Aspiring Pervert at Subway

We were sitting at a Subway just off the Athens, Tennessee exit on I-75 North.

I was enjoying a $5 Footlong, buffalo chicken this time, rather than the usual Spicy Italian. Travis was having the same, and Joe was eating the Spicy Italian.

We were just three travelers on our way home from the Atlanta airport. This was the final “automobiles” phase in our “planes, trains, and automobiles—and buses” tour of the East Coast, from New York to Knoxville in a day.

I look out the window and see a young Caucasian male bent forward at the waist, running awkwardly back to the Pontiac sedan still idling.

The car tears out of the parking lot.

I take another bite.

Travis is talking to the middle-aged woman at the next table. Listening to their conversation, I realize that I’ve missed something.

“What happened?” I asked.

Travis and the woman take turns telling the story.

The guy I saw scuttling back to the car had run up to the window, pulled down his pants and underwear, and pressed his genitals against the glass. The problem was that he came in too fast on his approach and smashed his testicles. In effect, he junk-punched himself with a plate glass window.

What I had seen was a man who had just set on fire one of the major nerve centers in his body because he wanted to play exhibitionist on a Monday night doubled over in pain as he returned to his getaway car.

A total of five customers and two employees were present in the restaurant. Only two of them saw what happened, and only one of those, Travis, saw the teenager’s mistake.

The woman at the next table said, “You know what we call that? A pervert.”

The only evidence was a foggy smudge on the window.

Joke’s on you, Mister Backfiring-Public-Exposure-Aching-Groin-Idiot.

Homeless Man and Crack Ho

Last night, I stopped a homeless man from choking a crack ho.

When my roommate Adam Brimer and I came out of Barley’s after swapping stories about our transformative wilderness experiences and our girlfriends—rest assured, there were no measuring tapes or trophy cases involved—we heard shouting.

An older man was chasing a heavy-set woman wearing heels and a gold blouse around my 4Runner.

“Gimme back my money! You stole my thirty dollars!” He was brandishing his cane in the air. He must have had bad knees because he kept his legs straight, and that caused him to wobbled from side to side as he hurried after her.

“I didn’t do nuffin!” the woman shouted back, beating a hasty retreat down the sidewalk.

“You took it out of my pocket!”

This kind of shouting match is no extraordinary occurrence in the Old City. The shelters and ministries like Knoxville Area Rescue Ministries and The Volunteer Ministry Center on Broadway and Central are less than a mile away, and many of the homeless men and women hang out and panhandle on Market Square or along Jackson Avenue. Men wearing several musty layers of mismatched clothing and missing several teeth are a part of the landscape, the same as the historic brick warehouses and the famous JFG sign.

At first, I slid into the driver’s seat and started the car while Adam stood on the running board and watched the fracas.

She underestimated how quickly the old man could move even without his cane to steady him. He caught up to her, pinned her up against Adam Fulton’s white sedan, and clamped both of his hands around her neck.

“Uh-oh,” Adam said.

I looked over my shoulder and saw what was happening.

We both sprinted over there.

Adam grabbed the man’s backpack and one of his arms. I grabbed one of his thumbs and used it to wrench that hand from the woman’s neck.

She was wimpering, “Help me, help me.”

After a few moments, we got the two separated. The woman adjusted her clothing, then turned around and walked away.

The old man was beside himself. “Don’t let her get away. She got into my pocket and took my $30.”

“I didn’t take nuffin from you,” the woman said.

“What reason would he have to accuse you then?” I asked.

She just looked at me then kept on walking away.

At that point, I was pretty sure the old man was telling the truth. He was probably only in his fifties, or maybe early sixties, but life on the street ages people prematurely. His lips curled in over his gums, and his eyes had that rheumy, yellowish look of constant irritation and addiction.

I learned in a course in college that the vast majority of people on the streets end up there on account of mental illness, substance abuse, or a combination of both.

“Man, she stole my money, man!” he threw his metal cane on the ground. At least while it was down there he couldn’t whack me with it.

I asked him to tell me what had happened, but he kept saying over and over, “She got in my pocket and stole my thirty dollars and, man, you just let her get away with it.”

“We weren’t just going to stand there and let you choke her,” I said.

“She stole my money, man.”

“I believe you, but it wasn’t right for you to choke her.”

“Was it right for her to steal my thirty dollars?”

“Of course not.”

“Man, it’s not fair,” he said and stamped his foot.

At this point, Adam Fulton and Cade Benedict came out of Barley’s. When they walked up, they were wide-eyed, looking back and forth between Adam, the homeless man, and me.

“Do you mind if we take my car?” Adam said, so we took a few steps back. They left.

“Call the Po-lice,” the man said. He just wasn’t going to let it go.

“I’ve got three dollars,” I said. “You can have it. It’s all I’ve got. What do you need?”

I offered him food.

“I want my money back. Let’s go find her.”

“You know she’s long gone.”

“Man, if you hadn’t come along, I’d have my money.”

I realized we weren’t going to get anywhere. He was going to blame me for stepping between him and what he saw as the quickest way to get his money back—depriving that woman of oxygen. I understand that people on the street live by a different code of ethics, one based on survival, not niceness. If Adam and I had simply driven away, however, my conscience would have eaten at me.

What was the right thing to do? Simply not get involved?

The theme of Sergei Bondarchuk’s Soviet film adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace has something to say about such situations:

“All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

I handed the homeless the three dollars, and said to Adam, “C’mon, this conversation is over.”

“Man, why’d you get involved, man? She stole my money, and you did nothing. Call the police, man. You came in, and now I ain’t never gonna get it back.”

