Empathy for the Devil

I was called an asshole today by an 11-year-old selling hot cocoa.

He was sitting behind a card table that teetered beneath the weight of an enormous plastic Gatorade cooler, one that was orange and battered and looked as if it had been pulled from the ass of a rhinoceros, the intestinal juices and fecal mucilage drying into horrendous smeared scabs of amber, black and brown.  From the stubby incontinent spigot of the 5-gallon jug dribbled hot chocolate, which fed a wad of napkins on the sidewalk below, turning them into a great loogie of muddy paste.  Beneath the cooler and suspended from the table with Duct tape hung a handmade sign, lunatic writing on fluorescent green poster board, that read:  HOT COCOA FOR HAITI!!!

No price was mentioned.  It read like a ransom note.  Or a campaign promise from the Oompa-Loompa Party.

Upon seeing him, and prior to being called an asshole, I’d assumed, because it was 1 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon, that he was home-schooled and I wished him well.  “I hope you’re getting everything that those who learn in a traditional institutional setting are getting, Mr. Homeschooling Boy,” I thought.  “I hope the cat says ‘yes’ when you ask her to the prom and that the limitations placed upon the casting of your school play allows you, and not your dog, to win the lead in Krapp’s Last Tape.”

I kept walking toward him, unaware that others were crossing the street to avoid him.

With no money in my pockets, having left the house to walk around town for the simple purpose of shaking the computer tension out of my eyes, I suddenly felt put upon, figuring that here was a kid, with hair in his face and the slouch of a cartoon character, who would most certainly take my inability to offer him money – money, that is, for the foul joy of waiting while his container relieved itself into a paper cup for me, nothing evident in either the transaction or the interaction between he and I or the piddling sound of the gruesome prize that I’d be leaving with to indicate that Haiti would see a dime from the purchase – as proof somehow that I was cheap and heartless and beneath contempt.

The same thing happened whenever I found myself forced to walk penniless past a homeless person.  I’ve given gloves and half-eaten hoagies away, even let a man who looked as if he’d just left a methadone clinic, but only after he’d been set on fire and then doused with chicken broth and pummeled with brie, listen to The Kinks on my Walkman, just to avoid the shame that comes with doing nothing.

I waited until I was ten feet away before I started tightening my jaw and twisting up my face and feeling around in my pockets, making a great pantomime of my effort, hoping that the kid would see, as if I were a man fighting yet succumbing to quicksand, that at least I’d tried to free myself from the sorrow of having only lint to contribute.

Then I shrugged and mouthed the words, “I’m sorry.”

“HOT COCOA FOR HAITI!” he shouted, looking right at me as I passed, his bark being delivered in a fake Cockney accent, like Bert from Mary Poppins or Michael Caine from Jaws: The Revenge, the reason for this being completely lost on me.  Without breaking my stride, I turned and smiled back at him, figuring that I’d at least leave him with the satisfaction that I’d gotten his ungettable joke.

“Asshole,” he said, scowling through his bangs.

“Fuck … you,” I mouthed, turning back around, suddenly wanting to see him and his dinky little set up swallowed by a fucking earthquake, no longer feeling poor.