A Sunday outing - Saving the guy at the bus bench

Well, it’s high noon on Sunday and Mary, Darren, and I are each standing beside our cars in the parking lot of the New Life church. It’s going to be hot today., real hot -like 100° hot and humid. .We have some food for the homeless and we are getting our plan together. We decide to take Darren‘s car and so we load everything in there , and as we are doing that, a friend of mine, Bryan rolls up - he has gone through his closets and found some clothing that we can give out, so we throw that in the car too.

We roll on downtown and wind up at a rectangular spot between two huge office buildings. There are some carport like structures there, providing shade, some tables and chairs, and some porta potties. At the end of the lot I see a trailer that says “free showers“ but as I get closer, I see it is defunct and nonworking. Darren has gotten our food out of the car. Mary is setting it up on the table. We have a large crate of individually, packaged sweets- things like rolls of cookies, sweet rolls in  bags, Twinkies, croissants two in a bag, etc. we also have a whole case of Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain bars in 10 bar packages. Another charity is there, and they have brought bags of something like hamburgers, it looks like they may be McDonald related as the bags have the golden arches on them. A troop of young folks show up (see  a picture of me with them below) they have three large flats of peanut butter sandwiches wrapped up in foil. The guy from the charity that brought the McDonald’s stuff wants to do a little street preaching so he starts in. Our friends sit at the tables and chairs under the shade shelters and watch him, some seem interested some not. When he gets done it’s time to eat. Everybody forms a line. They get a burger bag, a bottle of water, a peanut butter sandwich, some bagged sweets, and a Nutra grain bar. I talked to the kids who brought the peanut butter sandwiches who were standing in a group and ask them about their charity. They have a little charity that is mainly self funded by themselves, but once in a while they get donations, and sometimes they have a little charity event. I tell them that our charity the G&D  humanitarian charity has money to give to small charities like theirs and I hand them a card, and tell them that if they contact us, we’ll see what we can do for them. I also do the same for the guy with the hamburger bags who seems more interested, he is trying to show me on his phone a picture of his website, but it is so intensely bright down there. I can’t see anything. I tell him that if he contacts us, we will most probably be able to give him some money to do what he is doing. (it has been our experience that many people won’t even bother to contact us., can’t figure out why - we usually give them an initial contribution of $500 to start, and basically all we ask is some evidence that they are doing what they’re doing)

I’m standing next to Mary and things are beginning to wind down when some woman comes up to me and screams at me ,” I hate white people!” And spits at me. Fortunately., the wind is blowing in a fortuitous way for me and I do not get baptized. She storms off and as she goes I yell at her “ I love you, and I’m going to pray for you“. She turns and yells back, “I don’t want any of your damn prayers.“ Mary, who is black has probably gotten some of this treatment from time to time in her life, and when you deal with street people you get kind of immune to this stuff. Most of them are very nice, and grateful, and friendly, but there are a few who are just plain crazy, and angry, and bitter. We don’t see them every trip but once in a while. I turn  to Mary and say.,” you know, Dr. Martin Luther King, the day before he died, gave a speech, and he said that we must judge everyone by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, and I think that that person must have missed the message. Mary nods. What else can you say?

We have gotten everybody fed here and there are peanut butter sandwiches left and Mary has a case of Lipton sweet tea bottles in the car, so we decide to head out to another location and give out what we have. We roll up and park in a  lot “Mary yells out, brothers. We have some food for you!” The parking lot is a whole block long and as we look down to the other side, we see two guys come shuffling toward us. They are walking like the zombies in the movie “Night of the Living Dead “. In some ways, the  title of the movie is appropriate here - except it’s not night time.

I look up and see that we are at 300 east Cesar Chavez St. Across the street from the Baptist soup kitchen. Three blocks West is I 35 and three blocks beyond that at 300 W. Caesar Chavez Street is the epicenter for a whole bunch of premium hotels where the larger charities like to have their fundraising galas. It’s gala season and probably over there at the JW Marriott the waiters are setting up in the ballroom for tonight‘s event. The rich will gather for their cocktail hour, have their very nice meal, and dancing afterward - they’ll be all be dressed up, semi formal or formal. What a difference between there and where I am standing . Six blocks. Each group really has no conception of what it is really like for the other group.

We make another stop further down the street. Mary and Darren head off with the sandwiches and drinks. I’ll stay by the car cause I’m starting to run down. I notice a guy sitting on the bench at the bus stop. He is homeless. There is a little fence between him and I -it  goes up to my knees .  I yell out, “hey brother, we have food for you!“ No response, he is just sitting there with his head down on his chest. I get right up to the fence and I yell “Dude, we have some free food for you here!!“ No response. I am beginning to think that this guy either passed out from from the heat, or maybe he is dead. And I climb over the fence and get right next to him and yell out again. No response. Finally, I poke him with my index finger and his eyes open and I tell him again about the free food and he stands up. I signal Mary and point to the guy and she comes over with the peanut butter sandwiches and drinks and hands this guy some. We head off back to the car and Mary and I turn around for one last look at the guy, he is standing there pouring a bottle of water over his head, and it is cascading down over the front of him and back of him. (or maybe it is the Lipton iced tea we just gave him). Mary says, “he’s trying to cool down“ and I say yeah.

We still have some sandwiches left so somebody says, “let’s go to St. John’s“. St. John’s is not a church or recreation center. It is actually a Mobile gas station at the corner of St. John’s Avenue and the  W. Access Rd. of I 35 - some of the most raggedy people in Austin congregate there. Same drill as before., but a woman comes up to us and she has that wild, distant, scared , hungry look in her eyes. Mary hands her a sandwich and a Lipton. Mary sees it too and hands her a sandwich and a drink.The woman says, “thank you, thank you. Oh thank you“ probably hasn’t eaten in a while. Mary hands are two or three more sandwiches. She looks like she’s going to start crying.