I think having compassion for the homeless, for the down-and-out, for the bums, whores, and junkies, is a rare trait indeed. I don’t claim to be the most compassionate man living in North Knoxville. More rare than compassion, though, is the willingness to speak truth to people who are accustomed to being ignored, or at best, bribed to go away. I hope that’s what I did.

I turned back around.

“Listen,” I raised my voice this time, “I don’t know what happened before we got out here, but I do know that when I saw you choking a woman, I wasn’t going to stand idly by and let you do it. I don’t care if it’s you or anybody else, it’s never right to choke a woman. She may have stolen your $30. I’m not saying that’s right, but what I am saying is that it was wrong of you to do that to her. You’re not going to blame me for what happened. She stole your $30, huh? Well, you must have given her the opportunity.”

Once we were in the car, all Adam and I could do was laugh at the incredulity of the situation. Adam works for Knoxville News Sentinel, and one of his gigs was shooting a prostitution sting. He now knows one when he sees one. We had just wrestled a toothless homeless man with a cane off of a prostitute who probably outweighed him by fifty pounds.

That just doesn’t happen every day, so we laughed.

More Elusive Parts of Frog Anatomy

While weaving through the desks and chairs inside her portable with bluish-green aluminum siding the color of a corroded penny, Mrs. Menefee fanned herself.

“Is hot in here? Is anyone else hot? I’m burning up.” She’d open up the windows and double-check to make sure the air conditioner was on full blast, even in winter. We could see our breath, and we wore our winter coats.

Now I realize she must have been going through menopause, hot flashes and that sort of thing. She perspired as though she were playing a game of pick-up basketball. Beats of sweat quivered on her upper lip, and when with one of her hands planted on my desk and the other on my shoulder, she’d come by to offer an encouraging word or check our progress, I couldn’t help but stare at them. They quivered. They could roll off and splash on my homework at any second.

She had given us tapeworms to dissect.

Tapeworms could regenerate damaged parts, which sounded like something straight out of a Marvel comic. The body of the rowdy, incorrigible Wolverine healed almost instantly from wounds that would kill a non-mutant without an adamantium skeleton. If you cut a live tapeworm an inch from the tip of its arrow-shaped head down the middle of its body, it would grow back two heads. Other than this remarkable ability to become even more disgusting, the tapeworm was boring.

Frogs, which came next, were a different story. For some reason, Mrs. Menefee told us all to them.

Trying to choose a nickname for the hard, chemical-smelling frog on my dissection trays seemed strange. We were about to cut them open after all, though I suppose that I, like most boys, welcomed any opportunity to get away with something, to pull a prank or test a boundary. The hard part was not thinking of names but deciding which one of my least favorite teachers would receive the honor, and with it, a scalpel in the anus.

Nothing makes for an exciting day in science class like dead amphibians, razor-sharp knives, and Mrs. Ferguson, the saggy-breasted librarian, whose translucent white belly would soon regret the demerits that she gave me for talking.

Despite the morbid humor of my group of friends, we all enjoyed finding the heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, stomach, and the more elusive parts of frog anatomy.

Mrs. Menefee must have understood our need to destroy because after we had played Operation with our frogs, she told us that we could do what we wanted with them for the last five minutes off class.

My response was to take a pair of shears and cut mine up into little bits. Unsure of what to do next, I then stacked them in the middle of the tray. At the table next to mind, Carter Bradley was being admonished for putting part of his frog on a girl’s bare skin. Many of the other kids had simply thrown what was left of their unfortunate pets, mostly skin and skeleton, into the garbage cans.

Though I’m sure those frogs were bred and raised for the purpose of wide-eyed faces hiding sick senses of humor, opening them up, removing their miniature organs, and dumping them among the snotty tissues still seems like a waste.

Not to say I was a great respecter of life at that point in my life, but to say that my friends and I were in-between: we had retained enough of our childish wonder to marvel at the frozen architecture of their delicate bodies which had at one point enabled them to eat bugs, jump, and swim. At the same time, we jockeyed for position, who could be funniest and secure the girls’ admiration; who could shock the other friends and show boldness by pushing the limits of decency.

How strange to touch the preserved body of a creature once living! Perhaps some educator back when decided that dissecting frogs could teach the double lesson of anatomy and mortality—the fragility of living, breathing, pulsating existence.

Dissecting a frog would mean more to me now, that dear members of my family have died; people in high school and college with me; a girl I took to homecoming one year; a girl I studied with in Vienna, Austria; my father’s father who bequeathed to me his bony brow, his love of the written word, and his gregariousness. Dust animated for a day or for one hundred years inevitably completes its journey where it began. The rest of us are left to wonder where they are, if the stories of heaven are true.

In the seventh grade, we held death in our hands, yet we waited impatiently for the signal to sever the webbed feet and crack the tiny skull. We couldn’t wait to peel back the clammy skin and glimpse the fine, white muscles underneath before shredding them. I’m afraid the mysteries of biology and locomotion were lost on us.

I don’t know what I would do differently, whether if I were the teacher, I would speak in terms of science or faith; whether as the students slid their frogs out of its plastic sleeves, I would tell them to the dead creatures a number or a name.

Perhaps, instead, I would place a live frog, kicking and croaking, in each pair of  upturned palms and say, “You decide whether this frog lives or dies. If you decide to save its life, you must find it a good pond or river, then let it go. If you decide to kill it, you must do so at the front of the room where everyone can see. That’s the cost of being human.”

I wonder, if Mrs. Menefee had tried to teach that lesson, would we have learned it. Would one of my classmates squeezed out a fart and ruined the seriousness? I suppose it’s never too late to start learning the cost, the danger, of deciding for ourselves which life is sacred and which should be snuffed out.