THE WAY WE LIVE Paranoia and Peanut Butter Sandwiches

Two women came to the door one evening. My wife answered. They said they were lost and out of gas and needed to use the phone. I was at the back of the house, listening. My first thought was, Oh yeah sure, just use the phone and then chop our heads off and take the TV why don’t you?

But before I could get up there my wife already had handed the cordless phone out the door. I wanted to cut our losses, bar the door and let them keep the phone, but my wife reached back out, retrieved it and wished them well.

“Jim, they had their children in the car, and they were scared to death,” she said.

Well, fine. Just paint a big V on my forehead for villain.

But the previous person-in-need-at-the-door had been the young woman who jammed on the doorbell and, when we opened the door, started screaming, “My baby’s got a hole in his heart,” so that we were all running around flapping like chickens with our heads cut off, looking for…what? A cork? Finally I asked what we could do for her and she said 20 bucks.

When I was a kid in a little town in central Michigan, my mother used to give peanut butter sandwiches to the bums. The freight train that came to our town every morning was still pulled by a steam engine. Some days in the summer I went to the rail yard by myself to watch it roll in from the farm land in its own thunder-head of steam and sparks.

The point being, I was often at the yard when the bums arrived. I saw them hop down from the slow-rolling boxcars and lope off through the shacks and sidings like foxes breaking for a hayfield.

Once in a while I followed them. They kept trotting until they were safely out of the rail yard. Then they stopped at the sidewalk and looked around quickly for cops. I stayed a block behind while they began walking. They took a hard left at the first corner, a right at the dogleg, walked straight down Wright Avenue past the Episcopal church where my father was the rector, across the street, down the driveway, and there they all were, standing at my own backdoor, wringing their caps in their hands like raccoons. Some days I felt like getting in line behind them.

Here were guys coming in from the ranches of Montana, the streets of Chicago, the deserts of New Mexico, who knows where else, and as soon as they got to this little burg out in the middle of the Michigan sugar beet fields, they all knew exactly how to find Mrs. Schutze’s peanut butter sandwiches.

My older brother told me some of the neighbors thought our mother was attracting bums to the area, which he thought was ridiculous. I kept my own counsel, but I agreed with the neighbors. I thought she was turning us into Bum Central.

For all my embarrassment over it, I understand now what the experience meant. As a child, I saw someone I loved and respected extend mercy to other human beings. I admire my mother now for having been that way. There are days when I wish I could be the same way.

But I can’t. The danger is: If you slip somebody a five or a sandwich, you’ve got the guy living in your alley forever. The game of lite in the city is intense. The stakes are high.

Someone out there will want to tell me how all these people are victims of politics and would all be tool-and-die makers in the aviation industry if it weren’t for Ronald Reagan. There probably are guys like that. I’m not talking about those guys. I’m talking about shiftless people.

I happen to know a thing or two about the guys I’m talking about, because I get a lot of chances to chat with them, because my wife hires them.

Like the guy she hired to clean the leaves out of the rain gutters two stories up on our roof. No ladder, of course. Doesn’t use them. His technique is to climb up trees, jump over to the roof and then lie on his belly with his face hanging out over the edge and throw down the leaf mold and other yuck from the gutters by the fistful.

Assured me: “Don’t worry, sir. Even if I fall off, I would never sue you.”

He wore a regular shirt, what appeared to be pajama bottoms and bedroom slippers. Several weeks after I got him down off my roof, I received a call from a man three blocks up who said, “1 hired a fellow here to clean out my gutters, said he worked for you, and he borrowed my ladder, but I haven’t seen him in a couple days or the ladder, either.”

Yeah, right. Lend your ladder to a man in pajama bottoms. Then call me about it.

The ladder got home. That guy was of the benign element within the overall shiftless community. It’s the ones like the hole-in-t he-heart-baby woman who are so frightening. It takes a lot of chutzpah to come up on the porch of strangers, and then run a boldfaced jumping-up-and-down screaming scam on them. You never know when that kind of nerve or desperation might turn into something uglier.

For years the paradigm for human relations in the urban jungle was the Kitty Genovese incident: In 1964. the 28-year-old woman was fatally stabbed while her New York City neighbors ignored her pleas for help and hid behind their window curtains, afraid to get involved.

I remember reading that story as an 18-year-old, just ready to launch out into the universe of adult responsibility. I simply could not fathom that kind of callousness. But then look at what 1 had to judge the world by-a youth spent following bums around fanning communities.

Now, with many more years of urban life behind me in a couple of fairly tough cities, 1 discover a terrible truth about myself: I still do not condone the cowardice of Kitty Genovese’s neighbors. But I understand it,

The city is a complex, densely woven, high-pressure ecosystem. Life can be great. Life can be very bad. Introduce a single new element into the flow of things-peanut butter sandwiches from the porch-and you change the pattern of the weave. To survive, you have to pick your moments very carefully. You have to turn a deaf ear and a blind eye a lot of the time.

You want to think you will go out. into the street when you hear a scream for help. But you don’t want to hire a guy in his pajama pants to work on your roof. At least 1 don’t. Maybe, as Shakespeare said, the quality of mercy is not strained, but I say sooner or later you still have to put a lid on it. Obviously it is my fate to live with people who disagree with me.