’t looking at anyone. Her eyes were closed. So were her fists, and they were punching her face. Smack, smack. Over and over. I felt like she was punching me in the heart.
The next morning I veered close and looked into her eyes – not sure of what I saw – and kept walking. And turned back. I knew my wallet only had a $20 and, wishing it was a dollar, gave it to her. I hadn’t handed out a $20 on the street since that hardworking dumpster diver on Christmas Eve.
“Oh, wow! Oh, wow!” she yelled as I walked away. We became sorta-friends after that as I learned her name and that she suffered mental issues. That winter, Deborah changed her face color to reddish-brown, and when I last saw her, it was kind of dotted. Then, my job and I parted ways and so did we. I still remember her last smile.
A few days ago I came out of a grocery store on the island near the bridge.
“Hey.”
It was the guy I nodded at while entering the store. His hungry eyes peered at me over his mask. He seemed familiar, maybe the same guy I had seen through the chain link fence at the end of the bridge the day before. As I stared, his eyes grew wide with anxiety, kind of “O”-like, and I quickly apologized.
“Here,” I said, pulling out the $5 bill I’d gotten for him.
God, he was grateful. “I can eat,” he said. His eyes smiled. “Mike,” he said when we traded names, bumped elbows and agreed to share stories next time we met.
For a blink I felt good, but as I walked away names turned over and over in my head. Mike…Rodney…Deborah…Michele…Bella…others. The bag of groceries felt uncomfortable in my arms.
Will I ever be able to pass that damn coin along?