Always (23 page)

As he finished, there was thunderous applause, although the moderator had advised beforehand that there should be no show of support from the audience. I waited for them to quiet, looked into his eyes, and gave him a respectful nod of the head. Then I turned toward the camera and said, “I thank you for asking that question, Representative Edwards, because it is one of the most important issues facing our generation. I feel the only way to explain it is like this. I am sure you would agree that historically people of color in this country have been disadvantaged in many ways. Let's look at sports since the World Series just ended.

In baseball you have one player from one team facing nine from the opposition on the field. Now, the batter must
earn
his way on base. If he hits the ball and does not make it to first, he's out. Point-blank, end of discussion. But if by chance there is a
tie
. . .” And then I paused and looked at my opponent. “If there is a tie, Representative Edwards, since it was nine players on the field against one in baseball, the batter is viewed as being
disadvantaged
and the tie goes to the runner. The affirmative action laws as they are written will not—and I repeat because this is often overlooked—will not give
anything
to
anyone
who has not earned it. But if there is a tie between two applicants in terms of qualifications, what it does give is an opportunity for women and people of color to simply stay in the game.”

When I backed away from the microphone, the applause was so loud there was a squeal in the audio and I knew a mandate was a distinct possibility.

After my victory, I went up to New York City for a meeting with JFK Jr. and the editorial staff of
George
magazine as well as
Newsweek
and
Black Enterprise
. Herbert also made sure he got me back in front of Tim Russert and
Meet the Press
. As badly as I did the last time in town, I did well this time. I was comfortable with the questions and Russert shook my hand afterwards and asked if I could do the show again the Sunday before the next general election.

Leaving Rockefeller Center, I walked down the street and a few people recognized me. A couple even wanted autographs, but in a city so used to celebrities, most people just walked on by.

Then I noticed a lady standing in front of a department store across the street. She moved slowly, and as I saw her scratch her backside, it was obvious she had not bathed in some time. I looked at my watch and saw that I had some time before the limo would pick me up and take me to the airport to fly out to the West Coast. I went to a diner, bought a couple of sandwiches, and walked back outside to find the homeless woman asking a tall blond for money. The lady wore a designer cowboy hat, faded jeans, and had one of those dogs that was not much bigger than a rat with a bad perm, and it was wearing a gold-tone collar around its neck. I realized at that moment that we live in a society where pets are treated better than people. All of a sudden I lost my appetite.

I stood to the side out of the way of the flood of people walking past me and watched as this lady asked each and every individual entering and exiting the boutique for change. As they past, they'd step by as if they were deaf or they would pat their pockets and shrug their shoulders to save their own conscience. As I watched, she must have addressed twenty people, and not one gave her a red cent.

I crossed the street to get a little closer to her. I just wanted to hear what she was saying to these people to cause
some of them to make the faces they were making. She looked to be in her mid forties and her skin was pale. Not like a white person who's sick, just a yellowish, white-fish, eggshell pale. She wore a windbreaker over several sweaters, although it was a warm day in Manhattan, and one shoulder of the windbreaker ironically draped off of her like a rich woman's mink, exposing the dirty lining inside of it. She wore Burberry polyester pants, she was barefoot and walked with a limp. Between prospects she scratched her head furiously as if she was trying to get something out of her hair, and when she pulled her fingers out she smelled them. I thought,
My God, how dirty do you have to be to smell whatever is in your hair?

As I stood at a newspaper stand in front of the store next door so as not to make eye contact with her, I listened closely to what she was saying.

“Sir, I'm sorry to bother you, but do you have a spare dollar?”

“No, I just spent my last buck,” the man who wore a silk navy ascot replied.

“Sir, I'm sorry to bother you, but do you have a spare dollar?”

Walking so fast he almost tripped, the next prospect ran out into traffic to hail a taxi.

“Ladies, I'm sorry to bother you, but do you have a spare dollar?”

“Bish, please!” the woman said as she and her friend with a bag full of clothing laughed. “Get your ass a spare job.”

“Yeah, take yo po white-trash ass down to the damn welfare office,” her friend said with a laugh as they walked away.

And then Henry noticed a blind double amputee in a wheelchair with a tin cup extended and a crudely written sign hanging from his neck that read, “I thank my God every day that you can see.” One of the ladies almost walked into him as the other said, “Shit, these muttas coming out the cracks in the pavement today, child. You can
never
find a decent can of Raid when you need it. Can you?”

The homeless woman never changed expression as she
asked the next person and the next person and the next the same question and got the same result.

“Ma'am?” I said, walking up behind her. “Here's a dollar.” She looked at me and her eyes showed a joy I had not seen in them previously. “I also have an extra sandwich. You can have it under one condition.”

“What?” she said, awaiting the catch to my kindness.

“You have to sit over here with me and eat it.”

“That's all? You don't want no head . . . or nothing?”

As the words came out, I was glad I had not eaten, because I would have lost my lunch. “Aha, no. I just want a little company.”

As we sat, I smelled her. Let's just say I can only use a phrase I once learned from a Kansas farmer. She smelled like urine in a rusty bucket. But I sat and talked to Ora for half an hour.

