The Best Worst Trip Ever, Part One

My dad loves the Beach Boys, so I grew up listening to “Sloop John B.” In the song, Brian Wilson sings, “This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.”

That was how I felt at approximately 8:15am on Tuesday, November 17, 2009.

Let me give you a short prologue.

Back in August, my friend Elizabeth had asked me to take a look at the website of a luxury resort in Turks & Caicos where she and her husband, along with several of their friends, owned a condo. I made some recommendations, and over the following months, what began as a favor for a friend grew into a six-page proposal for online marketing.

Elizabeth called me on Thursday the week before to tell me that my proposal had been approved. The Tuscany was my biggest client to date, and represented a major turning point in my career as a freelance marketer and copywriter.

I was very excited.

The next day, Elizabeth booked plane tickets for herself, Paul Hassell, and me. Paul is a talented outdoor photographer who would be taking the pictures and shooting the videos that would bring the spice to all The Tuscany’s marketing initiatives for the next eight months.

Synchronizing the schedules of four busy people had taken hours of phone calls and emails, but by the grace of God, we had managed to carve out three full days to work between two days of travel.

I was working out the final details with Elizabeth on the phone—everything from international cell phone coverage to sunscreen—when she reminded me to bring my passport.

Still incredulous that so many variables had worked to our favor, I hung up the phone and bounded up the steps to my room. I keep my passport in my humidor whose humidifier I never remember to fill. At least my passport smelled like a pipe-smoking old man.

I opened it up to reassure myself that everything was in order, and that’s when my stomach did a back flip: as of May 20, 2009, my passport was expired.

On Monday at about 4:55pm, I gave Elizabeth, my friend Ben’s mother-in-law, the worst possible news, given our unique circumstances. Her response was two words: “Oh —!”

Use your imagination.

We agreed that the first order of business was to drive to the Post Office before it closed and see if they could offer any advice. I pulled in the parking lot four minutes later and slipped through the door before the woman locked it.

“Oh, you’re a sneaky one,” she said.

I smiled.

I waited in line for the woman on the far left to finish up with an elderly woman.

While I was waiting, I noticed that the post office worker had a cross taped to her plastic name plate. Cards with scriptures printed on them were also taped in several places.

This was encouraging. As a Christian, she might be more willing to help me.

“What can I do for you?” she asked in a voice thick and sweet with molasses. This was the voice of a woman who was happy because I was the last customer of the day.

“Well, I’ve got a big problem,” I said.

“Don’t tell me that!” she said. “It’s the end of the day.”

I went on to explain that my flight for Turks & Caicos left at 9:30 the next morning and my passport was expired.

The smile on her face sank into a frown.

I finished with the backstory. “Is there anything I can do?” I asked.

“Oh, you’re screwed” was her answer.

Thank you for your help, ma’am. And for the encouragement.

I’ll see you at church on Sunday.

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.