Give and take

Last night did not turn out the way I expected.

Scout and I had settled in for the evening in my favorite overnight spot in the city: the parking lot of the supermarket where Son #2 works.

The black fleece curtains were drawn and a jerry-rigged ‘gate’ set up to keep Scout from accessing the front of the van, where she likes to bark at passing dogs and skate boarders.

I unrolled her dog bed on the floor to give her a soft, warm place to relax, and opened the laptop to watch the latest The Good Wife (under cover of my sleeping bag because I am paranoid about getting caught again, living in my van in the city).

Deep into Alicia and Eli’s troubles, I heard a pounding on the window accompanied by Scout’s best guard dog imitation.

Fuck. A cop must be outside, waiting to question and roust me.

Not the actual woman. This is a stock photo.

But it wasn’t a cop. It was a woman who looked to be in her fifties, with a worried expression.

“Do you have some pliers?” she shouted through the closed window. I wasn’t about to open it to a stranger.

“I’m locked out of my van,” she said, gesturing on the other side of a walled fence toward a maroon minivan that I had seen while walking Scout.

The signs of habitation had been clear: the blacked-out windows, the open door, the dog dishes on the ground outside.

That’s unwise, I remembered thinking at the time. You don’t want to be obvious about it. I made it a point to steer clear of the van on later dog walks, to avoid invading the occupant’s privacy — what little there was.

Was I that obvious? How did this woman know anyone was inside my carefully-closed up van? Could she see the light of my laptop through the black curtains AND the sleeping bag? This was beyond alarming to me.

“No,” I shouted back, trying to wish her away.

“You don’t have any tools?” she asked, incredulous.

I thought about the toolbox in the back of the van and shook my head. Too many times, I had opened the window to beggars with fanciful stories in parking lots and then wished I had said no. This time, I did.

She turned away, a look of desperation on her face, and I immediately regretted my choice. She wasn’t acting; this was a real crisis. I knew what it was like to be locked out.

It was going to be a cold night for San Diego, in the low 40s. Would she have to spend the night on the street?

By the time I managed to leash Scout up, undo the ‘gate,’ put on my jacket, and find the keys, the woman was gone. We walked to her minivan a few hundred feet away but she wasn’t there, either.

Scout was overjoyed at this unscheduled walk, making sure to stop and sniff every bush to check out previous visitors. I tugged her along, impatient, as we walked around the block and through several parking lots, looking for the woman.

We came full circle and all I wanted was to get back inside to finish The Good Wife. But I decided to look one more time to see if the woman was back at her van. Yes, she was.

And she was crying. She had gotten hold of pliers somewhere and was trying without success to dismantle one of her van’s back windows.

“Sorry,” I said. “I lied. You scared me. I do have tools but I see you found pliers.”

Her name was Gina. She was tall with long, slim legs in black pants and a black hoodie. From the neck down, she could have passed for one of the SDSU coeds who live in the apartment buildings that line Montezuma Avenue. She must have been an attractive woman at one time but now her face was aged with worry.

Gina’s story came tumbling out. She had spent the weekend in jail after taking a sink and (something I can’t remember) from next to a dumpster behind a restaurant.

“I thought they were free,” Gina said. “I wasn’t stealing them. I was going to sell them at a swap meet.”

She had been released on informal probation but the officer who arrested her had the keys to the van and she didn’t know how to contact him. Her 8-month-old pit bull puppy was locked in the van, she said, and she had given the keys to the cop and begged him to take the puppy to her daughter. Now, the daughter had the dog but not the keys, and for some reason couldn’t — or wouldn’t — come to rescue her mother.

I wondered how much of Gina’s story was true, if the daughter had had enough of these crises and was practicing ‘tough love.’ I could relate.

Was she a drug addict? An alcoholic? It didn’t matter. Gina was in front of me and needed help. And for once, I was in a position to give it.

How many people had helped me in my hours of need since hitting the road two years ago? I couldn’t count. Here was an opportunity to pay just a fraction of that help forward.

There was a cheap motel across the street. I offered to put Gina up for the night, to give her time to track down her keys.

“Really? You would do that?”

“Sure,” I said. “I know how it is.”

I thought about how I would have wound up on the streets myself not that long ago, if not for the kindness of friends and strangers. Yes, I would do that.

We walked to the motel together, Gina limping in her gilded sandals.

“Do your feet hurt?”

“No, it’s my hip.”

A sign in the motel lobby’s window said, “I will be back shortly.”

We waited for fifteen minutes but I could see Gina was in pain. We decided to go back to her van. Later, I called the motel and found out no rooms were available anyway.

Then she had an idea.

“If you can pay for a motel room, what about paying for a locksmith?”

I hadn’t even thought of that, assuming that they wouldn’t be open at night or would be prohibitively expensive. A couple of phone calls later, it turned out I was wrong on both counts.

“I can come out in about an hour,” said the locksmith. “It’s $50.”

Another stock photo

Gina hunkered down on the curb next to her van and I went back to mine, passing a grubby-looking, white-bearded man and his dog as they tucked themselves under a bush for the night. It seemed like they were everywhere I went now.

What is the world coming to?

I thought about the vastness of the thirty feet or so between that man’s bush and my comfortable van. To him, and to Gina, I was wealthy. But to many so-called normal people who live in houses and apartments, we were indistinguishable. To them, I was as homeless as that old man sleeping under a bush.

His dog barked menacingly and Scout answered back in kind.

“Come ON,” I urged, pulling hard on the leash, eager to get back to the van and The Good Wife.

I had just put in my earbuds and started watching the show again when I heard more thumping on the window.

Fuck, what now?

“Do you have a blanket?” Gina asked, shivering and puffing on a cigarette, after I had fumbled with the curtains, the gate, and the lock to open the door.

Of course, why hadn’t I thought of that? I handed her a Mexican blanket through the door and she wrapped it around her shoulders. Smoke wafted into the van, nauseating me.

“Thank you so much!”

“Don’t smoke in it, okay?”

“Oh, sure, sorry!” She stubbed out the butt with her sandal and walked back toward her van.

Then I remembered that she had mentioned being hungry. What the hell, might as well buy her a sandwich as well as get cash to pay the locksmith. I left Scout in the van and walked to the store where Son #2 was still on his evening shift. I told him what was going on.

“Be careful!” he said.

He knew about the homeless people who slept near the back of the store. “Tweakers,” he had once told me, but I’d never seen evidence of drug use, just tired old men with no place else to go.

“I am, don’t worry,” I replied and went to find a sandwich in the deli section.

Son #2 followed me.

“I’ve got it,” he said. And he bought a roast beef sandwich for the woman he had never met.

I hugged him and took the sandwich to the maroon minivan. Gina was lying on the ground, wrapped in the thin blanket, her head on the curb as though it was a pillow. I could only imagine how uncomfortable she was but I resisted the temptation to invite her into my van.

Boundaries, LaVonne! I reminded myself. There wasn’t enough room anyway.

I gave her the sandwich and the money for the locksmith.

“Thank you,” she said for the hundredth time. “Thank you so much!”

“You’re so welcome,” I said, and headed home to finish my show at last.

It felt good to be on the giving end for a change.