I ride my bike and I'm not a generous person. If Mother Teresa were the norm she wouldn't be a saint; as it stands, altruism - moreso as we get increasingly self-involved (more preoccupied by Twitter-et-al) - is the exception and so as a less than altruistuic existence I am the norm.
I thought I should do something about this, you know, work on it. DO SOMETHING. So when there was born a locally-based bicycle advocacy bit of action, I figured this was my moment. It requires very little of me, nothing at all really but to show up to the occasional city council meeting to prove there are actual people who need them to vote yes on things that might help their citizens to stay alive whilst on their bikes. As Woody Allen says, "Eighty percent of success is showing up."
I happen to live in a community that is kissing the bottom of the Country's Worst Drivers list, several years running.
I met Alan in one of these meetings, or through this process in some way. Or a mutual friend brought him by my idle place of employment one day and introduced us. The three of us talked for over an hour and it was a very good first conversation, the kind you have with old friends over beers at two a.m. But I didn't know Alan then and sensed a bit of unsure volatility about him, so I wasn't, you know, sure.
Alan, older than me, was a musician and not regularly employed by any means. From what I could gather he'd fallen into a bit of debt and was contemplating a move into his car to cut his bills and pay it down. So soon after I met this person I was already unsure about he was now living in his car.
Soon after this, we were at another meeting about bicycles and I joked with him about being homeless and he got very offended and we didn't talk for a long time, not until a good chunk of meetings later when I approached him and apologized.
Our mutual acquaintance, Google, is a really good, nice young man about half Alan's age. Conversations began regarding Alan's mental instability and one day in my in-box was a list of terms/ailments/illnesses, all psychological and standard, and they were supposed to be all the things he decided Alan was.
I, of course, am Little Bored Fauntleroy, and it is exactly this kind of judgement/categorization that has been my undoing. What I mean is I have suffered these sorts of "decisions" and have been deeply damaged by them. So began our Constant Debate. Because I could easily be every one of those "ailments." And so can you. So can most of us, all of us; it's called the Human Condition.
So I took up the good fight in Alan's defense and in doing so, in this task alone, came to see Alan very differently. Because I was doing that to him, too, I was seeing him as homeless, as that simple one dimension that I both decided and dismissed.
Google and I went round-and-round on this for the next year or more, every so often. He wouldn't budge, because Google can be that way a little bit. He's not yet learned that there is a world beyond his own idea of a world. You have to get the shit kicked out of you a little bit before you learn that one, and he's smart and easily employable, not like Alan - who was smart but not as easily employable, or your master of ceremonies who is neither smart nor employable, and who can also double as a cautionary tale. We never got around to getting real jobs because we just wanted to be artists. And now we're just old.
The point is I saw that I was doing to Alan what so fucked with me, that everyone was doing that to him - deciding he should get help, live in an apartment like normal people and get a job like normal people and talk to you all the time no matter what like a normal person AND WHO THE FUCK DECIDED WHAT THIS NORMAL WAS versus who Alan was.
So I realized what I could do for Alan was take Alan exactly as Alan was and not want him to be or become anyone else.
This occurred to me over the winter when I was having my illustrious breakdown (see chapter 1). Google took to feeding the homeless and he'd book a breakfast and then after he'd call and ask if I wanted to get up at four in the morning to help him, and all I'm thinking is No, I don't want to get up at four in the morning to feed the fucking homeless because he knows I can't get up early to save my life and I was having this breakdown and couldn't function anyway and mostly I felt like I was being guilted into it and fuck him.
Of course, it's hard to be that way about a very nice person who gets up at four a.m. to feed homeless people, I'm just saying.
So I started thinking - well - why am I feeding homeless strangers when we have Alan standing right here? And Alan, trust me, asked for nothing. He was always clean shaven, always showered, always generous, and asked for nothing from anyone. He didn't do drugs and didn't drink. It had been a couple of years now and he had paid off his debt, and now was putting money away. He collected unemployment and sometimes did extra's work. Mostly, his day had become a well-honed routine of cycling from church to church ( where meals were served) to events (he was social and kept up his contacts). Neither of us spent money, so if we were hanging out with other cyclists who decided to get some food somewhere, Alan and I would split. We were both very disciplined this way; I've never made more than thirty thousand a year, and I've never lived beyond my means. No cable, no computer, no cell phone, thrift stores, used CD's sometimes, though it's been a few years since I got one.
