Same Kind of Different As Me

by Ron Hall

  One man, who declined to share his name, did tell us exactly what he thought of our philanthropy. Black, pencil-slim, and looking wildly out of place, he wore a mauve sharkskin suit and a hustler’s tie, both of which he had somehow managed to have sharply pressed. From beneath a cream-colored fedora, he surveyed his domain through dark glasses with a designer insignia stamped in gold. We later found out people called him “Mister.”

  That first Tuesday, Mister strode up to me with an aggressive, proprietary air, as though the mission dining hall was his and I was trespassing. “I don’t know who you folks are,” he growled around an unlit filter-tipped cigar, “but you think you’re doin’ us some kind of big favor. Well, tonight when you and your pretty little wife are home in your three-bedroom cottage watchin TV in your recliners thinkin you’re better than us, you just think about this: You miss a coupla paychecks and your wife leaves you and you’ll be homeless—just like us!”

  Speaking for myself—on the “favor” part—he was more right than I cared to admit. I didn’t know quite what to say, but when I opened my mouth, out came, “Thank you. Thank you for helping me see homelessness your way.” Unmoved, Mister eyed me like an insect, chomped his cigar, and strode off in disgust.

  The encounter unnerved me some, but also gave me a peek at how some of these folks felt. A thought nibbled at the edges of my brain: Maybe my mission wasn’t to analyze them, like some sort of exotic specimens, but just to get to know them.

  Meanwhile, no tally of disdain, strange glances, or silence seemed to bother Deborah. She wanted to know and truly serve these people, not merely feel good about herself. That first day, she fell in love with every one of them. At her urging, we memorized the names we learned that day and, that night, prayed for each one, even the obstreperous Mr. Mister, whose mind I suddenly found myself hoping to change.

  After a couple of Tuesdays, we noticed that the only time these folks got in a hurry was when they jockeyed for position near the head of their designated section of the serving line. We found out the reason for this: They feared we might ladle out all the good stuff—meat, for example—leaving only soup or stale 7-Eleven sandwiches for those unlucky enough to have been seated at the front of the chapel, farthest from the door. When the stragglers wound up with such low-end fare, the looks on their faces told a sad story: As society’s throwaways, they just accepted the fact that they survived on leftovers and discards.

  It seemed to us such a simple thing to prepare a little more food so that the street people at the end of the line could eat as well as those who slept at the mission, so we asked Chef Jim for that favor and he agreed. From then on, it thrilled us to serve the street people the good stuff, like fried chicken, roast beef, and spaghetti and meatballs.

  That was the first time I tried to do something to improve the lives of the people Deborah had dragged me along to serve. I hadn’t yet touched any of them, but already they were touching me.

  On our third Tuesday of serving, Deborah and I were in the dining hall helping Chef Jim prepare the extra food. Blind Brother Bill had just finished preaching on forgiveness and his congregants were filing in to eat, when we heard the crash of metal and a man roaring in anger near the chapel door. Alarmed, we turned to see about twenty people scatter as a huge, angry black man hurled another chair across the dining hall floor.

  “I’m gon’ kill whoever done it!” he screamed. “I’m gon’ kill whoever stole my shoes!” Then he sprayed the air with a volley of curses and advanced into the crowd, roundhousing his fists at anyone stupid enough to get in his way.

  It looked for all the world like a gangland brawl was going to explode right there at the chapel door. As I scanned the room for mission personnel to save the day, Deborah leaned in and whispered excitedly in my ear.

  “That’s him!”

  “What!” I said impatiently. “What are you talking about?”

  “That’s the man I saw in my dream! The one who changes the city. That’s him!”

  I turned and looked at Deborah as though she had truly gone over the edge. Across the room, a group of mission workers burst in and began pouring soothing words on the raging man’s temper. Grudgingly, he allowed himself to be led away.

  “That’s him,” Deborah said again, eyes sparkling. “I think you should try to make friends with him.”

  “Me!” My eyes widened in disbelief. “Did you not notice that the man you want me to make friends with just threatened to kill twenty people?”

