Giving Selfishly

In general, my interactions with Palo Alto’s street people usually involve some discomfort. I come out from dinner at Plutos, or Pasta?, and there they are, sitting on benches in front of Starbucks, bundled in tattered layers with matted hair and bad teeth, wielding shopping carts or sturdy backpacks.

Then there’s the euphemistic conversation:
“Have any spare change?” a walrus-y voice asks, hand outstretched, usually reaching up from a stoop. (This really means “Give me money.”) Then comes my answer – “No, sorry,” I mumble, face turned half away, my steps quick and jerky, my arm tight against purse or pocket. (This really means “Yes, I do have money, but I don’t want to give it to you, I won’t, I don’t trust your motives, get a job,” which I suspect, deep down, may really be short for, “Yes, I’m a selfish, greedy, sheltered little white girl.”) Then comes the final sally – “God bless you,” usually said quietly but with heart, as eyes follow me off along the sidewalk (This is meant to inspire guilt, and actually means “God have mercy on your soul, you liar and hypocrite. I am a person too.”)

I was filling out a scholarship application spring quarter of my senior year that left a whole page of space for “significant community service work.” I stared at my computer, winding my thumbs around each other and chewing on the bottom left corner of my mouth for a few long, spacey moments before starting to type. Twenty minutes later, the only bullet point read, “Participated in a collection of food, clothing, and miscellaneous items for the homeless and needy of our area.” (i.e. "threw some old clothes and an alarm clock into the homeless shelter bin last spring because I didn’t feel like packing them up and putting them in storage.") With the scholarship due in a few days, I replied to one of the “Volunteer!” (Meaning, “pad your resumes and applications with good-looking helpful stuff”) emails that get stuffed into my inbox semi-regularly. The project was feeding breakfast to a homeless shelter in Palo Alto.

I dressed that morning in a tank top and skirt, then changed my mind and put on jeans and sleeves. Something about the concept of “Homeless Shelter” struck me as dirty, and covered skin felt like a safer shield from parasites and perverts. We’d cooked big vats of eggs the night before, cracking dozens and dozens into huge bowls to be scrambled. I kept getting yolk in my fingers and my fingers in the whites, and shells in the bowl, filled so deep with egg that each new batch of yolks was hard to find and crush and mix in with the rest. “It doesn’t matter if there are shells,” I’d thought. “It’s such a big bowl.” Or maybe the thought was something like, “What does it matter – they’re homeless. They’ll be grateful no matter what.” This hadn’t rested easily in my mind, and I’d shaken my head to rattle it out.
I was nervous – why should I be nervous? I climbed into the middle seat of a fairly ritzy car, and suddenly wondered how it how it would look when five charmed Stanford kids rolled up to the dilapidated building framed by peeling green paint and unstable loiterers (this was how the building looked in my mind) in this big Mercedes SUV, or whatever it was. The nerves kept making guerilla attacks on my consciousness. Or was it my conscience?
I stared out the window but noticed nothing on the short drive from campus to the shelter. What if they crowded around me and fought over breakfast? Would I meet them, or just serve food? Would they recognize me as being the girl who never gave money? Would they call me out? I’d read somewhere that a third of schizophrenics are homeless, or vice versa – maybe it was that a third of homeless people are schizophrenics. Maybe they’d be talking to themselves, rocking back and forth in line. The idea of being so close to madness fascinated me. I had a sudden urge to hear their stories. In my mind we sat at an old, rattling table with a dent in it and the edge of the tabletop peeling off, me and a wild-haired man with blue eyes, as he told me, in a toothless drawl mediated by tics and twitches, about a good life gone horribly wrong.

Palo Alto must be a fairly nice place for homeless people – warm most of the year, clean streets, rich yuppies and decorated trees. Back in Pittsburgh, I used to wonder why they didn’t migrate with the seasons – I’d see them on the streets in January, red from the cold, but a shade darker from dirt, and patchy where stubble grew on their chins and pavement eroded their cheeks. In Pittsburgh, they had gimmicks. Sombrero Man wore a big Mexican hat and sat on Forbes all day, shaking maracas at college students. Sometimes he slouched beneath the awning of Vera Cruz, with the lounging toreador painted on the side of it, as if he’d just finished posing for an outrageously dishonest portrait. There was another guy known for the box of candy – cheap candy, Halloween lollypops in November and candy canes in January – that always sat next to him. No one ever took the candy, of course and I used to wonder if he noticed how much we snubbed his gift.

My mind was still on full blast as we pulled to the curb in front of a surprisingly new looking building. As per my vision, there were a few unusual people standing around. One silently opened the door for us. Another smiled and tipped his head, but the third ignored us, staring out into the space above the street. I unloaded two foil-covered trays of eggs and one of pancakes and walked it to the door. As I was passing the door holder, my purse slipped down over my shoulder, and as I jerked toward him to keep the breakfast balanced, the purse fringe leaping out as if to taunt him, the tag thrust into his face. I was embarrassed. “Don’t worry,” I wanted to say, conspiratorially, “It’s not really Prada. I got it on a street corner of New York three summers ago.”

I walked inside slowly, giving the other members of my group enough time to catch up and cover my back. My eyebrows lifted as I passed a room labeled “daycare” with finger paintings on the walls and bright plastic bins of toys, then emerged onto a patio with several solid-looking white tables and a well-kept grassy arbor. Through unsmudged glass I saw rows of new computers. “I think people are hungry,” someone said. A clean-cut black man tilted his head to a long, neat, single-file line forming at one end of the tables.