That Time I Inadvertently Sent a Homeless Man to Hell

The Belizean snack aisle kind of hell, anyway

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

Arriving home from Belize with a questionable case of Covid, I make my meandering way toward the baggage claim. With a worsening cough and a growing malaise, the conveyor belt rotates ad nauseam without a single suitcase in sight. As the overlaid metallic surface continues cycling around and around in a grating infinity, the absence of baggage grows all the more stark for the jet-lagged, weary-growing wait-ers.

There’s a scenic array of art along the wall at which the less tired tourists are stopping to take pictures. The locals speed-walk impatiently past, eager to get home and unaware of the droning waits at baggage claims still ahead of them. Rounding the bend and spotting the unmoving sea of congestion before them, some of them facepalm in defeat.

Others begin gearing up for the hibernal wait, relieving their achy legs on hastily packed bags. Others pull folded newspapers from their suitcases as they solemnly accept their fates.

As the stalled row of travelers’ patience rapidly dwindles, a man springs buoyantly from the corner to take advantage of the impasse. There’s a gleam in his eyes, a series of stains on his hoodie, and a 5 o’clock shadow that looks like Christmas lights that lingered into February.

From afar, he appears like one of the many homeless that the multi-cultured metropolis is baldly unwilling to house. He’s wearing tattered clothes and seems as though he’s been allowed by an uncaring capitalism to fester in his own filth.

He asks for food and is greeted with winces, glowers, and blithe dismissals. From across the revolving belt of metal — now populated by two unattended suitcases that had meekly arrived on the scene — the man snakes his way methodically around with a pre-rehearsed story. With the first few couples and traveling groups to whom he pitches the plea, he finds little luck.

Slowly, he makes his way around the Miami to Philadelphia baggage claim like a Jehovah’s Witness canvassing homes. But his success rate makes even Scientologists look like prolific salesmen.

As the man continues to near me, he arrives with an overbearing stench. It’s such an unidentifiable maelstrom of odors that it lends credibility to the little of his tale I’ve surmised thus far. The cacophony of stenches is at once curious and revolting — like a mix of festering durian and Axe body spray.

As the metal before me flows perennially into itself and my suitcase remains nowhere in sight, it’s my turn to take my chances with the suspiciously smelling vagabond. The closer he grows, the more hair-raising the odor becomes. It wafts from sweat-stained clothes through my nostrils and causes my eyebrows to contort perplexedly apart.

“Excuse me, sir, sorry to bother you and God bless you. I’m homeless and I haven’t eaten anything in two weeks. Any — food or money you have — I’m just tryna’ get maybe a bus ticket to somewhere I can get some work. Anything you can spare would really help me a lot. Thanks for stoppin’ and listenin’ and God bless,” he explains. His voice is sullen but his gestures are emphatic. With each swing of an arm, the abrasive bouquet of odors barrels toward me in crescendoing waves.

The speech sounds as though it’s being read off of a torn note card — one that’s been pieced indelicately back together with scotch tape. But the words scrawled across it ring true. I try my best to be a receptive listener as I struggle to stand on my sickly, shaky legs. With a couple of suppressed coughs, I reach down toward my wallet, open it, and realize my pouchful of pesos and Belizean dollars is unlikely to do the man before me much good.

Remembering the assortment of Central American snacks stored within my backpack, though, it occurs to me that I’m not totally powerless to help. But with no more than an obscenely spicy bag of chips remaining from my once flourishing menagerie of munchies, the predicament at hand presents itself in full color. Hearing the bag crumple, the man’s eyes and palms widen.

“Do you have any water — or — ” I ask, pretty sure I already know the answer. His eyes remain captively focused on my foreign corn chips. “These chips are like — extremely spicy… you might want t — ”

With hands stretched out before me, he gestures for the chips with hardly so much as a faint acknowledgment of my words. I allow the chips to flow into his fingers like a faucet. They’re crumbled to bits from two successive flights and a few miles worth of airport-bound commute, but he takes the mound of fiery chips into his hand like a poor soul who’d never experienced the blows of a hot pepper before in his life.

And with one deft movement, he pours the gaping pile of infernal red crumbs into his mouth like a plow truck unloading mulch. A tearful bliss colors his face. God rays shine down through a dense floor of concrete as a heavenly melody fills the room. He looks with enraptured awe toward the airport ceiling with arms spread divinely apart. He appears as though he’s about to fall to his knees from the beatific might of the delectably spicy snack.

But the bliss rapidly begins to sour. And I begin questioning the origins of this soulful, doughy-eyed gaze. Tears of ecstasy turn into a muted agony as the vagabond abandons all attempts at future beggaring in the interest of a feverish search for water. His note card elevator pitch goes flying in the windless room as his pupils furiously scan the auditorium-sized expanse in search of a water fountain.

His grateful glimmer morphs into a fretful desperation. He looks like a deer in the headlights — a man contemplating the venom of the poisonous dart frog he thoughtlessly plucked. But as a water source emerges in the corner of his peripherals, he madly dashes toward it.

Properly quenched and with the contours of his lips a flagrant crimson, the man looks toward me from across the room with squinted eyes and a suspicious stare that reads “sorcerer!”

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This article was originally published on Medium.

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