  She laid her hand on my shoulder and tilted her head with a smile. “I really think God’s laid it on my heart that you need to reach out to him.”

  “Sorry,” I said, trying hard to ignore the head tilt, “but I wasn’t at that meeting where you heard from God.”

  I wasn’t about to invite a killer out for tea. But we did start tracking the man Deborah said she had seen in her dream. He intrigued us both. Probably in his sixties, he looked younger and, somehow, older at the same time. He dressed in rags. A loner, the whites of his eyes had gone an eerie yellow. He never smiled and seldom spoke. Nor did we see anyone acknowledge him. But it wasn’t as though others at the mission ostracized him; it was more like they kept a respectful distance, as one might give wide berth to a pit bull.

  On Tuesdays, when the serving line had nearly dried up, he would suddenly appear out of nowhere. With a poker face and no eye contact, he’d indicate that he wanted two plates, claiming one was for an old man upstairs. It was a clear violation of the rules, but we weren’t there to be the mission police. So we served him double and blessed him, to which he responded with a wall of silence. One Tuesday, someone in the kitchen told us they thought his name was Dallas.

  Dallas always ate one plate in the dining hall, picking out a spot in a corner far from other human contact. If anyone dared to sit nearby, he got up and moved. While eating, he stared sternly into his plate, chewing slowly with his few good teeth. Never glancing left or right, he methodically scooped the food into his mouth until it was gone. Then he would vanish. I mean that—vanish. He had this strange knack: You rarely saw him come or go. It was more like he was there . . . and then he wasn’t.

  Often, driving up to the mission, we’d see Dallas standing alone in a parking lot across the street in the shadow of a Dumpster, his face a stone slate. A couple of times, I overheard people saying this loner was crazy and not to mess with him. Deborah wrote his name in her Bible, next to Ecclesiastes 9:15: “There was found in a certain city a poor man who was wise, and by his wisdom he saved the city.”

  Occasionally, Deborah reminded me that she had a feeling God wanted me to be Dallas’s friend. But I wasn’t looking for any new friends, and even if I had been, Dallas from Fort Worth did not fit the profile.

  Still, only to please Deborah—God would have to wait—I began a gingerly pursuit of the man.

  “Hey there, Dallas,” I’d say whenever I saw him. “How’re you doing today?”

  Most of the time, he ignored me. But sometimes, his yellowing eyes skewered me with a look that said, “Leave. Me. Alone.” Which I would have been only too happy to do had it not been for my wife.

  After a couple of months of this, someone at the mission heard me call Dallas “Dallas” and laughed at me like I was the town idiot. “His name ain’t Dallas, fool. It’s Denver.”

  Well, maybe that’s why he looks disgusted every time I speak to him, I thought, suddenly hopeful.

  “Hey, Denver!” I called the very next time I saw him out by the Dumpster. He never even looked at me. The man was about as approachable as an electric cattle fence.

  19

  Things was goin along just fine at the mission till that smilin white couple started servin in the dinin hall on Tuesdays. Ever week, that woman drew a bead on me in the serving line. She’d smile at me real big and ask me my name and how I was doin—you know: attackin me for no particular reason. I did my best to stay completely outta her way.

  And I didn’t tell her my name was Denver, neit
her, but some fool blowed my cover. After that, the woman would corner me and poke her skinny finger in my face and tell me I wadn’t no bad fella.

  “Denver, God has a calling on your life,” she’d say.

  I told her several times not to be messin with me ’cause I was a mean man.

  “You are not a mean man, and I don’t ever want to hear you say that!” she’d say.

  She was gettin kinda smart with me. Ain’t never been no woman done that before, and few men, either, without them gettin hurt. But she kept on attackin me until I thought to myself, What’d I ever do to this woman that she won’t leave me alone so I can go on about my business?

  It might seem like bein homeless don’t take no skill, but I’m gon’ tell you, to stay alive homeless folks has got to know who’s who and what’s what. Here’s what the homeless in Fort Worth knowed about me: Stay outta my way, ’cause I would beat a man down, have him snorin ’fore he hit the ground.

