Same Kind of Different As Me (15 page)
After
the Caravan concert, I got back to the mission first. Exchanging thank-yous and good-nights, I dropped off the mission men curbside, speed-dialing Deborah’s cell phone as I pulled away.
“You’re not going to believe this!” I said when she picked up. “He talked to me!”
“Who?” she said. “I can barely hear you.” I could hear the mission women still chattering in the background.
“Denver!”
“What!”
“Denver! He came up to me after the concert and apologized for running away from us all this time. And guess what? Tomorrow, I’m taking him out to breakfast!”
“I knew it!” Deborah said. “I knew you’d make friends with him!”
She was elated. Before we went to bed that night, we prayed together that God would show us how to reach Denver, how to let him know we cared about him. Still, before I left the next morning, I warned Deborah not to get her hopes up.
When I pulled up to the mission at 8:30 sharp, Denver was waiting for me on the steps. It was the second time I had seen him neatly dressed, and the second day in a row, this time in khaki trousers and a white shirt with a button-down collar he hadn’t buttoned.
We exchanged greetings and drove with little small talk to the Cactus Flower Café, a little place I like on Throckmorton. Denver ordered eggs and grits and buttermilk, and when the waitress said they didn’t have buttermilk, I silently thanked God. When I was little, watching my dad gulp down the clabbered chunks made me gag.
The food came, followed by a lesson in patience. I was half done by the time Denver finished melting butter on his grits; I was mopping up egg yolk with my biscuit before he had taken his first bite. It took him a solid hour to eat two eggs and grits—I swear I wanted to snatch his fork away and feed him myself.
I did most of the talking, of course, asking about his family without getting too personal, a policy he reciprocated in his answers. In a quiet, country drawl, sometimes laughing and sometimes choosing his words with great caution, he sketched scenes of his past. I learned that he had been raised on a Louisiana plantation, that he’d never been to school a day in his life, and that somewhere in his late twenties—he wasn’t quite sure when—he’d hopped a freight train with less than $20 in his pocket. He had been home-less, and in and out of scrapes with the law, ever since.
Suddenly, Denver dropped his head and became silent. “What is it?” I said, concerned I might have pushed too hard. He raised his head and stared into my eyes, his own like brown lasers locked on target. In my mind, I started counting to one hundred and was past eighty when he finally spoke.
“Mind if I ask you a personal question?” he said.
“Of course not. Ask me anything you want.”
“I don’t wanna make you mad, and you don’t have to tell me nothin if you don’t want to.”
“Ask away,” I said and braced myself.
Again, a long pause. Then, softly: “What’s your name?”
“What’s my name! That’s what you wanted to ask me?”
“Yessir . . . ,” he ventured, embarrassment creeping up his cheeks. “In the circle I live in, you don’t ask nobody his name.”
Suddenly, I flashed back to the slack-jawed stares we’d encountered on our first day at the mission.
You don’t ask nobody his name . . .
“Ron Hall!” I blurted, smiling.
“Mr. Ron,” Denver replied, translating plantation-style.
“No, just Ron.”
“No, it’s
Mr.
Ron,” he repeated firmly. “What’s your wife’s name?”
“Deborah.”
“Miss Debbie,” he said warmly. “I think she’s an angel.”
“Me, too,” I said. “She just might be one.”
His obvious affection for her touched me, especially because he had never really acknowledged her.
Now, I thought I knew why. If he opened up to her, he’d blow his cover and that would threaten his survival in the jungle where he was the lion and everyone feared him. I knew after listening to his story that he’d carved out a life for himself. Though meager and pathetic from the perspective of the more fortunate, it was a life he knew how to live. After more than thirty years, he was an expert at it. God may have been calling Denver, as Deborah had been telling him, but in Denver’s view maybe God should’ve come knocking earlier.
By the time he’d finished his breakfast, my hair had grown an inch! I sensed he wasn’t through talking, but I wasn’t sure what else to say. Finally, he asked me a pointed question: “What you want from me?”
