Chapter 11. Waiting for Air Force One
I keep thinking about the fact that if I die, I will go to heaven, but so long as I’m alive I’ll know the pain of life. My credit cards are taut with burden. Betsy and I haven’t spoken for a few weeks. Rachel is high pressure, but is trying to get me to make the first move, to her specifications, and I can’t help thinking she’d lose interest in me soon enough anyway. I was relieved to get away from that drama when I didn’t have the money for another quarter of seminary. I’ve been doing mostly volunteer church stuff for the past couple of weeks. I don’t know where I’m heading. In a phone call home the other day, my mother mentioned that she misses being able to brag about me.
That one stung.
Being alive is hard. I’ve given up hope that anything I assumed I’d experience here will actually happen; it’s clear to me that I’m destined for something much closer to the rat hole in Calcutta than I’d expected, and I don’t know what good I’m doing being here. It’s been nearly seven months since I left Chicago, and I feel lost and broken and like an absolute fool, with nothing to make sense of the choices I’ve made. I have almost no friends—just David, Rachel and the confusion she brings, a couple of acquaintances from school, Stephen, and the youth group David leads. I have no job, no plan, and it sure feels as though I have no control over what’s next. My dad is concerned about my mental well-being, but then again everyone who works at Lilly thinks the world needs Prozac. I’ve lived my whole life in a bubble of life assumptions endowed to me by a culture of selfish consumption. I have no idea who I am apart from that, and I’m completely unprepared to be here, alone and making choices without the herd. It’s confusing and it’s frightening—even as it feeds my pride to be on this “rebel for God” track. I’m miserable. I don’t know what God wants to do with me and with my life, how he’ll make this all work out, and I don’t know how to fill in the blanks on my own. I can say all of this casually, but it tweaks the deepest parts of me to feel like I’m derailed. The feelings make me desperate to take control, so at night sometimes I put on my cross necklace and go to the roughest parts of town hoping to get shot. Suicide by carefully chosen wrong place at wrong time. Heaven without passing “Go.” On my terms.
Tonight I only made it a few blocks, to the corner of Colfax and Josephine, in front of the 7–Eleven that never responded to my application. I was planning to drive to an area near Five Points, where the risks are greater, but I saw this one-legged black guy in an Army jacket in the bus shelter, and I stopped.
His name is George, and he’s more than a little drunk. His left pant leg is folded over and pinned at the nub where his knee used to be. He dropped his metal crutches on the ground at his foot. He wet himself and smells like it, plus sweat and alcohol. It’s cold enough that I wonder if his pants will freeze. He tells me that Air Force One is waiting for him out at the airport, and he wants me to take him there. I ask about his world, but he is so far gone that he can’t report on anything but his immediate surroundings. I ask him if he’s hungry, and he is. I buy him a ham and cheese sandwich from the 7–Eleven cooler. He doesn’t have any teeth, so he can’t bite through the ham. I’d noticed his missing teeth—I should have thought to select a different sandwich. What he can bite off, the bread and cheese, he gums without swallowing. He fishes a hooked finger across the roof of his mouth and flings each bite to the ground, and then wipes his hand on his wet pants. Clearly, his drinking has reached the point that he’s given up food for booze. His coughing makes me think of the news report I heard today about a tuberculosis outbreak that has the firefighters and paramedics concerned about the people they pick up.
I try to make conversation with him for an hour, with little progress. He’s still far from sober, but his stupor is clearing, and he asks about me. I tell him about seminary and moving from Chicago. I tell him about Betsy and Rachel.
"Laaadies,” he blurts in slur. Then, in whimsical free association follow-up, “I loves me some laaadies.”
I tell him about how I go out at night with weird thoughts of getting killed and escaping the pain.
"I hear that. Air Force One’s going down one day, and that’ll be that,” he empathizes.
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For a long time we just sit on the bench, him taking and scraping bites of cheese sandwich from the roof of his mouth. He puts the ham in his coat pocket.
I don’t know why I’m sitting here with this guy. I don’t know what I can do for him. Frankly, it seems pretty clear that he’s not long for the world. I ask him if he’d like to pray with me. He offers me his hand. My hands have been pulled into my sleeves to minimize my exposure to his coughing and fluids. My first thought is to recoil, to protect myself. But my first action is to push my hand out from my sleeve and take hold of his, which happens to be the one he favors for fishing bites from his mouth. I pray and he coughs and shudders. I say Amen. He says Amen.
And he doesn’t let go of my hand.
So I don’t either.
And we sit that way for about another hour, fat white do-gooder and one-legged wino near the end of his tour, holding hands in the bus stop on Denver’s main drag for sin and vice. I don’t know which of us is more desperate, and I don’t know which of us is more buoyed by this time. I think briefly of those stories where people meet someone who they think may have turned out to be an angel. There’s something nice about the idea of a repulsive, sodden angel holding my hand, especially since I left home hoping to get shot.
This is better.
This is what God had in mind instead of shaping culture with the power of mass marketing like Sue would have had me do. This is what was more important than my dreams with Betsy. It’s what was more pressing than my parents’ plans for my life. George. He is more important because if I hadn’t shown up he’d have spent the night alone and forgotten. So would I. The world is full of people like us and moments like this, and they make sense of all the questions that can never be answered by seminarians and people who live in ivory towers of rationalizations and convenience. My mom would be horrified and could never brag about such things to her friends over coffee, but my heavenly Father is proud. This moment has nothing to do with my hiding places—my defense and camouflage. The collection I affix to my crab shell to protect myself from the squid of life and evil has nothing to do with this moment. I’m here. I’m seen. I’m exposed, and God is with me. This makes sense of my situation. This makes me worth something. I’m important and I’m loved, and all the worship remains with God.
About an hour before sunrise, I put newspaper down on my Jeep’s passenger seat and drive George to a drunk tank he tells me about. I go home and sleep for a few hours. When I return to the place to offer him breakfast, he’s already gone. I conclude that if I get tuberculosis, it was worth it, and I get my wish to escape the pain that returns with the ordinary day.
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