  But no matter how mean and bad I tried to act at the mission, I couldn’t shake that woman loose. She was the first person I’d met in a long time that wadn’t scared of me. Seemed like to me she had spiritual eyes: She could see right through my skin to who I was on the inside.

  Lemme tell you what homeless people think about folks that help home-less people: When you homeless, you wonder why certain volunteers do what they do. What do they want? Everybody want somethin. For instance, when that couple come to the mission, I thought the man looked like the law. The way he dressed, the way he acted. Too high-class. His wife, too, at first. The way she acted, the way she treated people . . . she just looked too sophisticated. Wadn’t the way she dressed. It was just something about the way she carried herself. And both of em was askin way too many questions.

  While everbody else was fallin in love with em, I was what you call skeptical. I wadn’t thinkin nothin evil. It was just that they didn’t look like the type to come in and mess with the homeless. People like that may not feel it within themselves that they’re better than you, but when you the one that’s homeless, you feel like they feel like they’re better than you.

  But these folks was different. One reason was they didn’t come just on holidays. Most people don’t want the homeless close to em—think they’re dirty, or got some kinda disease, or maybe they think that kind of troubled life gon’ rub off on em. They come at Christmas and Easter and Thanksgivin and give you a little turkey and lukewarm gravy. Then they go home and gather round their own table and forget about you till the next time come around where they start feelin a little guilty ’cause they got so much to be thankful for.

  On Tuesdays, I started waitin till there wadn’t no line so I could get through real fast without talkin to that couple at all. But that didn’t mean I wadn’t watchin em.

  20

  It took a couple of months before I noticed a real change in my heart, a heart that was feeling like it had been run through the short cycle in a microwave—warm on the outside but still a little cool in the middle. I was fairly certain something had happened when I began waking up on Tuesday morning, Mission Day, and felt the same chill of excitement as when I woke up on Saturdays at Rocky Top. It wasn’t a raising-the-dead caliber miracle or anything. But folks who knew me would have classified it as a minor one. At least.

  My own take on the topic was that maybe—just maybe—God had also rung my number when He called Deborah. On days when nothing else pressed, I found myself dropping by the mission. Soon, the fellows in the hood started to recognize my dirty-green crew-cab truck, and when they saw me pop out of the tunnel on East Lancaster Street, they’d slip their paper-bag-wrapped liquor bottles behind their backs and wave at me like I was a neighbor coming home from work.

  Sometimes I ventured into the streets, places where even in broad day-light, young women wandered by like death in blue jeans, offering sex for cigarettes. Or for a ride home to steal mama’s TV and pawn it at Cash America. I hoped just to lend an ear, be an example. Sometimes, I stayed closer to the mission where some sunny afternoons, I’d sit on the curb in the shade of a vacant building and chat. One fellow told me he’d been married a thousand times to a thousand beautiful women—all of them as rich as Oprah. Of course, he said, all of them had also stolen every dime he’d ever made, so he asked me if I could spare a smoke.

  If I hung around long enough and concentrated on spotting a fellow who didn’t want to be spotted, I’d nearly always see Denver. But if I made a move toward him, he would move an equal distance away. The fact that I was now calling him by his real name seemed to do more harm than good. If anything, he seemed irritated, like he was mad that I now had it right.

  The mission residents had by then dubbed Deborah “Mrs. Tuesday.” They liked her a lot. But she became convinced that it would take more than “like”—and more than our ladling macaroni and meat loaf—to gain their trust. Without that, she realized, our efforts might mean a full belly on Tuesday nights, but little in the way of real change. Her goal was changed lives, healed hearts. Broken men and women rejoining the ranks of the clean and sober, moving out to places of their own, spending Sundays in the park with their families.

