TKOG Who picks up the check (without trying to pick up the guy)

NTKOG #127: The kind of everyday philanthropist who proves there is such a thing as a free lunch. By buying it for you.

I am: broke. Also? I may be nice, but…

I am not: that nice.

The Scene: Hole-in-the-wall pizzeria (is there any other sort worth going to?) on Comm and Harvard Ave. in Allston, intent on nursing a slice for an hour or two over a good book while waiting for Sister to get her hair cut. I get through fifty pages of “The Confessions Of Max Tivoli” (a must-read) and am finishing the last few cold, greasy nibbles when an Oscar promo starring my imaginary boyfriend Alec Baldwin comes on. I laugh a little too loudly right as a guy my age walks out of the restroom, and to apologize for my social transgression, I lock eyes with him and smile.

The second I smile at him, he magically levitates six inches closer to me. The man is hungry for human contact. His eyes rip from me to the mangled scrap of pizza in my hands, shimmering with congealed grease, and the big vein in his throat pulses. Oh. Oh, maybe he’s just hungry.

He asks me what sorts of movies and TV I watch — oh, not many; no TV, no DVD player — and he touches his forehead with contrition. “Oh, a girl like you, of course you read all the time. I’m bothering you. You want to get back to your book. Just tell me — is it a good book?” While he says this, he backs away a few feet, but his face is so vulnerable it reminds me of a big pimple on the verge of popping.

“Would you like a slice of pizza?” I ask him. “I was going to get another one. I’ll get you one, if you’d like.”

I order and pay for the slices; while I’m at the counter, I set my Fake-A-Call app to rescue me in fifteen minutes. By the time I come back, he’s written down the title and author of the book I’m reading on a scrap of paper and shoved it in his pocket.

He tells me he’s been on a reading binge lately, and starts describing the plot of Catch Me If You Can in detail; his words are well-chosen but each one spews out before the previous one is half-finished. He’s too lucid to be drunk; his manicured beard and clean clothes tell me he has a home; I’m beginning to wonder if he’s just a person who’s lost his ability to recognize the social conventions that mark us as “normal” when he starts touching his face.

Just his nose at first. He reaches up to brush it with the back of his wrist once, twice, three times while he tells me about his first time reading a Raymond Chandler novel. By the time he mentions reading Catcher in the Rye, his pizza is forgotten and he alternates between hands, scratching his arms, his thighs, reaching under his shirt and scratching his belly. He tells me about a memoir he read last week.

“I got so into that book that I stayed up thirty-seven hours straight just to read it,” he says, ripping his fingernails through the skin of his neck with such a fervor that I can practically see the addict bugs crawling under his skin.

I ignored the Fake-A-Call savior call when it rang, and did not reset it. I talked to the guy and let him talk at me for forty-five minutes, when I really did have to go meet my sister. His slice sat there, still half-eaten.

When I left, he reached out to shake my hand, and that’s the moment my grace failed me. “Sorry,” I told him, “pizza grease. I’m kind of a germophobe.” Then said goodbye and walked away.

The Verdict: Because of the nature of my job, I spend a lot of time working with mental illness, drug addiction and anti-social behavior. And maybe familiarity will just never breed comfort, because it still spooks me. This is the kind of thing I wish I had nerves to do more often though.

I don’t know. I can’t sit here in my comfortable, good-smelling life and rate my facile little field trip to the outer edges of human suffering. It’s too cynical. Just give someone a big fucking hug today. That’s what I want to do.

Tagged as: adam smith, allston, drug addiction, free lunch, my heart hurts, things you can't unsee