#2: Sometimes all it takes is a cupcake.
Stevie1 always looks like he knows where he’s going and is determined to get there. He more glides than walks. Like he’s barely lifting his feet off the ground. Or is having trouble convincing them to stay on task.
When he crosses the street, it’s always at a diagonal. He stops. Goes. Stops. Goes. Works his way around the cars as if they were standing still. He’s turned jaywalking into performance art.
Stevie is always barefoot. With his pants cuffs rolled up a bit so he doesn’t end up tripping on them. I don’t remember him from last winter, but I can imagine him wearing unlaced ankle-high boots that don’t really fit. And not tripping on the laces.
Since Stevie is always on the move, I’d never had a chance to talk to him. So I was surprised when I looked up from my table outside the bakery and saw him jaywalking across the street right at me. As he reached the curb he stopped, looked to the right to see if there was someone else he was supposed to be talking to, before turning back to me and saying, “Could you give me money for a cupcake?”
I stood up. I don’t know why. But when someone asks you for cupcake money, it seems like a pretty serious transaction. People have told me they need money for coffee, cigarettes, beer, gas to get home and a motel room to get out of the rain. But nobody had ever asked me for money for a cupcake. Except a child. And Stevie was no child. He was a barefoot grownup who was determined to get his hands on a cupcake. Right now.
I started asking him my basic questions. He told me his name and that he was from New Hampshire over by the Seacoast.
What was he doing here? Stevie paused, surprised. He thought his part of the negotiation was finished. He tried to drag his eyes away from my hand which was reaching in my pocket and said absentmindedly that he had a friend here.
I didn’t want to annoy him with more questions but I couldn’t help ask what his plans were. Even though his eyes were now fixated on a $52 I’d materialized, he managed to drag his attention back long enough to look up and tell me he was planning to buy a house.
“Gee Stevie, you don’t have money for a cupcake but you might have money for a house?”
I didn’t say this disparagingly. He sounded serious. So I was curious. Maybe, like Kenny, he thought he was coming into an inheritance.
While keeping one eye on the $5, he explained that he was going to start getting his SSI disability payments again. It made perfect sense to him that this might be enough for him to buy a house. So it made perfect sense to me. Maybe that’s what they mean when they say to meet someone where they are—I was already calculating how much of a mortgage payment he could make with a typical disability payments. But he interrupted my financial planning to add that he might go to Canada or Iceland instead.
By now his hands were getting a little shaky and his eyes were totally riveted back on the $5. I began to feel like I was torturing the guy, so I gave it to him and said it was great to meet him.
I had just sat back down to start working again when I looked up to see him blasting out of the bakery door, holding the cupcake up like an ice cream cone you didn’t want to drip. He caught a dollop of frosting just before it fell, and kept walking.
Diagonally across the street. Barefoot.
Stevie is a pseudonym. The cupcakes are the real deal.
A few singles wouldn’t do it. The cupcakes cost like $3. And are worth it.