The Kindness of Strangers

Blanche DuBois, the immortal heroine of Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” had this to say as they led her away to incarceration: “I have always counted on the kindness of strangers.”

She’s not the only one.

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The public phone at the bus station in Ventura was being used but I could wait. There was time before the concert, and perhaps the stout woman with the two canes and the cart piled high beside her would not be long with her call.

“Are you the minister?” she leaned out and asked me. I assured her I was not. And then, in a sort of automatic response to her question, I asked, “Are you all right?”

Now, no one in our society should ask anyone else that sort of question. It can lead to complications and involvement, and the watchword of this society is to avoid getting involved.

I was inundated with a tale of woe. The minister had been called; he had said he would be there; she had waited and waited.

And then, just then, in the parking lot of the bus station, a car drove up and the woman said: “That’s the minister now.”

It was. He had been randomly summoned by phone, and now he set about helping the woman. She had a room, she informed us, at the City Center Motel, and the good father said he would take her there. The only trouble was that the woman’s cart, piled high, wouldn’t fit in his car. But it did in mine. The minister and I swung it into place. It was heavy with cardboard boxes tied about with string, old shoes and what not.

The pastor and the woman, who here can be called Tango (not her real name), were already at the hotel when I arrived, and he was ready to take off. I was left with Tango, who informed me that she had not eaten in two days.

Nothing, I asked? Only a “mistaken hamburger” from a fast-food restaurant, she informed me. (Those are hamburgers that are prepared beforehand and then must be disposed of because they are left over and no longer fresh enough to sell.)

We went to the Vagabond Restaurant and Tango said something about a steak and I said no, a liver and onions dinner, at half the price, was what my budget would allow. Our waitress, perhaps sensing a special quality to the situation, proved herself kindly and patient. Neither she nor I took notice of Tango’s arms as they wildly flailed the air as she talked. It was a dramatic touch but not all that unusual in a public restaurant.

In New York City the talk is about street people who will not come in out of the cold. The city has decided, with more than a nudge from the American Civil Liberties Union, that people have the right to live as they choose to live even on the street. Provided, of course, that they are not a danger to themselves or to others.

Tango, so far as I could tell, was no danger to herself. She had been hitch-hiking for 25 years and even had a little chair to sit on when her arthritis flared up.

She had other stratagems for living on the road and on the streets. When night began to fall she would get on the phone and call the police and explain her situation. Sometimes they were rude, sometimes they said she’d have to go to a welfare agency in the morning, and sometimes, as tonight, they got her a room through a charity.

Tango came from a genteel background: Her father was a colonel in the Army Medical Corps, in charge of two hospital ships during World War II. And her mother was crazy. As a child, she had traveled throughout the world, but somehow her life as an adult had become unravelled and she had fallen through the net that this society supposedly provides for such as her.

However, she liked her life of movement. “Who wants to just sit around?” she asked. “You got to get out there and live life.”

She was living it all right. She had dragged a watermelon box, large and with air holes on top, across the freeway in Santa Maria and used it as a house for herself and her cat for five weeks. Then disaster struck: Some passers-by had called “kitty, kitty” and off went the cat.

Pain, pain, a life of pain. Her 22-year-old son was in foster homes from 7 until 14 years of age. She had done the best she could but he saw only the negative side of things. OK, so he was in four foster homes in one year, but she had gotten him out of the worst one. Now he bagged groceries and would go through times when he would not speak. Then he would quit his job and go to earth like an animal, and finally emerge and get another entry-level job.

Three husbands. Numbers one and three beat her.

“You want to hear some horror stories?” Tango asked, and I quoted Sam Goldwyn to her: thanks very much but no thanks. A little later, toward the end of our meal, Tango requested a plastic cup for the rest of her sundae. We already had containers for the liver and onions. Once again great patience and understanding from that special waitress.

Any doubt I might have had that Tango was special was dispelled when she began to tell me about the bird. “Caw, caw,” she shouted and her arms began to strike the air like wings. She had talked with her crow that very morning and he was angry. “I don’t blame him,” she said, “after the way they treated him.” It was Thoreau who spoke of people who march to a different drummer. It was true for my friend Tango.

I left her at the door of her motel room and even gave her a hug of a ministerial sort. (I had been taken for a minister and I might as well act as one).

“I hope that sundae hasn’t melted down,” she said, and I told her I felt sure it had not.

I was in time to make the concert, but as I listened to the music I was haunted by the picture of Tango in her watermelon box and without her kitty.

What are we to do with people who will not do what we tell them to do? Round them up? (There were no street people in Nazi Germany.)

Or should we, we who proclaim ourselves so compassionate and caring, decree that anyone requesting food or shelter, in this bounteous land so blessed by God, will be accorded food or shelter, without filling out a form or answering questions.