So life goes on and I think, shit it's been a rough winter, maybe a little fun would be nice. But I'm too cheap to have fun, and Alan was there and I thought he really needed some fun, some no-strings attached appreciation, a bit of splurge and lightness. So I hatched a plan to start leaving him anonymous gift-cards at Google's house, where Alan picked up his mail. The first one was Trader Joe's and it was for six dollars, I'm pretty sure. I figured if he didn't use it it'd be no great loss. I immediately regretted it - not because of Alan, but because Google (only in my opinion) set off or fed the fire of suspicion and what was intended to be a hassle-free bit of fun instead became a voracious who-dunnit. It ruined the whole thing and shifted the focus from the intended fun of the matter to an incredible amount of energy and conversation devoted to who the donor was. Of course they decided it was me and it was just an awful turn of events that I denied to the end.
A week or so later Alan called me from Trader Joe's, and it was Alan perusing the aisles of Trader Joe's reading off items of possible interest. It was very funny.
Oh, right: I chose Trader Joe's because I ride through their alley to get home and would most often run into Alan in that alley.
A month or two later, a four dollar gift card to Starbucks showed up at Google's house for Alan. There was no discussion after this one.
Alan came by work one afternoon and we hung out for a while, chatted, idly, pleasantly, about nothing at all, but these little conversations were changing me. The more I interacted with him the more I grew to respect him. I mean, here's Alan living in his car and when you talk to him he never blamed anyone for anything - he always took responsibility for his actions. He would say, I think So-and-So is mad at me; when he talked to me that day I was in a bad place and overreacted and snapped at him.
You have to understand, I'd been around the likes of the narcissistic psychopath for ten years, someone who could never offer a sentence or sentiment without padding it with enough crap to own not a single action of her own doing. She had conversational subterfuge perfected; she'd never say 'that person I shouldn't be talking to,' no there was always the ever-present slight of hand to shift the action verb onto someone else: 'that person you don't think I should be talking to.' She never said something wrong, it was 'maybe I said something they took wrongly.' She was never the action of her own actions, not once.
Add this to The Los Angeles Times, the business section every Sunday. There's some kind of money management column or something, I don't know what it is. And these people are five times more in debt than Alan ever was, and they're about to go bankrupt and lose their house, and they're talking about not wanting to give up the gym membership, or the spa treatments, or the cable TV, or the Guatemalan maid and these fucking moronic assholes deserve to lose their lives!
Alan wasn't any of this. He owned every sentence, gesture, action with deep and graceful honesty.
I opened up for work one afternoon and there was an envelope that had dropped through the mail slot and in it was the gift cards and on the envelope Alan had written that I was a good friend but he just didn't play this. Love, Alan. And I was depressed as shit, and it was that moment I know I was wrong, it was Alan who was in some way my redemption. And I wondered if I was using him.
But I kept the cards and added the one from Whole Foods that I'd just gotten , six dollars. Because I fucked up, I made it a game, not anyone but me, and now he thought it was charity, but it wasn't it was just supposed to be a moment of funfuckingfun.
A few weeks later I saw Alan in the alley at Trader Joe's. It's funny because he had a lock on his bike but he wouldn't just lock it up, he would hide it in the trees. I locked my bike up and went into TJ's to find him but to no avail. He was outside and it was hot and I had an hour to kill before work so I invited him upstairs for some water. We talked for about an hour and we never talked about the cards but it was a really good conversation because I was getting it now and could walk to his rhythm now and I very much enjoyed it.
Because he figured it out. He was telling me how he would get food stamps, but because he ate at churches he gave them his food stamps. He kept nothing extra for himself, nothing he didn't need and all this other interesting shit about how he thinks he creates his own roadblocks, you know, all this shit no one would admit about themselves because they have to look good or they're simply in denial, and suddenly I'm realizing Alan is like the sanest person I know. Alan is saner than the psychopathic narcissist who is a millionaire and those assholes in the LA Times and all of them, and no one but me gets this. And now I really like myself just for getting it, and I have to go to work and the cards were never mentioned but I'm into it now. I'm riding down the alley now hoping to see him for the next installment of this ongoing conversation, that I deeply respect him and that the cards were never about charity but respect, permission to take a break from it all and have a moment of fun. And maybe he'd even take them back (but probably not).
So, let's just cut to it. On his birthday last week Alan was killed on his bicycle, and I've been going out at night at these really random hours riding my bike and crying and I can't stop.