A Simple Act of Decency

In an age in which moral responsibility is defined by lawyers, a simple act of honesty evokes less than cosmic attention.

There are rarely any standing ovations for someone who, motivated by conscience, takes the high road in establishing for himself what his levels of personal conduct ought to be.

He decides alone, acts alone and walks away with an angel on his shoulder.

Two events bring this to mind, the most public of which is the thuggery of NBA star Latrell Sprewell, who first apologized for a violent attack on his coach and then began whining about the price he had to pay for it.

Both the attack and the backpedaling are increasingly characteristic of what, for lack of a better term, are called “sports” in America. The million-dollar babies that make up our mindless, head-smashing games feel accountable only to their astronomical salaries.

In Sprewell’s case, the assault on Coach P. J. Carlesimo resulted in his being fired by the Golden State Warriors and suspended for a year by the NBA.

It was only then, with millions at stake, that he managed a limited apology, followed by a mournful appeal to lessen the punishment. So he choked a guy. Big deal. That’s entertainment.

Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., who seems to be wherever a camera is pointed, stood firmly by Sprewell’s side during the televised apology session, ready, if necessary, to toss his own made-for-the-moment code of moral conduct into the fray.

The issue, he might say, isn’t the choking per se but what the legal definition of a choke might turn out to be. Was Sprewell actually choking his coach or merely stroking his throat? Stay tuned.

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Now about the honest man.

It was one of those nights when El Nino was playing in the thunderheads over the San Fernando Valley and rain was falling like a mother’s tears on the El Camino Shopping Center.

You could almost hear her moaning on the wind that drove the rain in parallel sheets across the crowded parking lot in front of a Sav-On store jammed with early evening shoppers.

I was standing by a checkout counter waiting for my wife, which is how I spend a tenth of my life, when a man in his mid-30s walked in out of the rain looking like he’d been dipped in a tub. I’ve never seen anyone so wet.

He was dressed in work clothes and carried a Sav-On bag tucked under one arm, which he had protected from the storm like it contained the crown jewels of England. I figured he’d probably had to cross the whole parking lot in order to get that wet, but the bag somehow was amazingly dry.

When he finally got the clerk’s attention he explained that he’d accidentally walked out without paying for an item he’d picked up as a Christmas gift and had returned to the store to make good. He owed her, he said, $32.85.

She looked at him like he’d just declared himself her missing father and said, “What?” She couldn’t believe what she’d heard. He said that he’d discovered his mistake after he’d gotten into his car and had come back to pay what he owed.

With that he took his purchase, a kind of purple rectangular box, from the bag, laid it on the counter and counted out the cash to the last penny. She rang it up, still not believing this was happening, and handed him a receipt. Retrieving the package, he went back out into the storm.

It was only after he’d gone that the clerk, looking toward the closing door, said: “That was really nice.”

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I don’t know who the man was, but judging by the way he was dressed and the way he counted out the $32.85 I’m reasonably certain he wasn’t under contract to anyone for $32 million.

He was probably just one of us, if you know what I mean, a guy working at a job and making a salary that is never big enough when the roof starts leaking or the car breaks down.

It’s especially hard at Christmas when with all your heart you want to buy special things for special people but the cash just isn’t there and the credit cards are all maxed out.

The guy at Sav-On probably knows what I’m talking about and could have kept whatever the gift was he’d taken out of the store in the first place and saved himself a little money. No one would have ever known.

But instead he chose the high road by paying what he owed, all other considerations aside. So doing, he displayed what a psychologist friend, Michael Aharoni, calls the moral spirit of accountability.

Responsibility, Aharoni told me one day, is something you can wiggle out of, the way Sprewell is trying to dodge the consequences of his behavior. Accountability is the ultimate ownership of one’s standards and values and the unwavering willingness to answer to a judgment of the soul.

To compare Sprewell and the guy who paid his debt is probably a stretch, but there lies within the dichotomy of their actions two paths of conduct open to us all. Unfortunately, standards today are set more by superstars than by guys who brave the rain to make things right, and the masses follow the star.

But maybe, by acknowledging the unknown man’s quiet gift to the moral spirit of accountability, we can simultaneously honor both him and the energy of redemption he brought to a rainy night in the Valley. It’s just the right thing to do.

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Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com