Charity Case
Last night, as I was filling up my car, a mini-van pulled into the pump next to me and the woman driving rolled down her window.
“Excuse me, Sir, I’ve got a bit of a situation here and I was wondering if you could help?”
- Scary Santa begs for money for Chicago’s poor
I stepped across the pump island so as to hear better and asked her what’s the problem.
She proceeded to tell me a rather convoluted tale about how she recently had an apendectomy, and today she had had to drive down from Richmond to Augusta Medical Center for a checkup. But she’d left her bank card on the table at home, and she didn’t have enough money for gas to get back to Richmond.
Could I help her out? Any money I could spare would be appreciated.
I admit, I’ve become pretty inured to pleas for money. I work in a major urban area where you can’t walk a city block without some poor soul sitting on the sidewalk with a paper coffee cup asking you to spare some change. I don’t give them anything, anymore, because their numbers are just too numerous.
But this was different. I wasn’t in the city. I was pumping gas, as I’ve done once or twice a week all my working life, during which time I have never been accosted for money. It took me by surprise.
I did consider whether she might be lying. If it was a lie, it was a pretty good one. I looked in the van. She had children with her, and a man sitting in the passenger seat. Would anyone have the nerve to run a scam with their children in the vehicle? Probably. But again, I was surprised by the whole situation, not thinking too clearly. Maybe, in the end, it was good I wasn’t thinking too clearly. Clear thinking can be as much an impediment to right action as addled thinking.
So what do I do? I said, “Let me pay for my gas and get some change, and I’ll give you some money when I come out.”
She said OK and remained in her vehicle while I went inside and paid.
At the register, I started to have second thoughts. Here’s the part where clear thinking can sometimes lead us astray (maybe). I’d had time to reflect on her story. Why would someone who lives in Richmond have an apendectomy almost a hundred miles away in a smaller Virginia town? Well, maybe she was visiting family at the time, and it was an emergency.
If that is true, couldn’t she call on family to get her out of this jam?
The more I started thinking, the more I started wishing I’d told her I couldn’t help her. Evil, evil thoughts, really. What if her situation were genuine, and I, like most people, questioned her motives and refused help?
As I paid, I mentioned the situation to the woman at the counter. I’ve bought gas here often enough that the woman knows me by sight, and so I asked her if she would tell me, next time I come in, if the woman actually bought gas.
She looked skeptically at me and said “Don’t give her anything.” And then, to the man standing next to her, “We’ve got a panhandler on pump 11. You wanna call the cops?”
He says, “I’ll go out and chase them away.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to get her in trouble. I’m going to give her 10 dollars for gas, I just want to know if she actually buys gas with it.”
At the time, this seemed reasonable to me, but today it seems like a stupid request. If you give someone money, supposedly out of charity, you have no right to question how they spend it.
The man apparently thought it was a dumb suggestion as well. He said, “If you wanted to be sure she bought gas, you should have pre-paid for ten dollars worth of gas on that pump.”
Somehow, that seemed almost a worse option than giving the woman ten dollars. It was tantamount to saying, “I don’t trust you.” There was no charity in it.
I said, “Just forget it. It’s only ten dollars.”
And in the end, that’s what it came down to. Ten dollars wasn’t worth the guilt of not giving it, however much I might mistrust how it would be spent.
Does that make any sense? I don’t know. I was a little angry at this woman, likely a scam artist, for putting me in the midst of a moral crisis when all I wanted was to pump my gas and leave.
But I went back outside, walked over to her car, and handed her the ten dollar bill.
I said, “Hopefully this will get you to wherever you’re going.”
“Yes! Thank you,” she said. “It’ll be enough.”
I noticed that her male companion had his feet up on the dash. He was wearing shorts and flip flops on a cold November day. His toenails were painted black. Why did I notice? Why did I care? It was just my bourgeois moral sensibilities placing judgment upon them, again.
I got in my car, started it up, and sat there for a minute. I was waiting to see if someone would get out of the vehicle and start pumping gas. After a moment, she did open the van door, but didn’t get out.
I thought to myself, “This is awful. What am I doing? I gave her the money. I can’t be niggling about what she does with it. Maybe she’ll go buy cigarettes, or McDonalds food for her kids. Whatever.”
So I forced myself to leave and not look back, never to know whether she actually bought gas with the ten dollars or not. Although I know I made the right decision all the way around–I have no way of knowing her intentions, I can only respond to her stated “need” of money–I am still plagued with the thought that she and her companion were running a scam, pulling up to people at gas stations up and down the interstate, reciting her hard luck story for cash.
I have to let it go, though. I am letting it go by writing about it.
In a similar situation, what do you think you would do?
It’s difficult to tell when people are telling the truth. I think, in retrospect, it would’ve been better to pay for their gas prepay — and if they wanted to get shitty with you, then tough. That would just prove the point.
At the very least, if they were lying, do you think they’d ask for drug or booze money in front of the kids? Hm, don’t answer that question.
Be content with the thought that you might have actually helped someone. I think sometimes we all become blind to pleas for help, and it’s hard to tell when to give in, because sometimes, people really do need the help.
Those elaborate stories are the worst. I’ve been known to give money after an elaborate story, depending on my mood. Personally, I think my problem with the situation is that I don’t want to look like the chump, falling for a fake story. In the end, though, I like to think that the real chump is the person lying to good-hearted people just to get a few bucks. What kind of life is that?
So even if we are losers for believing them, we still win because at least our hearts are in the right place. Or, that’s what I tell myself.
In the end, it wasn’t the elaborate story, but the kids in the back seat that convinced me. I just find it difficult to imagine a parent who would use her children to perpetrate a scam, and yet I know it happens. Shoplifters often hide items in their child’s clothes or stroller. If they are caught, they can blame it on the small child accidentally taking something, give the item back, and usually walk free. So why is it so hard to believe a parent would use their kids as stage dressing for a scam? Yet I find it hard to believe.
I agree with Heather. I’d rather risk being taken for a fool any day than be a close-fisted about life. I find it fascinating how deeply it bothers us when feel that we may have been cheated. There’s something essentially conservative about caring so much more about the feeling than the money (because, clearly, the money is inconsequential). It’s a sort of exchange on the level of being I think. We always when we exist and give of ourselves want to end up feeling filled-up. When we are cheated it undermines that sensation of being filled-up. I hope that makes sense.
If I am interpreting your comment correctly, you’re saying that too often our acts of charity are rooted in a selfish desire to feel better about ourselves. When we feel cheated, it’s as if the person stole something from us, and not necessarily the money but that feeling of well-being. Ultimately charity ought to be grounded in something other than our own desire to feel good, but unfortunately it’s difficult, if not impossible, to get beyond it.
Matthew, i think that charity and ego are completely different. Ego might masquerade as charity, but all in all they are nearly opposites when it comes to situations like these. The long drawn out tale doesn’t help, because then you do begin to question it more, and that leads your thinking out of a charitable place. When I lived in Portland, there was this fellow that used to haunt my neighborhood. His were always drawn out and always different, and he NEVER remembered you, or the 20 other times you told him “no”. His schtick was to try to catch you coming across the street and then reference someone or some group of people and ask you “Did you just hear what he/they said?” “They said ‘that black guy’, listen man, i’m just trying to scratch something together so my kids can have something to eat!” It was the worst. One time he just straight up asked me for $20.