After the last set of call boxes I ducked under a bridge for the commuter rail line. I noticed a man sitting on the curb on the block in front of me. He was wearing a knit cap—that’s all my memory shows me now, except that he was African-American. I vowed right then and there that I wasn’t going to be the typical white university student who’d look away. And I wasn’t going to turn around and run back to the emergency call boxes.
I went ahead.
The man looked up at me; I looked down at him.
“Hey, can you help me out? My car broke down.”
I smiled—I must have smiled. I was prepared. I said: “I know you really want a drink. I’ll give you some money, but we have to drink together.”
That’s what I said—it was matter-of-fact and to the point.
It also was staged.
I had been rehearsing the line ever since I had managed a homeless shelter a year before graduate school. I felt important with the homeless; I was bigger in their world, almost like Superman: a normal person on his home planet but able to leap tall buildings on the otherwise alien Earth.
Besides, I was buying the booze—I knew the homeless usually don’t reject that kind of mercy. My newfound friend and I walked deep into the South Side, where bookstores gave way to row homes and flats. We ended up at a liquor store with a long line—a security guard let in a couple of customers at a time. Nods, quick handshakes, and a “Hey, brother,” told me that my companion was a regular.
I asked what people wanted to drink: “Whiskey!” “Rum!” “Beer!” came in rapid sequence. But looking in my pocket, I discovered that I had less cash than I thought.
“It’s going to be Thunderbird,” my companion said as he saw my rumpled dollar bills.
I knew about Thunderbird—the cheapest wine there was, the kind that hadn’t even been introduced to a real grape.
“We need Kool-Aid,” someone else added. “It’ll take away the bite.”
But where were we going find that? No problem: first liquor store I’d ever seen that displayed Kool-Aid packages on the counter by the cash register—you could pick them up easily when you got your fifth of Thunderbird handed to you.
We got our supplies and about five of us walked into the night together. We put the Kool-Aid in the Thunderbird, and watched it swirl and dissolve. We passed it around, mouth to mouth—I thought it bad form to wipe down the bottle before taking a swig.
Our “church” was an empty lot with a chain-link fence and our “sacrament” tasted like cherries and oranges more than grapes. Maybe it wasn’t Communion, but it was a communion, I was sure of that—even when we started walking down the street together and I lost track of the group and had to hail a cab to get back to my apartment.
The next day, I realized that alcohol wasn’t exactly the universal solvent that could dissolve distinctions of race and class—after all, I woke up in a bed, with a blanket, and there was a roof over my head, even as terrible as I felt. But maybe, I thought, just maybe I had performed an act of mercy, beyond simply buying the booze.
I had shown the homeless that I cared, that I was willing to share.
It was the mercy that mattered—not the uncomfortable fact that I couldn’t remember anyone’s name.
I wasn’t the type attracted to the Polynesian novelty drinks, not at Ciral’s House of Tiki, not anyplace else, but I knew the House of Tiki was there for me. I never had a zombie—with its seven kinds of liquor—and didn’t feel the urge to stick my face into a flaming Scorpion bowl. I kept to Jack Daniels and chasers of Miller Draft—plunking down enough scholarship cash on the bar to keep the drinks coming.
When I loosened up, I’d even talk to the barman.
I think the barman and Ciral were actually the same person—but I never asked. In any case, it was the same barman every time I went in. He wore a floral Hawaiian shirt. His beard and mustache were well trimmed, and his brown-black hair was slicked back, curling midway down his neck.
One night, I asked whether it was true that Mayor Harold Washington used to stop by for a drink after hours. No such thing ever happened, the barman said. Another night, I tried laying the groundwork for an extended discussion:
“Wasn’t this the setting for a shootout filmed for the movie The Package? Gene Hackman, right?”
I thought of the spiky blowfish lamps exploding with gunshots and the air thick with flying bamboo splinters and spinning drink coasters.
“No,” the barman said, “we only appeared for a couple of minutes in the film.”
I quickly drained my beer glass and left.
But I would be back soon enough.
The best thing about the House of Tiki was that it had beer to go, and it was open till four in the morning. The beer would keep me going until five, which was when I started to feel hungry. I liked frying up steak and eggs at dawn’s light, even though I’d have to first wipe down the plates smeared with the mold growing in my kitchen sink.
I wasn’t exactly born with a silver spoon in my mouth—more like a book in my hand. I was an adopted child, christened to be an academic. The one thing I knew about my time in the orphanage attached to a Catholic home for unwed mothers is that the Sisters of Providence insisted that I be put into a family with a professor: evidently, my birth mother was particularly bright, and the sisters assumed that her intellect had been passed down to me. Although this meant that I had to wait longer to be adopted, it was intended as a mercy: even if I didn’t have a God-given birth family to take care of me, I would still find my God-given abilities nurtured.
And sure enough, here I was in graduate school.
But I didn’t cook high-end fusion cuisine; I didn’t frequent wine tastings; I didn’t go to French film festivals. I ate breakfast like a farmer, like a truck driver. At night, I went to dive bars like the House of Tiki and favored Everyman actors like Gene Hackman.
I had a double life, and the flip side of my bookish coin was rougher and grittier than my classmates and advisers could imagine when they saw me in those shiny black loafers. The homeless were a relief from all that graduate-school posturing and posing.
Maybe, I realized, the homeless were the ones who sensed where I was coming from.
Maybe they were the ones who showed me the mercy, not the other way around.
A couple weeks after drinking with the homeless, I made my usual visit to the all-night grocery store for my breakfast routine. I got London broil, a dozen eggs, a brick of American cheese, and put it all in a basket. I felt good—it was the kind of drunk when I didn’t feel quite drunk, just calm and collected. It was a surprise when I saw a security guard shadowing me. But no matter—like any normal customer, I engaged in some polite conversation with the woman at the cash register.
I tasted
