Thursday November 18, 2004 – An Act of Unkindness

Thursday November 18, 2004 – An Act of Unkindness

I met a Panhandler on my way to work Wednesday morning and the encounter jolted me out of my otherwise complaisant and routine world. It happened after I had been away from San Jose for three days in a place that operates at half the speed of this area and I was still moving slowly, both physically and mentally. I had stopped for gas at a service station in South San Jose, which has the lowest prices of nearly any in the bay area $2.39 for 91 octane gasoline. The station is one of those owned by a no-name gas retailer chain that buys more expensive gas wholesale from the major refiners and sells is at prices below those of the brand name refiners.

This station is a reflection of the patrons that frequent the place: the workingmen and women squeezing the most out of every dollar they have. Today, there is a gardener filling his 20-year-old pick-up loaded down with lawnmowers and leaf blowers not to mention an assortment of tools of his trade. He has a five-gallon gas can he plans to load up for all the motorized tools his truck is toting. The gardener and his helper are both dressed in jeans and sweatshirt ready for a day of manual labor. On the pump on the other side of the island from me is a single woman filling her Toyota Corolla. She’s dressed in a skirt and blouse with a sweater. Hard to say what line of work she might be in. Surprisingly, not all the pumps are occupied. A 10-year-old Nissan abandoned the pump behind me just as I pulled in front of him. The Hispanic driver was around 40 with slightly graying hair.

The three-island, two pump per island station is able to serve twelve vehicles at once. Today, there are about four including the white delivery van on the island and pump farthest from me. The station has to be forty years old. It has been here the 30 years I’ve been driving by it and it was pretty worn looking back then. By that I mean it hasn’t been painted since I’ve been coming. The pumps have been replaced over time with the kind that accepts debit and credit cards. When we first started coming they use to let you pump your gas first then come to the teller window and make your payment. That ended with the first car that filled its tank and drove off with no intention of paying, I want to say it was sometime during the gas crises with long lines during the Carter administration in the 1970s. Since then, the drill is to approach the teller window and provide a sum that represents the most you’ll spend on gas and return when you’ve determined that either you don’t want to spend that amount or your tank just won’t take it all—less of a problem these days when a $20 won’t half fill and empty tank.

The concrete on either side of the islands are pretty stained with spilled gasoline and oil drops from cars with leaky gaskets. The service stalls where once the station made minor repairs are empty, The station now only sell gas, cigarettes, and a small amount of junk food, During the day the teller works with the door to his small area open, but at night the door is locked and all transactions occur through the glass partition that protects the cashier from the world outside. Cash enters and change is dispensed through a metal tray that is fitted into the thick glass partition.

On one occasion when my wife “I” accompanied me to the gas station on the weekend, she pointed out the lady “working” the station. “I” noticed her walk from the far side of the busy highway to the station side—there’s a traffic light intersection with a crosswalk at the side street that T’s into the busy highway—the station is on the corner of this intersection. The lady was dressed in an outfit intended to draw attention to herself, but I had been too busy watching the pump consume my cash in exchange for the meager measure of gasoline it was dispensing to notice. I only became aware of her as I drove off and saw her talking with one of the men pumping gas at the island farthest from the side street and at the pump nearest the busy highway. It was shortly before noon when we stopped. I hope she made a successful transaction.

The station is a nexus for a community of people. I suspect if I were more observant, I would see familiar faces among those filling their tanks all of us drawn here for the same reason—all of us stopping here because of the cheap gas and it’s on our way to where we’re going. But like most people today, we have a check list of things to do and we do them with a blind efficiency that minimizes any other function save the one we’re doing: get gas, pick up take-out, drop off cleaning, pick up cleaning... And associated with each of these functions is a minimum of socializing. The clerk at the pizza place has a fixed vocabulary that he uses repetitively all night. I would guess that he could go through a shift of work without saying more than a 100 unique words. Exacerbating the problem is the station adding new pumps that take credit cards. This has eliminated, not only the need for spoken communications, but also the need for me to approach the casher window, where before I was forced to confront and consider my fellow patrons all queuing to deposit their cash before pumping their gas.

I recall a television program, which explored how humans were teaching monkeys to use keyboards to ask for things. It required learning a simple set of keystrokes to get food, another to get a toy, another to open a door to an adjoining cage, etc. It now appears that the experiment is being conducted on a higher level primate and not only at the gas station, but at the bank ATM machine, the checkout counter, the telephone, and the Internet. We are slowly being removed from human contact—humans are inefficient at doing thing like monetary transactions. The machines do a much better job, they don’t complain, they aren’t nasty to customers, and they don’t require daily sustenance, vacations or biological breaks—they work round the clock 26/7, though they do break down,

As I said in the beginning, on Wednesday morning as I was doing my financial transaction with my favorite pump—I use the same one most every time I come in for gas—I caught sight of a man, who at first I thought belonged to the Toyota Corolla on the other side of the island I was on—the one with the lady, who had gone to the cashier window to deposit her cash, returned to pump her gas, and then had gone back to retrieve her change. When she returned, the man spoke with her and I naturally assumed they were together, though they did not seem to be at first. She smiled at him, said something I could not understand and she got into her car, sat for a moment, and then drove away. The man stood looking after her. He didn’t seem unkempt. He was my height and age—maybe a few years older, a black man dressed in a pull-over V-neck sweater over the top of a brown patterned shirt with brown slacks and lace-up shoes. I paid him no attention—remember direct your effort at the task and hand and then move on—until he spoke to me.

That’s when I looked at him and I saw him for the first time, saw him to be as I described him, saw him to have a look of expectation on his face, saw him to be somewhat nervous and awkward. “Pardon me?” I said in response to his expectant look. “Do you have any change you can spare?” he asked again. At that moment, I was terribly conflicted. On the one hand, I could say “no” and return to completing my transaction with the pump. In San Francisco, when I’m confronted by panhandlers, it’s usually while I’m walking and I simply say “no” and continue on my way. I could do the same now, say “no” complete my transaction with the pump, get in my car and drive away.

But I didn’t. Instead, I reached into my left pocket, where I knew I had spare change and I pulled it out. I look him in the eye and I said, “this is what I have, you’re welcome to it.” I then held out my hand and he reached out his and I gave him the change. A funny thing happened at that point, something I think he and I both recognized at the same time. I had given him what he had asked for. In taking it I think he realized that he had demeaned himself at the meager amount he had exchanged for the loss of dignity the effort had cost him. And in the bargain, I felt badly that I had made him confront the indignity. Had I said “no” he would have felt anger and outrage at having been rebuffed and I would have felt anger at being disturbed in completing my mindless task. How could what I thought was an act of generosity, create so much grief for both parties? I’ve dealt with machines so much that I’m beginning to forget how to deal with people.