Sorry, I can’t help you

It was gonna be a relatively normal Saturday when J and I just had a delightful Potbelly post-climbing dinner and were walking to the Green Line station on Washington and Wabash until out of nowhere, a thin, frail-looking guy came up to us asking for help: “Could you guys help me? You guys can save my life today.” In Chicago, the instinct after hearing the first question would just be to just immediately turn them down and go away, but you don’t hear the second sentence very often.

So J and I, neither of us having the brazenness to reject this existential claim so hastily, decided to keep listening. S first outright stated that he didn’t like asking or begging people for help, but his situation was so dire that he had to resort to doing so. He proceeded to tell us about how he had diabetes and had to get his prescribed medications today, otherwise he could possibly go into a coma with an improperly regulated blood sugar level. I noticed he was holding a can of classic Red Bull, which he later explained that he had been drinking to pump sugar into his bloodstream. However, his card had been put on hold by the bank for 24 to 48 hours so he was simply unable to get his medications from Walgreens, so he needed some $180 for the meds and had been around downtown since 10am to ask people for their help. He had only gotten $52, and wanted us to fill up the rest.

I can’t speak to how J felt while listening to his story, but I was immediately put in a moral dilemma. I didn’t know whether to believe in S’s story or not. It’s… different from all the begging that I’ve encountered in the States so far, most of them being either asking me to give them some spare change or buy them a meal. But S had a whole story behind his; I looked into his eyes and through them, I felt it was an honest story of a desperate man, trying to save himself. I don’t think either J and I were in a financial position to discharge such a sum of money at a whim like that, and so we stayed firm throughout the interaction that we were not going to help him with the remaining $130 ish that he needed. I didn’t bring cash with me, and J only had $5 ish, so we were pulling the typical “Sorry, we don’t have any spare change” move in an attempt to get ourselves out of the situation. However, upon recalling to write this, I’m honestly not sure if we ever committed to that to get out — I think we just didn’t have the guts to — and somehow the situation evolved to that I could help him with $20 and J $15, both of us would head to the ATM to get him that cash. A slightly notable detail was that he promised to pay us back, offered us his name and phone number so that I guess somehow we could track him down afterwards, and promised that he would pay us back after. I almost dismissed that right away, just in an attempt to delay any actual involvement in this, saying that we could always just text him later if this story turned out to be true.

There were points in the interaction that felt weird, like right after the above moment when we offered such help, he re-confirmed with us “So you can give me $20? And you $15?” I don’t know, at that moment it felt like we had fallen right into his trap, unable to leave because of our own social awkwardness, being held against our own words so that we would give him $35 within the span of less than 10 minutes.

Then J asked him if he could provide some kind of prescription record to prove that he indeed needed such medications, and I think then there was a misunderstanding — he was saying “Let’s go to Walgreens”, so we thought that he was going to go up to the counter to show some kind of record in the Walgreens system, but I think he thought that we were fine with him not showing us any record because he “only had it at his home”. So J, S and I headed to Walgreens, each party having a different understanding of the mutual agreement to even go to Walgreens in the first place. He started introducing himself “My name is S, what’s your name?” and extended out his right hand. I coldly replied in a blank stare “I’m Henry” and J “I’m Mia”. I was still figuring out what the morally right course of action is, while balancing that with my own self-interests. Is his story actually legitimate? I could somewhat get behind the blood sugar thing he was talking about. My grandpa has it, so I knew a few things about the insanity that could happen if diabetes goes unregulated. And if so, do I have the moral obligation to give him the $130, or a part of it, an amount that despite meaning a lot to my life, would apparently mean his life for the night? I was deep in my thinking and wasn’t mentally there for the actual interaction with S. I was also scared that maybe he had some drugs or infectious diseases with him. And so I didn’t shake his hand.

On the walk to Walgreens (that was only a block away), I asked him if he had had lunch. He answered no, saying that he had only been drinking the Red Bull to… better regulate the sugar? As we were getting closer to Walgreens, my brain started to turn back on and return to reality. I thought to myself “Wait, what about his family? His friends? If he is indeed in such a situation, how is no one helping him?” I asked him about his family as we went through the Walgreens door. A horrible timing, in hindsight. He answered that he was living with his grandmother near Jefferson Park. And that his parents had passed away in a plane crash in 2007. My heart twitched. I wasn’t looking at him when he said that — we were going through the entrance of a busy Walgreens — then I muttered emotionlessly “I’m sorry to hear that”, face unchanged and unfazed as if to not give him the satisfaction of successfully getting to my heart and my pity, but inside I was broken and back again at the crossroad, not knowing what to do.

We got into the Walgreens and he showed us the ATM, but then the misunderstanding manifested itself, because we were then asking him to show us his prescription record. He initially suggested that we could go to his neighborhood Walgreens pharmacy to check the record ourselves, but of course we gave that a hard no. In hindsight, I think that 1, Walgreens should have his record throughout its entire digital system, so we could’ve just checked with the Walgreens that we were at, and 2, that he wasn’t aware of this, he just didn’t know that we didn’t have to go to his pharmacy for his record. And so I searched up that pharmacy and tried to call it to look up his record. It was kinda crazy that I was met with an answering bot that wasn’t just “press 1 for … press 2 for …” — I was met with a bot that wanted me to say what I wanted to do. After some AI magic, it reconfirmed that I wanted to look up a prescription status, and put me through to the local pharmacy. It blew my mind there and then, but that’s a story for another time.

