Monday, February 20, 2006

Knock Knock

A knock on the door at 1 AM is never good. And at first I wasn’t sure exactly what I was hearing. There was a noise in my head, maybe a dream. I rolled back over. Then there was a second knock.

By the second knock, I was semi-awake. The only thing I could figure was that one of my neighbors must be in trouble. I pulled on some warm-ups to cover my legs, screwed on a baseball cap and stumbled to the door.

I cracked the door open. There was a young man on my porch. He was wearing a jacket and a toboggan.

“Hey, I’m really sorry to wake you up,” he said. “I remember helping you move into this house.”

The cold air that was seeping around the cracked door was waking me up.

“I beg your pardon,” I said. “I didn’t quite catch that.”

“C’mon. You remember me. I helped you move in. I sure did like this house.”

I moved into this house some 13 years ago. From the looks of this guy he would have had to have been 6 at the time.

“WHAT?” I said.

“Ok, can I come in?” he asked. “Can I just come in and get some heat?”

“Hey, man. Sorry,” I said. “I’ve never seen you before in my life. I’m not letting you in my house. I’m closing the door.”

I closed the door, making sure the dead bolt caught.

I then called the police. Some elderly person in the neighborhood, after getting rousted out of a dead sleep might take pity on this bozo and let him in.

A cruiser arrived within 5 minutes.

I identified myself and shook hands with the young man. Here’s the thing about cops. They listen but they don’t make much eye contact unless they are asking the questions. He stood there ram-rod straight with his hands clasped over his belt as I gave the description of my visitor and recited his cock-and-bull story about how he happened to show up on my porch. All the while the cop was giving me the once over. When he wasn’t busy looking over my shoulder or all around the living room, that is.

Good thing I had remembered to put the crack pipe in the closet before letting him in.

That was a joke.

Anyway, the officer opined that it was probably a homeless person that had been rousted from somewhere else. He said that he had checked the Laundromat up on Kavanaugh on the way to see me. It was clear.

“You did the right thing by calling. We need to get him checked out before he talks his way into an old person’s home,” he said as he was going back out into the night. That’s what I thought as well.

As he crossed the yard another cruiser pulled up. A young black cop steps out. He is wearing a knit cap with “POLICE” written in reflective yellow across the front. He puts one foot on the running board and another on the ground. Just a couple of kids. These guys couldn’t have been over 25! 30 at the max.

“I just got a call on Lee,” the black kid says, jerking his thumb over his shoulder toward Lee Avenue. “Guy in dark jacket and something on his head.”

“Dark jacket, right?” the white kid calls back to me.

“Dark jacket. Right,” I say.

The white kid runs to his cruiser. The black kid talks into the radio on his chest.

“Thanks guys!” I say.

Both officers tell me that I am welcome.

“Go back inside, Sir,” the white kid says. “It’s cold out here. We’ll take care of this.”

And off they went into the night. Bless their underpaid little hearts.

As I have said before, I am not a very good Christian but I am a pretty good Methodist. And it is banged into our head from early on in Sunday School that we are to help the less fortunate, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and to care for the sick.

We are also commanded to give shelter and warmth. After all, Jesus said, “That which you do to the least of my brothers you do unto me.”

And so there was that part of me, the Methodist part of me, that almost opened the door. Thank God, the cynical lawyer part of me nudged my ass out of the driver’s seat and took over. After all, Jesus may have walked the streets but he didn’t walk these streets. Hell, it’s dangerous on the other side of the door. It is one thing to offer Yourself as a perfect and living sacrifice in exchange for the forgiveness of the manifold sins of the world. It is quite another to get knocked in the head in exchange for your wallet.

The guy was obviously up to no good. He completely lied about what brought him to my house. And what did bring him to my house anyway? He might have been armed. He probably would have tried to steal something before leaving. You just can’t give into your decent impulses unless you can control the situation. And once you let an absolute stranger into your house at one in the morning, you have, by definition, lost control of the situation and you get what you get.

I guess it says something about my raising that my initial impulse was to help the guy out. But to have done so would have been exceptionally foolish. I can only hope that when it comes time to settle my account in the hereafter, I am not judged to harshly.

But I am going to give a little money to the Salvation Army or to the Rescue Mission just in case. It never hurts to middle your bets. I’m sure that Pascal would understand.

I’m also going to give some money to a police charity as well in gratitude for the grim faced young men that came out in the night and who flew into the streets in order to get somebody off the street before an innocent person was harmed while succumbing to a decent impulse.

And I’m sure that I will continue to ponder this modern parable for some time to come.












1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You are indeed fortunate that the common sense enzyme overwhelmed your impulse to do good enzyme. And, you're to be admired for even having the impulse to do good in these days when Wally Hall has a television show.