A direct hit
, I thought, and decided to give him a completely unvarnished answer: “I just want to be your friend.”
He raised his eyebrows in curious disbelief and a long moment of silence stretched between us.
“Let me think about it,” he finally said.
I didn’t feel rejected, which surprised me. Then again, I had never formally asked anyone to be my friend.
I paid the bill. Denver thanked me. As we rode back to the mission, he began to laugh. I didn’t really get the joke, but his laugh turned into a roar so robust that tears appeared in the corners of his eyes and he began to choke like he’d swallowed a frog and couldn’t catch his breath. After a block or so, I started laughing, too, at first because I was afraid not to, then naturally as his genuine mirth became contagious.
“Folks at the mission . . . ,” he sputtered, still chuckling and wiping at his eyes. “Folks at the mission thinks you and your wife is from the CIA!”
“The CIA!”
“Yessir . . . the CIA!”
“Is that what you thought, too?”
“Yes . . . ,” he said, finally able to collect himself. “Most folks that serve at the mission come once or twice and we never see em again. But you and your wife come ever week. And your wife always be askin everbody his name and his birthday . . . you know, gatherin information. Now just think about it: Why would anybody be wantin to know a homeless man’s name and birthday, if they ain’t the CIA?”
A week passed before I saw Denver again on a brilliant fall day, the sky a crisp blue. Sweater weather. Cruising down East Lancaster in the crew-cab, I spotted him standing stonelike by the Dumpster across the street from the mission. Gone was the pressed and proper cleaned-up man we had taken to the show; Denver had slipped back into his comfort zone as a vagrant.
I pulled to the curb and lowered the passenger-side window. “Hop in. Let’s go get a cup of coffee.”
I steered toward the Starbucks at University, a mall designed by Charles Hodges, an eminent Dallas–Fort Worth architect and a friend of mine. Instead of gargoyles along the eves, he’d installed replicas of the skulls of longhorn steers. Vintage Texas.
At first, Denver was quiet as we stood in line, and I found out later he was amazed that people would stand in line to pay two or three dollars for a cup of coffee that had to be ordered in a foreign language. On top of that, he got worried that the folks working the cash register were getting ready to mix it up with the folks brewing the coffee.
He elbowed me and whispered fiercely: “There’s fixin to be a rumble!”
“A rumble?”
“Yeah, ’causa all that back-talkin they doin. One says ‘decaf non-fat lattay,’ and the other one hollers it back, and another one hollers ‘frappay,’ and somebody else hollers back ‘frappay.’ That’s gang talk. That kind a’ back-talkin get you killed on the streets!” He looked genuinely concerned.
I tried explaining the strange café language that seemed to have taken over the civilized world. Then we took our coffee outside and pulled up chairs at a tiny black patio table under a green umbrella. For a few minutes, I attempted to explain what an art dealer is to a man who had never heard of Picasso. When I launched off on a tangent about French impressionism, he appeared thoroughly unimpressed, then downright bored.
I finally figured out he wasn’t listening and stopped my patter. Then things got quiet.
Denver was first to break the silence. “What’s your name again?”
“Ron.”
“And what’s your wife’s name?”
“Deborah.”
“Mr. Ron and Miss Debbie,” he said, allowing a smile to escape. “I’ll try to remember.”
Then his smile faded into seriousness, as if he’d had a rare light moment then someone had closed the blinds. He stared down at the steam rolling up from his coffee cup. “I been thinkin a lot about what you asked me.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. “What did I ask you?”
“’Bout bein your friend.”
My jaw dropped an inch. I’d forgotten that when I told him at the Cactus Flower Café that all I wanted from him was his friendship, he’d said he’d think about it. Now, I was shocked that anyone would spend a week pondering such a question. While the whole conversation had slipped my mind, Denver had clearly spent serious time preparing his answer.
He looked up from his coffee, fixing me with one eye, the other squinted like Clint Eastwood. “There’s somethin I heard ’bout white folks that bothers me, and it has to do with fishin.”
