Casual
Epstein, Joseph
Casual A CHEAP NIGHT OUT A warm Monday night in Chicago, and I'm feeling flush and contented, departing a parking lot with my wife, beginning our walk to the Emperor's Choice, our favorite Chinese...
...Panhandling is becoming more and more widespread in America...
...He shakes hands with me, and smiles...
...He works for his father's construction company—the name is beautifully vague, like Acme or Delta Development—and he's been driving one of the company trucks, which is stalled nearby...
...The towing company won't do business with him for less...
...A guy in his early thirties, in jeans, a well-worn cambray work shirt, and a white hard hat, with a phone in his hand, asks, "Do you speak English...
...I note he seems to be missing the back teeth on the upper right side...
...Casual A CHEAP NIGHT OUT A warm Monday night in Chicago, and I'm feeling flush and contented, departing a parking lot with my wife, beginning our walk to the Emperor's Choice, our favorite Chinese restaurant on Wentworth Avenue...
...He exudes a look of extreme gratitude, says thank you, hugs my wife lightly, then hugs me...
...Why, I ask myself, don't I feel, in the language of my people, more of a schmuck than I do...
...Not a good sign, I fleetingly think...
...Sometimes it can be truly affecting: men horribly crippled in motorized chairs selling newspapers for the homeless...
...If you are conning me," I say, "at my age I shall have to repair to the Gobi Desert, to live out my days as a hermit, forever disappointed in humankind...
...After I do so, he asks if I would mind also writing down our phone number, so that he can have his wife call up to thank us...
...Part of me admires the sheer style with which I have been taken...
...He wants to know what's the latest he can have her call...
...Keeps you sharp...
...He was no dope, my father...
...Why not...
...If I am going to trust him for $27, why not trust him for $40...
...so was the request for our phone number and the nicety of asking what was the latest that his wife could call...
...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...
...He shows me his hands, palms turned outward, which are calloused, a cut on the left one...
...I peel off two twenties and hand them to him...
...Between a twenty-seven-dollar fool and a forty-dollar fool, there is only a thirteen-dollar difference...
...Bringing up the movie Pay It Forward was a fine touch...
...Forty dollars is a little more than the cost of my wife's and my Chinese dinner that evening...
...He wants us to know that he will not forget to do so...
...He says, eyes looking down at the pavement, the whole twenty-seven bucks...
...How much does he need...
...If the money had slipped out of my pocket, or if I had even been pickpocketed, I think I would have felt more aggrieved...
...Our man, it suggested, was well brought up...
...he asks...
...We haven't...
...Reminds you of your own fallibility...
...Thanks again," he says, "I won't forget this...
...Did you ever see the movie Pay It Forward...
...You know," I remember my father saying, "it doesn't hurt to get conned every once in a while...
...Sometimes it can be menacing...
...He explains that in it when a person has been the recipient of a good deed, he must turn around and do a similar deed...
...For some reason, I am not as depressed about this as perhaps I ought to be...
...Not long ago I was stopped in a supermarket parking lot by a guy with what I believe are known as felony muscles, who told me he had just got out of jail and could I let him have a buck...
...I have, indubitably, been conned and taken, shaken and nicely baked...
...You wouldn't do that to an older gent, would you...
...it entailed, after all, costuming: that hard hat, the phone, the calloused hands, the whole bit...
...Fewer than eighty bucks for dinner and a night's entertainment—by current standards, not all that bad...
...Could I help him out...
...And, clapping his hard hat on his head, he walks off briskly in the direction of the nearby Dan Ryan Expressway...
...Surprise: His wife didn't call that evening, nor did he the day after...
...I choose, however, not to go to the Gobi Desert...
...When I tell him that I have been known to do so, he begins a long and detailed story, which I shall provide here in a much-shortened version...
...I shake him off...
...He offers to get someone on his phone for me to prove his bona fides...
...I take my money clip out of my pants pocket and realize I have only twenties...
...I forked it over without hesitation...
...The towing company won't take a credit card, but insists on cash, and he is twenty-seven dollars short of the sum required...
...What the hell...
...Now, nearly five weeks later, "Nancy" seems to have forgotten to mail the check...
...Instead my wife and I were presented with a show of fairly high quality...
...He promises that "Nancy," in the office, will cut me a check for the sum in the morning...
...Please," he says, "write down your name and address, so that I know where to have the check sent...
...But for the most part I shell out my dollar or two only for the really impressive and well-made cock-and-bull stories, extravagant tales of sadness recounted with flair...
Vol. 7 • July 2002 • No. 44