  She began to rack her brain about ways to bring a little joy into their lives. Her first idea: Beauty Shop Night. Deborah and her best friend, Mary Ellen Davenport, would go to the mission loaded down with makeup kits, hairstyling tools, perfumes, soaps, and every manicure and pedicure accessory ever invented. And the homeless women would come. Deborah and Mary Ellen would comb the lice out of their hair, then wash and style it with blow-dryers and curling tools. If a woman wanted a pedicure, Deborah and Mary Ellen would wash her feet, use pumice stones to scrub away callouses layered on by ill-fitting shoes, and paint her toenails in a feminine shade of red or pink. They did facials and makeovers and gave the women little makeup kits to keep. Sometimes, on these nights, a homeless woman, catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror, would remember what she looked like before her life went off course and begin to cry.

  Then Deborah dreamed up movie night. It sounded silly to me, but on the first night at least fifty men showed up to watch a movie about the Brooklyn Tabernacle choir. The next Wednesday, the dining hall was completely packed—150 people. The third week, something miraculous happened: Instead of heading for the exits when the video screen went blank, grown men, crusty and battle-hardened, began weeping and asking for prayer. God somehow managed to transform the dining hall into a confessional. It wasn’t the movies that caused the metamorphosis. It was just the simple act of caring. The men began confiding in us things some of them had never told anyone—and truthfully some things I wish they’d never told us.

  That spurred Deborah on to a new idea: birthday night. Once a month, we brought a giant, gorgeously frosted sheet cake and everyone, including “God’s people,” would be invited to eat some. Those with a birthday that month got two pieces. Some folks couldn’t even remember what month they were born, but we weren’t checking IDs. The cake was always a hit. So much so that people began having more and more birthdays it seemed—some every month. (During the twelve months we brought cake, some fellows at the mission aged twelve years.)

  In the fall of 1998, the mailman delivered to our home an invitation that arrived with the junk mail but turned out to be a treasure. Our friend Tim Taylor was organizing “an outreach to the unreached”—that’s fancy talk for evangelism—in a downtown theater that occupied the top floor of a land-mark bar called the Caravan of Dreams.

  Deborah and I had been to the Caravan, a smoky jazz and blues lounge owned by billionaire developer and Fort Worth renovator Ed Bass. But the bar had stayed hip while we had not, so it had been years since we’d dropped in. Still, Tim’s invitation gave Deborah an idea: We could drive down to the mission and pack our cars with people who would enjoy a liquor-free night on the town. Given Jesus’s habit of consorting with drinkers and gluttons, she didn’t see the venue as a problem.

  The next day, we whipped up a flyer announcing the free co
ncert, drove down to the mission, and tacked it up on a bulletin board next to one offering to buy poor people’s plasma.

  The flyer didn’t say what band was playing, but the Caravan was no hole in the wall. Anyone who’d been in Fort Worth awhile knew it occasionally featured a marquee performer. I’m sure the mission folks were hoping B. B. King might show up.

  Rain slicked the pavement as we pulled up to the mission that evening, me in my Suburban and Deborah in her Land Cruiser. Still, we had customers: about fifteen men and women standing on the shiny sidewalk dressed in their handout best.

  Including Denver.

  We were shocked to see him standing on the mission steps, solemn and rigid like the statue of a dictator. And he clearly meant to go with us: He was scrubbed so clean his ebony skin shone against a dark blue secondhand suit that almost fit. He stood alone, of course, at least twenty feet from anyone—which did not surprise us since the others always treated him like a bad dog on a long chain.

  When I got out and opened the door to my Suburban, six men piled into the two backseats, leaving the front passenger seat vacant. No one wanted to sit near Denver, who had sourly observed the commotion of loading, yet had not made a move. For five solid minutes he stood there staring. I waited. Then, without a word, he stalked to the Suburban and slid into the front seat, inches from my elbow.

  I had never been that close to him. I felt like Billy Crystal in the movie City Slickers, when he camps alone on the prairie with the menacing trail boss Curly, shivering as Curly sharpens his knife on a razor strop. To break the tension, I took a couple of stabs at trivial conversation, but Denver sat stock-still and silent, a sphinx riding shotgun.

  As I eased down the street, the other fellows seemed happy to be riding in a car that wasn’t marked “Fort Worth Police Department” on the sides. They wanted to know all about it, the monthly payments, and whether I knew any other rich people.