He was serious and I didn’t dare laugh, but I did try to lighten the mood a bit. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to help you,” I said, smiling. “I don’t even own a tackle box.”
Denver scowled, not amused. “I think you can.”
He spoke slowly and deliberately, keeping me pinned with that eyeball, ignoring the Starbucks groupies coming and going on the patio around us. “I heard that when white folks go fishin they do somethin called ‘catch and release.’”
Catch and release?
I nodded solemnly, suddenly nervous and curious at the same time.
“That really bothers me,” Denver went on. “I just can’t figure it out. ’Cause when colored folks go fishin, we really proud of what we catch, and we take it and show it off to everybody that’ll look. Then we eat what we catch . . . in other words, we use it to
sustain
us. So it really bothers me that white folks would go to all that trouble to catch a fish, then when they done caught it, just throw it back in the water.”
He paused again, and the silence between us stretched a full minute. Then: “Did you hear what I said?”
I nodded, afraid to speak, afraid to offend.
Denver looked away, searching the blue autumn sky, then locked onto me again with that drill-bit stare. “So, Mr. Ron, it occurred to me: If you is fishin for a friend you just gon’ catch and release, then I ain’t got no desire to be your friend.”
The world seemed to halt in midstride and fall silent around us like one of those freeze-frame scenes on TV. I could hear my heart pounding and imagined Denver could see it popping my breast pocket up and down. I returned Denver’s gaze with what I hoped was a receptive expression and hung on.
Suddenly his eyes gentled and he spoke more softly than before: “But if you is lookin for a
real
friend, then I’ll be one. Forever.”
I’m gon
’ tell you right now what I first thought about Mr. Ron askin me would I be his friend: I didn’t like it. Why would he want to be my friend? That’s what I was thinkin. What does he want? Everybody want somethin. Why don’t he pick somebody else? Why
I
got to be his friend?
You got to understand that by that time, I had layers of street on me a mile thick. Some homeless folks got lotsa friends, but I hadn’t ever let nobody get that close. It wadn’t that I was worried about gettin hurt or nothin like that. Bein a friend is a heavy commitment. In a way, even more than a husband or a wife. And I was selfish. I could take care a’ myself, and I didn’t need nobody else’s baggage. Besides that, friendship to me means more than just somebody to talk to, or run with, or hang with.
Bein friends is like being soldiers in the army. You live together; you fight together; you die together. I knowed Mr. Ron wadn’t fixin to come up outta no bushes and help me fight.
But then I got to thinkin about him some more and thought maybe we might have somethin to offer each other. I could be his friend in a different way than he could be my friend. I knowed he wanted to help the homeless, and I could take him places he couldn’t go by hisself. I didn’t know what I might find in his circle or even that I had any business bein there, but I knowed he could help me find out whatever was down that road.
The way I looked at it, a fair exchange ain’t no robbery, and a even swap ain’t no swindle. He was gon’ protect me in the country club, and I was gon’ protect him in the hood. Even swap, straight down the line.
“
If you
is lookin for a
real
friend, then I’ll be one. Forever.”
As Denver’s words echoed in my head, it occurred to me that I could not recall ever having heard any pronouncement on friendship more moving or profound than what I’d just heard from the mouth of a vagabond. Humbled, all I could do in return was make a simple, but sincere, promise: “Denver, if you’ll be my friend, I promise not to catch and release.”
He put out his hand and we shook. Then, like a sunrise, a grin lit Denver’s face and we stood, facing each other, and hugged. In that moment, the fear and distrust that had hulked like an iceberg between us melted on the warm patio outside Starbucks.
Beginning that day, we became the new odd couple, Denver and I. A couple of times a week, I’d swing by the mission and pick him up, and we’d head out to a coffeehouse, a museum, or a café. Deborah, meanwhile, urged me on, praying deep roots for the friendship she’d prayed would bud in the first place. After our catch-and-release chat, Denver’s sulking silence thawed into a gentle shyness. “Did you see how Denver said hi in the supper line?” she’d say, eyes shining. “I think you’re really making progress.”