We then put the call on speaker and S started giving the pharmacist his name and his DOB (for the DOB, he gave me a look to implicitly tell me to step back out of hearing range for this detail, which I thought was totally fair). And as it turned out, his info was actually there in the system. However, no medications have been sent over by his doctor. No meds were there for pickup. He repeatedly insisted to the pharmacist that he should’ve received some meds already, one time after another in such a desperate voice, to the point that I was surprised that she managed to be so patient with him, saying that there’s none for him to pick up and that he should contact his doctor the next morning to settle the issue. The call, still to my surprise, ended pleasantly. Trust me, it really could’ve turned into a shouting match through my phone at various points.

And so, there were no meds for him to pick up. In me, I sighed a sigh of relief. I didn’t have to be the one to help him. Because if his urgent situation were to actually be true, there was no way to help it anyway, since there were no meds to pick up. And since there were no meds to pick up then, we didn’t have to help him right then. Perhaps, someone else would do that the day after. J was the one who started drawing in the curtains: “I’m sorry we got to go, sorry we can’t help you today” and I quickly followed “I’m so sorry we can’t help you today, I really hope you get through the night.” As I was leaving, I looked at his eyes again. I saw a stare of utter disappointment at a loss of words and perhaps, the total collapse of his world and his hopes.

If you were to ask me now after the fact if I believe in his story, I’d say 80-20. It would not be a definite answer for sure, and would still just be a probability. But I ended up not helping him anyway. I think that maybe I’m just not mentally ready to handle the weight of the possibility that his story was indeed true. That his parents did indeed pass away when he was 6 (I heard the pharmacist then reconfirming his year of birth as 2001). That he only had 2 friends who were practically no longer in his life, one had moved to San Francisco and one in college. That he had diabetes and a card on hold, struggling to make his blood sugar not go crazy and to make ends meet. That I had refused to shake his hand, how lowly he must’ve felt when I did that. That he did not want to be the beggar, yet life had to be so cruel to him that he had to resort to doing such things.

After the incident, J and I both felt like we were somewhat targeted by him as the pedestrians most likely to give him 10 seconds of our attention to at least listen to his situation other than that he needed help. I guess we didn’t really like that, but what would we have done if we were to be in his shoes? We probably wouldn’t have asked the older population who would’ve so casually and so quickly dismissed whatever we had to say, and would’ve ended up using the same “targeting” strategy anyway, and would’ve chosen 2 young-looking college students on a Saturday night in downtown. It was do or die for him. The targeting was ugly, but it had to be done.

I still mulled over what had just happened on the ride back and was asking myself the question of moral responsibility — if we were responsible for helping him — and was reassuring myself that given the information that we had, especially that there were no meds for him to even pick up, it was okay for us to refuse to help him for the night. But whose responsibility was it to help him? His friends, his family? What happens if those sources of support just weren’t available, like exactly in his case? I guess the American society failed him and failed me that night.

Reflecting back on myself, it also made me realize how lucky I am for having what I have. I have great friends around and a family behind me who are constant sources of support, especially in times of need, physically, mentally and financially. On a slightly tangential line, but somewhat relevant to a bigger frame of thoughts that I intend to write down more some day, it made me realize (again) how ordinary ordinary people were. I was born into a slightly upper middle class family (in Vietnam’s context), had great opportunities growing up and am attending one of the best universities in America, and so I quickly set my sights on doing great things with my life, whether that being getting a PhD from a reputable program or getting a high-paying job right after graduation. Great, great, unordinary things. Extra… ordinary? But life for most people seems to be “simpler” and isn’t so rose-tinted. This wasn’t my waking up moment to the complex society outside of my own tiny bubble, it was just a reminder of it.

Perhaps most painfully, this interaction revealed once again to me how brutal humanity has become. In facing a fellow man seeking help, we immediately turn to the possibility that they are just conning us for our pity. We immediately assume that the person is lying to us for some quick cash on a Saturday night. Perhaps that mentality would help one not fall to the various trickery actual con men do, but isn’t that so sad? It reminds me of a Uber ride I was on while in Washington DC, when the driver revealed to me and my friend that he was actually an Afghan immigrant who had used to work in the American embassy in Afghanistan, left the country after the Taliban took over and had previously been in Denmark while waiting for an asylum visa before getting into the States and renting in Maryland. There was also an interesting storyline for that one, but the point is that it was my friend’s and my intuition to also consider the possibility that he was lying to us to perhaps get some sort of financial gain. I guess it is sad (for me) that when random strangers talk to me about their hardships, society has trained me to consider the possibility that it’s a lie more than to take a chance in believing in it. Perhaps that’s too naive of a thought, but could you imagine how helpless a situation a person must be in for them to go around, talking about that exact thing to total strangers just to ask for help, only to have most people dismiss them before even listening to what they have to say?

S didn’t have an American accent. He pronounced Montrose “Mon-chose”. So I’m guessing that he was an immigrant from somewhere, and maybe his family had moved here in search of a better life. If his story were to be true, I don’t think that better life had been going for him. But I certainly hope it will in the future, someway, somehow.