I Am So Popular: This Is Not a Hustle
A few weeks ago, I was driving my friend, Big Red, home after a show. It had been a cabaret style revue of Broadway tunes and we were inspired to improvise a musical of our own as we drove.
I’m a lousy singer. Big Red is much better, but still it’s not like he’s in the running to dethrone Ethel Merman or anything. And so our invented musical sounded more like an off-key cross between old TV theme songs and tunes we’d picked up at guitar mass back in the ‘70’s when we were young and far too impressionable to avoid all that Kumbaya-ing.
We had really hit our pace and were belting it out when, on the Northern edge of Hyde Park, I noticed a dude semi-stumbling down the sidewalk, tapping his red-tipped white cane hither and tither. I told Big Red I’d give him five bucks to roll down the window and say, “What are you? Blind?!”
(For those of you who need to be hit over the head with it— what I said to Big Red was a joke. Do you really think I’d give away five bucks that easily in this economy?)
Joke or not, instant karma struck, as it always does, instantly. For as our car drew near to the blind man, he flagged us down. Others would have driven on, quickly. Not Big Red and me. We instantly morphed into the Dynamic Good Deed Duo. I pulled over and Big hopped out and walked back toward the guy to see what was up. As I watched in my rearview, I knew instantly that I’d done it again—let my own fucked up need to be ever-helpful get me into what was surely going to be a pain in the ass situation.
I can’t speak for Big or what drives him to do good deeds, I can only say that he is very quiet and consistent in his kindness—the guy who opens the door for you at the Post Office or plucks the can of peas down off the shelf for your hunched over 95 year-old grandma at HEB because he’s a foot-and-a-half taller than her. Unlike me, Big doesn’t have a big mouth. He just does the deed and disappears.
Not me. I like to trumpet my efforts, or at least not shy away from garnered praise. I think this stems back to all those times I begged to be the kid to clap the chalky erasers together or feed the classroom gerbil or lead the pledge. For in those moments I was netting special, positive attention from the teacher and I was evoking jealousy in the lesser good deed doers who were not selected, the little fuckers!
My good deed obsession also, I’m certain, reaches back to cues picked up courtesy of sermons and the gospels offered at the aforementioned guitar masses. For though I would grow up to wholeheartedly reject the Catholic church and its doctrine, which was shoved down my vulnerable throat as a child, I never got over that “Do unto others” bit about loving your neighbor.
Wait, let me qualify that remark. Actually, I have gotten over it: the times when I have been dicked over. In which case my motto becomes “Grudge unto others…” But that’s a story for another time. For now, the point is, I am particularly fond of exercising my Savior Complex upon unsuspecting innocents whom I perceive to be in need. If I have to push other good deed doers out of the way to be the Best Samaritan, then so be it. This need to help others to the nth degree is an affliction, to be certain. But I find that as long as a competitive good deed doer is somewhat careful and selects someone who is okay with being on the receiving end, then all is well.
The problem is, I’m not always as careful as I should be. My son could tick off a big handful of examples of hypocrisy on my part. I gave him the age-old message—Don’t talk to strangers!— countless times, only to turn around and pick up someone off the street and offer a ride, perhaps because it was cold or raining and perhaps because they had no coat or were with a little baby or had clearly just missed the bus to UT. Once I took a couple of young hippies to the methadone clinic (they gave me love beads in return). Another time I convinced a tiny, slip-of-a-thing foreign student to get out of the rain and into my car for a ride to campus. She was very quiet until a few blocks before our destination, at which point she asked me if I knew the Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, whereupon I struggled with a sudden urge to push her out of the moving vehicle.
Getting back to the blind dude in Hyde Park. So before I know it, Big Red is guiding the guy back to my car. He gets the guy situated in the front seat (thanks a lot, Big) and I buckle him in.
“I’m Spike,” I say.
“I’m Nathan,” he says.
“He needs a ride to 12th and I-35,” says Big.
Thinking about saving time rather than, say, the possibility of being beaten to death by a red-tipped white cane, I do a little calculating. If I drop Big Red off first - we’re just a few blocks from his place—then take Nathan to his destination, I’ll save both time and gas.
“I’ll take you home first,” I tell Big. “Then Nathan.”
Without raising his voice or flicking me in the back of my head in a way that might reveal how fucking stupid he knows this plan to be, Big simply says, calmly, “Nah, that’s okay. I’ll go with you,” as if it’s just a nice night for a ride and he’s got nothing going on anyway.
Nathan sighs and says, “I should just get this out of the way—I mean, if you don’t mind me unloading…”
What can I say to that? Red is my very favorite color flag. “Go right ahead!” I say. “Unload away!”
“First, I want you to know— this is not a hustle.”
Ding, ding, ding, ding!!! Nathan’s declaration reminds me of one of my stalkers (I’m lucky enough to have two) who likes to send me long rambling notes filled with scenarios of what he’s going to do with me when he “surprises” me with a visit sometime. In these notes, he likes to remind me that he’s “not a stalker.” Well, then, if you type it in an email, or say it in my car, it must be true! I am not a stalker! This is not a hustle!
The word “hustle” is barely out of Nathan’s mouth when a cop car pulls up behind us, flipping on lights and siren. Nathan about goes through the roof, the way only a guilty man could, and shouts, “What’s that?!”
“That was just the cops,” I say. “Heading somewhere else. So, you were saying…”
Mr. This-is-Not-a-Hustle then trots out every single tired old hustle story in the book, one after the other, rat-a-tat-tat, not giving me and Big time to absorb one before he launches into the next.
I just got here on a Greyhoud bus. My social security checks won’t be sent here for a few days. I’m staying at a rooming house at 12th and the highway. They won’t let me back in until I give them eighteen dollars in back rent. Eighteen dollars. That’s all. My family in Indiana, I had to escape them. They were abusive and drug addicts. I got away. I don’t have any friends here. I’ve been walking for thirty hours straight.
Before he could launch into the part about his puppy getting run over, his time at the orphanage, his stint in Nam, or how he was blinded while rescuing a kitten from a burning tree, Big gently stopped him.
“Dude, we can give you a ride but we don’t have any money,” he said.
“I just lost my job,” I added. It was the truth. “I might have a dollar.”
Now we were at 51st and Airport. Nathan announced a change of plans. “You know,” he said, after hearing we didn’t have any money, “why don’t you just drop me at a gas station.”
There was a gas station in front of us, across the road. I was in the wrong lane to easily access it and knew of another gas station a few blocks south. So I didn’t mention the gas station in front of us and figured I’d take him to the one I was familiar with.
But our blind non-hustler gestured toward the station in front of us. “What about that one?” he said. It didn’t cross my mind to ask a blind man how he knew there was a gas station in front of us. And even now I am insisting that he must have some light-sensitivity. No really, that couldn’t have been a hustle?
We ditched Nate not at the gas station of his choice, but one nearby. Before he got out, he asked us if it was a good neighborhood. What did he mean by that? Good as in the people that lived there? As it happened, it was my neighborhood. Good as in you don’t have to worry about getting hustled? Well, Nate, as the saying goes:
The answer is in your hands.
Spike Gillespie is the President of the Office of Good Deeds. She’ll be hosting the Umpteenth Annual Kick Ass Awards, co-sponsored by the Austinist, Friday, January 9th at BookPeople, 7 pm. Free, family friendly, lots of cupcakes and beer. Don’t miss it. Spike blogs at www.spikeg.com
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