Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock(31)

“I’m sort of crazy. I’m mostly lonely,” I said, because she looked little-kid confused and I was starting to feel bad for her again. I guess I only liked her when we were alone. “I follow sad miserable-looking adults on the trains all day sometimes and so I thought we had weird train-station behavior in common and—”

“You all right, Lauren?” said Jackson, who was now somehow rubbing Lauren’s shoulders again and glaring at me like he wanted to kill me before I could accept Jesus Christ into my heart, and would therefore—in his mind—end up burning in a sea of fire.

“She’s all right,” I said. “I’m leaving. Problem solved.”

I left.





TWENTY-TWO


I’d see Lauren at the train station from time to time but she pretended like she didn’t know who I was, and I pretended like I didn’t know who she was either.

This went on for a year or so.

Then one day, I saw her in Center City being harassed by a bum, who was following her and yelling, “Give me a sandwich and you think you saved the world? It don’t work like that! You think God sent you to give me two pieces of bread with a slice of cheese and a flimsy circle of bologna and cheap bright-yellow mustard and that’s supposed to make up for ten years of living in a cardboard box? That’s what you want me to believe? God loves me because you gave me a half-assed sandwich? I’m homeless—not crazy!”

The guy had wild eyes and a lion’s mane of gray hair that made his head look like a frozen sun or something.

“I’m sorry I disturbed you,” Lauren said.

“That ain’t good enough,” the bum said. “I gotta few things you can tell your god the next time you pray in your nice warm house with a toilet in it and a whole refrigerator of food that you’d never give to bums like me because it costs too f*cking much and so it ain’t bum food. I bet you got a dog that eats better than me.”

“I’m sorry,” Lauren said. “I’m sorry.”

It was kind of funny seeing Lauren getting verbally beat down by a bum, and I was totally on the bum’s side, but Lauren looked so rattled that I had to intervene. And so I went up to the bum and said, “I was sent to you by the Atheist Society of America. We believe in chaos and no god at all, and want to congratulate you on putting this uppity Christian in her place. As a reward we’d like to give you twenty dollars that you may use to buy a superior sandwich or whatever you’d like. No strings attached.”

The gray lion-haired bum looked at me like I was insane, but he snatched the money out of my hand and walked away.

“He’s just going to buy alcohol or drugs, you know,” Lauren said, which made me sad, because she didn’t know that man at all, let alone whether he had a dependency problem.

“I don’t believe we’ve met before. I’m Leonard Peacock,” I said, and stuck out my hand confidently, putting on the Bogie charm.

“I remember who you are,” Lauren said, ignoring my outstretched hand, playing hard-to-get Bacall again. She looked really shook up, so I didn’t take offense. “Why do you think he got so angry at me?”

I didn’t feel like listing all the reasons why she deserved the verbal beatdown from the homeless man—mostly because I knew that wouldn’t help my cause—so I just changed the subject. “You’re welcome.”

“What?”

“You no longer have a bum trailing you, yelling at you.”

“Oh,” she said. “I was fine. God would have protected me.”

“Maybe god sent me to protect you,” I said, playing devil’s advocate.

“Maybe.”

“God says you should have coffee with me right now?”

“You want to have coffee with me? Why?”

“We can talk more about god,” I said, giving her the line she wanted.

“What you said to Jackson and me at my church,” Lauren said. “It was really rude.”

“I know, I know. I’m sorry,” I said just to get her to have coffee with me, because her face was all red from her being harassed, and she looked so femme fatale—so much like she needed saving—that I didn’t even care she had trap written all over her.

“I’m not going to park with you,” she said in this really serious way that depressed me; I only had so much Bogart in me, truth be told, and I was already running low.

“Do people in your church really use the word park as a euphemism for having sex in cars? Do teenagers really have sex in cars? I don’t even drive.”

“If you’re just going to make fun of me for going to church and believing in God, I don’t want to have coffee with you, Mr. Atheist.”

Her calling me Mr. Atheist really deflated me because it felt like a wall—like my personal beliefs were going to keep us from being friends and ultimately kissing. It was like once again someone was labeling me and putting me in a box just as soon I expressed myself. Suddenly, the whole deal didn’t feel like a game anymore.

Consequences, Herr Silverman says. Consequences.

I abandoned my plan. I made a real attempt. “I’m not going to make fun of you, okay? I just want to understand you. Maybe we can have an exchange? Maybe we can talk about our beliefs over coffee without trying to change each other. What do you think?”