When in Samaria

I had to make a split decision last night when I saw a person enter the apartment building across from the bar where I work after he offered to sell me a tv complete with dangling frayed cable chords.

I would have let the whole thing pass and just made a joke about it the next night, except, I began to worry that someone might get hurt.

I was in a pickle. I sat and debated with myself what to do. But in the end I had to go with my gut. I called the police.

Here were my justifications 5 beers into sitting at the back door.

1. In entering someone’s home he was creating an inherently dangerous situation both for himself and the people around him.


2. He solicited me as an employee of a business that doesn't want illegal activity happening in the back of the bar (hence the creation of my position). This unwanted illegal activity includes black men doing crack and hocking hot TVs, but, just fyi, NOT white men smoking pot and having public sex.


3. This bar, which is the only well-attended gay bar in a 45 minute drive of town, had a noise complaint from one of the neighbors in that same apartment building I saw the guy with the stolen TV go into. The sad sort of irony is that it is well-known at the bar that the particular neighbor that calls to complain about us is himself a gay man. I had sort of a Jane Jacobs moment and thought, maybe if we watch out for our neighbor, he will watch out for us.


4. A few nights ago when the police came for the noise complaint they were very inappropriate with the patrons and staff at the bar and made a pretty clear and odd reference to the murder of a gay man that had happened here a few years ago. Many of the staff and older patrons of the bar had worked with this man or were friends of his and the reference was highly suspicious given the nature of the complaint. I kind of felt like perhaps if we let the police know we are looking out for the neighborhood they might be more accepting of our role in the community.

I knew instantly that none of my rationale mattered when the first words the cop said to me when he got out of his car were, "Black guy?"

How can I explain his inflection? It was a question, but not really a question. It was the way you ask a question when you know the answer and there is no reason for the other person to speak, but it is your job to ask the question. My heart sank. I described the man and explained what had happened and how I had seen him enter the apartment building across the way.

My heart was down in the bottom of my shoes by the time I walked back to my post at the bar and watched my gay friends, black, white, Latino, Paki, Japanese drinking, talking, finding comfort in one another.

I mentioned what had happened to a gal I know at the bar.

She said, “Did he have a hooded shirt on?”
Me: “Yes.”
Her: “Black guy, big, 40s.”
Me: (Thinking that describes a fairly broad range of people.) “Yes, but . . . “
Her: “That’s my friend’s man. Real crackhead.”
Me: “I feel badly.”
Her: “Don’t. It’s them or us. You have to make a choice.”

I should say that this gal is a Spanish-speaker and I have seen her drinking and talking with black people, white people and every color in between as well. So, I don’t think it was a racially motivated comment.

It’s them or us.

What does that mean? Have I come down on the side of the white police? Is that my ‘us’? Or am I on the side of the gay clientele of Merlins? Is that my ‘community’? And who is ‘them’? Blacks? Straights? Crackheads? TV thieves?

Coincidentally, I had a similar (though completely different) conversation with a social work professor earlier in the day when I began to use the term “quality of life.”

Her: “What do you mean by improving the ‘quality of life’ in Binghamton?”
Me: “I mean making things better.”
Her: “For whom?”
Me: “For everyone.”
Her: “Making things better for some necessitates making not making things better for others.”

I know on a very important level this is true. But I have a feeling that at the time, when we were at the retreat working to draft a mission statement for a local gender expression and sexuality pride coalition, we probably both agreed that the values we were espousing as a group - justice, visibility, stewardship, accessibility, queerness, diversity - are things that would make any community nicer to live in for any member, even those that feel that said values are in opposition to their own. Better, that is, if you believe that freedom within the confines of respect for other’s freedom is the basis of a free and just society.

This is stewardship, then, I guess. “I see how you feel, and I understand why, but let me show you the bigger picture . . . This is how we can all be free without hurting one another.“

I could have used a steward last night. Some little voice in my ear who had thought through this very issue thoroughly and could give me guidance on what to do.

I did not protect my brother’s freedom. Bottom line.

He was hurting someone, financially, but it was likely someone who had built their happiness profiting from a system that impinged upon his basic liberties. Obviously, he had the greater need for that TV. He presumably had less access through legal channels to the things he needed. And so he stole the TV.

In the retreat, the Reverend Miller (long, but wonderful story), defined access thusly:

“At the dojo where I train there is a rule. If two people are going to spar and one partner wants to spar at slow speed and the other at medium speed. Slow speed trumps.”

There is no such thing as equal access, really. It is an ideal, something we can approach infinitely without ever reaching. We talk about it as if it were real and obtainable. But any black crackhead could tell you it is a bunch of bullshit.

Does that mean we scrap the law? Not call the police when you see someone breaking into an apartment?

If I were asleep in my apartment, alone, well with Pip, and one of my neighbors saw person breaking in (gender, race, etc aside) I would want them to help me.

I have called the police on several other occasions in my life.

There was the time when I saw a man stop his truck at a stop sign and start punching a child in his car. I was rattled by it for days. The young boy who was getting beaten was cowering and then opened the truck door and fell out as the driver had started to pull away from the stop sign. He could have easily been run over.

I called the police about several injury accidents including the time I saw a bicycler get thrashed by a car full of kids late night on a weekend.

I called the police once when I was expecting KC to come up on a visit from Tulsa to Lawrence. She was supposed to leave early in the morning, but she hadn’t shown up. I paced the apartment all day, scared to leave, no way of finding out if she was okay, not being a legal relative of hers. She eventually did make it. She, I think, had had some car trouble. Her arrival coincided with that of the pizza I had ordered because I didn’t want to leave the house in case she showed up (pre cell phones). Just as I was hugging her and saying, “I was so worried about you”, the pizza person gave me an expecting look, so I paid him and hugged her at the same time.

There are these little moments in your life when you have the opportunity to seize things and prove once and for all that we are capable of greatness or at least great insight.

I should have hugged her and let the damn pizza guy wait.

With my crackhead, in retrospect, what I should have done is tried to talk to the guy. I should have gotten someone to cover the door for me and gone and talked to him. It would have seemed crazy, it would have probably been dangerous, it most likely wouldn’t have worked, but it is the only just thing I could have done. It would be the only thing that could bring our world’s to some type of consensus.

“Hey, I won’t buy that TV and I can’t let you go into that building because someone might get hurt. I don’t want to give you money that you will use to hurt yourself. But, I will talk to you for a while. I will listen. I will try to understand and however I can, I will help.”

When I was leaving work there was a man walking around in the other parking lot where my car was at. He had on a pair of boxers and a t-shirt. He was older, 50’s, and had pasty white skin showing everywhere. The boxers were split along the butt. He was bending over and running his fingers over the cement and rocks in the parking lot as if he was looking for something. Every time he bent down to touch the floor I saw the split in his pants widen and his old pasty ass crack appear. He started picking up small bits of asphalt or debris and putting them in his mouth.

Me: “Hey man.”
Him: “Hey, hey, hey, man, man.”
Me: “Are you okay. Do you need some help.”
Him: “Nope. Nuhuh”

I got in my car and sat for several moments as he continued gathering pebbles and eating them. He had moved to the other side of the lot near a wall. I watched him illuminated by my break lights the way a deer might be. And I feared hurting him, the way I would a wild animal who had accidentally strayed into the parking lot outside of the bar. He looked frightened in a general sort of animalistic way by my car, and I was quite sure he had no idea what a car was or how it could hurt him.