What a night! I kinda hate telling this story on myself, but I'm so disgusted, I feel I have to. I was getting hungry, it was getting late, and I didn't feel like making something. I wish now that I had.
I ordered some sweet and sour pork from a local Chinese place, and start driving over to pick it up. On the way I'm flagged down by an elderly black woman who has obvious mobility problems. I never pick up anyone, but I can see that she needs help. She said that she needed a ride to a grocery store. Fine. There's one right next to the Chinese place, so it's no trouble to me.
On the way she asks if I could help her with buying some bread, milk, and eggs. Again, I don't like giving money to strangers, but these are food staples, and I can see that she is in need. Plus I'm shopping with her, so I know that she really is getting these things and not alcohol or junk food. Well, once in the store, the list grows and grows. The first red flag. Still, it's nothing astronomical, and nothing that isn't a staple, so I was OK with it, and I still am. I came to find out that she was buying for others that supposedly didn't have anything. I do this kind of work at church (only not with my own money), so it's nothing unusual, and I can see that the need exists. Fine. I did and still do take her at her word on that point.
After we get out and I get my Chinese I ask where she needs to go thinking that it was in the neighborhood. It wasn't. She needed to take it to a housing project downtown. I'm very familiar with downtown, and I'm familiar with the project, so even though it's pretty far out of my way, I begrudgingly agree. Then came red flag number two. She asked me to stop at a liquor store to buy a pack of cigarettes. I drew the line there. Groceries I'll help a little with. I'll even give a ride to a complete stranger if I really feel it's needed. But I WILL NOT buy cigarettes. Not only are they not a food staple, I personally find them disgusting and loathe their very existence. With that settled we get to the project and she takes the first load up. I wait, and wait, and wait. I finally set a time that if she didn't come back, I'd just leave with the rest of the food and donate it to our food bank at church. She finally came back and said that the second family wasn't at home, so she needed to go to her home in Newburg.
Now Newburg is kind of a sketchy lower income suburb of Louisville, quite a distance from downtown, and it was getting close to getting dark. At that point I should have just given her bus fare, and left her and the groceries. However I'm too nice for my own good, perhaps to the point of being a sucker, so I start driving her, thinking that I'll leave her at a nice corner in the Highlands neighborhood; a safe, well populated area where she can call someone to pick her and the groceries up. Well, she tells me where she needs to go, and it isn't TOO much further than where I was going to leave her, so I think, "OK, fine, the ordeal is almost over." Wrong again.
On the way she wants to go through a liquor store drive thru to get a cup of ice.
WOMAN: "Please sir, I ain't had nothin' to eat or drink all day and I'm dying. I have the money to pay for that. It's right by my house."![]()
ERIC: *sigh*
"OK, but that's it."
WOMAN: "Oh, thank you Jesus! This will come back to you many times over!" ![]()
I thought to myself, if the store was so close to her house why couldn't she go after I dropped her off. But by that point I just wanted her gone so I didn't put of too much of a fight. Well, at the drive-thru window she didn't order ice, but a bag of cookies and a lighter! Grr!!!
Oh well, it was her money then. However, after she got the lighter and cookies she started yelling at the man in the drive-thru! Something about how they screwed her and everyone in the neighborhood, and she has their names.
ERIC: "OK, this crazy old woman needs to be out of my car NOW!!!"
I pull away from the window before she can finish her fight, and start driving back across Newburg Rd. to where she said her sister lived. As we pull up to her sister's house she starts screaming at people in the neighborhood, and then at her sister who owes her money. It isn't fighting yelling, but obnoxious loud conversation. I stop at the sister's house and immediately start unloading the groceries on the sister's lawn. Well guess what? The woman can't stay there, and has no way to get home, which was "really close." If I'd had any sense I would have finished unloading and left her there, but I VERY reluctantly agreed to take this nightmare of a person ONE last place, to her cousin's apartment, who could help her take the groceries back to the family in the projects tomorrow. At this point, I was getting really upset at the situation, which she misconstrued as me being afraid of the black neighborhood. The neighborhood didn't bother me, I've been in worse neighborhoods in Louisville and never felt unsafe. But then again, I've never been driving through one of those neighborhoods with a crazy woman yelling "Hey nig***! You my slave!" to strangers out of my car window! ![]()
We get to the apartment, and she starts knocking on the door and getting no answer. By this time the sun is really going down, it's a really bad apartment complex in a bad neighborhood, and I've had it!!! This has gone about 1 1/2 hours beyond the point of being a "good deed." I unload the groceries on the apartment's stoop, wish her luck (and a good psychiatrist), and tear out of there like a bat out of, well, you get the idea.
Here I try to do something nice for someone who I still believe really needed help, and I'm continually taken advantage of with nothing I did for her being enough. I wound up driving about 15 miles out of my way when I was only going out to get my Chinese food!!! Had I just driven by her, or refused to help with the food I would have felt bad about it, but after this ordeal, I never will regret passing someone by again!!! NEVER again!!!!!!!
-Eric
