Bipolarland, Texas part 4

 

2

It turns out Sarah is rather isolated from the rest of the homeless people. She's recently homeless.

So she tells me about how her parents were trying to force her to go to school to be a lawyer, but she doesn’t want to. They don’t allow her to stay at their place unless she’s actively pursuing that career, yet they yell at her when she tries to leave, shouting that she needs to stay with them if she wants a place to live or to be fed. Welfare won’t take her; they just tell her to get another job whenever she loses one. She tried fifteen jobs, from airport screener to garbage collector to paper shredder to bakery assistant to paper girl to beer server. The longest she lasted in a job was five days. She spilled the beer and smashed the crystal mugs it was in, got tired of getting off her bicycle to put the papers in their mailboxes because she was lousy at throwing them properly where they would land in the porch safe from the rain. She got sick from handling people’s biohazardous garbage because she handled the bags too roughly and they broke open. She got fired from the airport for bringing home confiscated contraband from her checkpoint, instead of possibly letting them destroy all this perfectly good and sometimes high-quality and expensive stuff. She spilled the coffee at the coffee shop, kept breathing on the pizza at Papa John’s, kept breaking the dishes she was supposed to wash at Applebee’s, jammed the paper shredder at the Republican Party’s headquarters, burned the bread in the bakery, miscalculated the totals at Family Dollar and ended up selling a woman a $5 candle for $50. She worked for a mental health crisis hotline but talked too much about herself and her own problems to the people she was trying to help. She was an assistant at a preschool, but was fired for getting too excited and goofing off and acting like the kids. She was a lifeguard, but was fired after an actual drowning emergency came up and she just sat there in the lifeguard’s chair petrified, sure she would screw up if she tried to help, so she did nothing, and luckily two other lifeguards jumped in and saved the guy and he was okay, but Sarah was fired after that one.

She was the usher that bumped into and pushed aside people in the theater and spilled their snacks while leading them to their seats. She was the taxi driver that panicked and forgot her way around her own hometown where she grew up.

What is more, Sarah couldn’t get into any college after high school because her marks were too low. Why? Because her parents had been pushing her too hard and expected nineties or 100 in everything, and when she didn’t deliver they called her a freeloader, a loser, a nutjob, a bum with a below-average IQ. Which made her marks even worse.

“I don’t mean to be making excuses,” she says. “I hope I don’t sound like that.” She turns a little red.

Suddenly I’m infuriated.

What’s so different between me and her that she has to blush around me? What’s so classy and hoity-toity and snobby about me, or the likes of me, that makes her have to apologize for her feelings?

“You know, I’m not going to judge you,” I say again. I’m starting to get annoyed. I don’t want to be treated like an unsympathetic yuppie. Or any kind of yuppie, since they all seem to be unsympathetic.

The waiter brings our food. Sarah puts her head in her hands. Accepting charity from someone and then having to socialize with them must be the most embarrassing thing she can think of. And I tell her that, and remind her that I would have just dropped a twenty in her bowl and kept walking, but that I had thought she might want to talk to someone, someone who could help raise awareness.

I hope I don’t sound too preppy with all the classy talk about raising awareness. Isn’t there a way I can be intelligent but not sound snooty? I know there is; I’ve done it before, when I didn’t really need it. And now that I need it, when I need the ability to speak with the common touch, it’s eluding me.

She nods her head, nibbling at the end of a french fry. “I don’t know how I’m going to eat all this.”

“Well, it’ll last you a few days, then. At the rate you’re eating it at, anyway. Come on, you must want more than that.”