Well, we’ve given all we had and it’s time to roll on home. We get to my house and Mary and Darren drop me off. I get up to the front door and punch in the code for the electronic lock and I open the door and a big blast the cool air hits me in the face, I get over to refrigerator for some crushed ice, and I have a drinks refrigerator where I keep all my drinks. I grab all that and sit down. I think how incredibly lucky I am to be able do what I have just done, (the part with the ice and the drinks refrigerator) but  the other part too. I’m glad that we got to that guy on the bus bench, he might’ve just stayed like that till he lapsed into a coma and died from the heat. I ask Alexa, what’s the weather?. She says it’s 98° out and the humidity is high and the temperature is supposed to get higher. I drink my iced energy drink, and think how lucky I am again to have it and  air conditioning. I wonder if others sitting at other bus benches will die today from the heat. Probably so, - because that is the way it really is out on the street. —-George

To be or not to be, deciding whether to kill yourself. 

HI haven’t been sharing too much here on Facebook lately, I usually let Dianne do it, but Dianne says I need to tell you all some more  more things, so I thought I’d write about what I did yesterday because I think it is typical of some of the problems that I encounter in directly interacting with our homeless.

St Andrews Church down the road from us here, each Thursday night provides a meal for the homeless, washes their clothes, gives them donated clothes, and everybody can have a shower if he or she wishes. I only get down there occasionally, because quite frankly by that time of the day, I’m pretty exhausted. What with the cancer and all the drugs that I am taking. A few days before Thursday, I started getting some strong feelings indicating that I needed to get on down there that  Thursday evening . Some might call it a hunch, and once I wrote a little story that was published in a magazine about a teenage girl who kept recieving “Cosmic etherons” which helped her out so maybe it was that, or maybe it was just Jesus sending me some signals - the explanation is the one I have come to ptrfer. Thursday about noon time I actually was feeling pretty great, and I noticed that I really was walking around pretty good - not my usual Charlie Chaplin gait. When I go there to Andrews I always like to bring them some nice stuff - had some of those really great gourmet muffins from Costco, the chocolate ones with nuts and chocolate chunks in them, and some artisan breads and some other stuff.

 Later  I found myself standing there at Andrews drinking some of that blue Gatorade that they had and sweating profusely like I usually do because of the pills. Suddenly  I noticed someone standing right next to me. I have noticed in dealing with the homeless that some of them are quite shy and when they want to talk to you, they will just stand there to see whether you will walk away or actually engage them in conversation. 

She was small and stature and thin as  a rail, maybe one or two steps up from some  of those pictures from the concentration camps at the end of World War II. I said, “I’m George. Would you like talk about some stuff?“  And so she did. I said to her let’s go and find a little quiet spot where we can talk. We sat down  and I said, “how are you doing? What’s been going on with you?” ., to which she replied, “I almost killed myself last night, but Jesus told me not to“. I encouraged her most strongly to get some professional  counseling, I would help her- she would have none of that.I told her that I absolutely knew that Jesus did not want her to kill herself and  I told her that I sensed that she was a really good woman but just having some very hard times, and things were going to get better for her.(that last bit after the comma was maybe a lie, but nevertheless, I hope it will be so.) I I told her about the serenity prayer ( if you don’t know what that is Google it will probably help you out too even if you’re an atheist) I told I would like us to be friends that I really cared about her and didn’t want her to do anything to harm herself because I loved her  and really cared about her. After a while, it was time for our conversation to be over. She was next in the shower line didn’t want to miss her place. 

She asked me for a Bible, and felt that if she had one, and was feeling like she wanted to harm herself, she could read the Bible and it would help her out. I did not have any in the car, but we were sitting next to St Andrews library , - they have lots of books there pertaining to all things to do with religion and I was looking around for a Bible in the library,  suddenly I saw something with an orange cover that said ,” a woman’s Bible“. Perfect, so I stole it. Jolie said., Write something in it so anybody will know that I did not steal it. I wrote some really nice stuff that that took up the whole title page, and as I was doing that, I noticed a sticker that said that it belonged to our associate pastor Babbs. Whoops. So it just went on permanent loan to Jolie, I’ll take it up with Babbs when I get the chance, she is a good person, and I think she will probably be pleased to know that her Bible might keep Jolie from killing herself, what could be better than that ? Soon it was time for me to gather up the remnants of stuff that I brought, so that I could use it at my (and my two great friends)little ministry under the I 35 Bridge across from the police station on Saturday. As I said, I had some of those gourmet muffins from Costco, the ones that are chocolate and have some chocolate pieces in them and some nuts. As I was going  out I asked Jolie if she would like a couple of extra muffins, and she said, “can I have the whole tray?” and I said sure cause we’re friends now we’re gonna look out after each other. Jolie smiled, and at that time I knew that I had broken through. I also had one of those really great artisan breads because I thought Andrews was were going to have a casserole instead of hamburgers, and hot dogs  with potato salad. I asked her if she wanted to take the loaf of bread. She said, “can I really?” I said sure what did I just say? We’re now friends and gonna take care of each other. Bigger smile. Then she said “this stuff will last me a week”We said goodbye. 

I decided I’m going to go back next week and see how she is no matter how tired I feel, and I’m going to bring some Ensure and hope that I can get her to take it and drink it. She is so skinny. I’m praying that she will be there, and if you are so inclined, I hope you will pray that she will be there too. I really, really hope so. Or maybe she might have killed herself. Stay tuned the story is not over.