Soft Touch for a ‘Scholar’ of Hard Knocks

I was probably duped the other day by a persuasive con man and his female accomplice.

Either that or I helped a young couple in their hour of need.

How does it look to you?

I had pulled into a space on the Hughes supermarket parking lot on West Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena. A young man got out of a small, battered red-orange car on my left. Smiling, he said, “You have something to do with UCLA?”

Sharp young man. He had noticed a UCLA parking sticker on my windshield. I told him I was an honorary alumnus and that my sons had attended UCLA.

What a coincidence. He was enrolling in UCLA. He squatted by my door and began to pour out his story, without a stop, with increasing anguish and despair.

His wife was sitting in the car, devouring an apple. She was two months’ pregnant. She’d had morning sickness that morning. They had been looking for apartments in Sherman Oaks when someone broke into their car. He pointed to where the door appeared to have been pried away from the body. The thief had taken all his photographic gear. (He was a photographer.) His wife had left her purse under the seat and the thief had taken that. They had no money, no credit cards. They had been to the police. They had driven out to the airport to try Travelers’ Aid. Nobody could help them. They needed money for food.

Someone had given his wife the apple. That’s all she’d had to eat all day. The way she was chomping on it, I could believe it. They needed money for gasoline to get back to Lodi, so he could get the $1,400 they needed to rent the apartment they had found. Could I think of anyone who could help them?

I am a soft touch. I slipped a $20 bill from my billfold and gave it to him. He jumped to his feet. The bill vanished. He said, “God bless you.” His wife called out, “God bless you, sir,” from the car. He said, “You’ll get it back, don’t worry. Do you have a business card?” I gave him my card.

“You’ll get it back,” he said again. “God bless you!”

His wife got out of the car and they walked toward the market.

I am a soft touch; I am also a skeptic. Why was he enrolling in UCLA in May--a month from the end of the term? Certainly he hadn’t left his wallet in the car. Why didn’t he have any credit cards? What had brought him from Sherman Oaks to Pasadena? How could a student at UCLA pay $1,400 a month for an apartment and support a pregnant wife?

I decided that I had been taken. Still, they had walked toward the market. Maybe they were hungry. I had decided that if their story was true, I didn’t want to turn them away. It had cost me only $20 to have a clear conscience.

I was on my way to my daughter-in-law’s house for a party. When I arrived I told the story. A young friend who was helping her had had an almost identical experience. She too had given a desperate young couple $20.

Then my daughter-in-law said that she had been approached by a woman with a small child in the same parking lot. The woman told her she had nothing to feed her child. My daughter-in-law told her to wait. She went into the store and bought $30 worth of food--every kind of food that a child might eat. She trundled it outside and gave it to the woman.

Were all three of us easy marks? As of now, I think so. Has the supermarket parking lot become a hazardous place? It always has been. Your car can be sideswiped by someone who leaves no card. It can be burglarized. It can be stolen. You can be held up or mugged. You can buy drugs. You can probably buy a handgun. Your children can be kidnaped. You can be murdered.

It’s possible, I suppose, that in a week or two I’ll get a letter from Lodi with a $20 bill in it and a note saying, “God bless you!”

It may turn out that the young man indeed has enrolled at UCLA, for a summer session; that he has a scholarship and enough money to keep them in a $1,400-a-month apartment; that someone had given his wife that apple just before he spotted me; that I had helped them in a crisis and that when the baby comes, I will be its godfather.

I think God should bless me either way.