She was only twenty-seven, had no children, but was once married. She and her husband had had a house in Iowa and a Chevrolet wagon with wood on the side. They were married for two years, but fell into credit card debt, which eventually bankrupted them. One night she left and came to New York looking for stardom on Broadway, where she got involved in drugs. “Tits,” as she called them. “I think I smoked up a little bit of my brains too,” she said. She was very proud of the fact that she had kicked hard drugs all by herself and was not
tricking
anymore. “I still smoke, though,” she said. “I don't even consider weed tits. But I ain't crazy. A great man named Oscar Wilde wrote, if you destroy the thing you love”—she took pleasure from the surprise in my eyes at her knowing the quote—“the thing you love destroys you. I know I done destroyed me some weed, so there you go.” And then she looked around for a potential beggee.

“I shot heroin before I even smoked weed. First time I was out turning, this bitch came up and asked if I had any shit. I told her I snorted and then she said she didn't have time for that. A little while later, I saw her in the alley shooting it in a vein in her waist. She said all of her other veins were too messed up. I swore up and down right then
and there I would never do any drug I had to shoot in my body. Well, I got to the point where I shot in my arms, fingers, thighs and then between my toes, and then my waist, and then the only place I could do it was to shoot it in right in my neck. After doing it like that for a while . . . I thought I should stop.

“And I would do enti-thang . . . you hear me? Enti-thang to get a buzz in dem days. I used to trick for Jacksons. That would buy me about two packets and I was using about eighteen or nineteen of dem packets a day. That just tells you how much I had to turn. Sometimes the men wouldn't have a Jackson, so I did it for ten and a few times even five or a Washington. It didn't matter 'cause I had to have dem snaps.

“You know something?” she continued, as she vehemently scratched her head again and then the back of her neck. “I been called so many names, when someone says ‘ho,' ‘white trash,' or ‘cracker bitch,' I look around like it's my name. I guess regular people get upset with that kinda stuff, but I don't. I've had people pour hot coffee on me while I was sleeping in the rain, I have had people spit on me just for the hell of it, look at me and run as if I were a monster or something or cover their kid's eyes as if I were contagious as they pass by me. I used to have feelings; not anymore. That's the first thing you lose when you live on the street.” She looked at the entrance of the store as a tall black man came out carrying a tennis racket over one shoulder and a white girl on his other arm.

“You know something?” she said, looking back at me. “I also used to read the Bible. But I don't no mo 'cause I don't see how God could let me go through what I have all these years on the streets. I remember somewhere in the New Testament, I think it was in the book of Matthew, where somebody said to Jesus, ‘When were you here?' and he said something like, ‘I was there and you didn't feed me. I was there,'” she said with a chipped tooth smile, “‘and you didn't clothe me.'” And then she took a bite of her sandwich and her smile faded as she said, “I was there, and you poured hot coffee on me one morning while I was sleeping
in the rain and burned my face. Yeah . . . I was there, and you spit on me when I wasn't even messing with nobody.” As she looked at the last bite of her sandwich she said, “What's yo name again?”

“Louis.”

“Louis. Umm, that sounds like some rich-white-boy name.”

“Ahh, I'm not hardly rich or white,” I said. “I go to work every day like everybody—” And then I caught myself.

“You can say it.” She smiled at me and then laughed. “Shoot, I go to work too. I just have more flexible hours.”

I laughed not so much at what she said, but her spirit in spite of her circumstances. She continued as she looked at the last bite of her sandwich in her hand, “I'm not loco, you know.” As she said that I watched her face change like the seasons from the smile that exposed her dingy teeth to the aged one I saw earlier as she was begging for dollars. Looking at me, she said, “You know that, Leon? I'm not crazy. And I'm not lazy either. People think that when you live on the streets. They think you just crazy or sorry. But that's not me. I'm just . . . just unfortunate. I have had some bad breaks in my life, but you know something? When I was a little girl, I would see people on the street corners and my mom would say don't look at him, don't look at her, but I'd sneak a peek anyway. Maybe it was contagious, 'cause deep inside, I knew one day, somehow, some way, no matter what happened, no matter what I did, I would be just like them.”

She put the last bite of the sandwich in her mouth and chewed slowly, closing her eyes as if it were a filet from the Russian Tea Room. “That was a good sammitch,” she said. “That was damn good.”

What could I say at this point? I stood and simply said, “Thank you.”

“For what?” she asked, stuffing the aluminum foil from our sandwiches into her pocket.

“For having lunch with me.” And then before I knew it, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the first bill my hand touched, which happened to have a picture of Grant
on it, and handed it to her. I don't know how she responded, because I turned away and ran across the street to the waiting limo.

On the cross-country flight to the West Coast I could not get her out of my mind. In an odd way we were somewhat similar. We both enjoyed the flexibility of our jobs, we both suffered the slings and arrows, and most important, we both knew at an early age what we would be when we grew up. I took out a legal pad and scratched a few ideas, because I was bound and determined that even if we stood on opposite sides of the divide, Ora and I would make a difference. I called Herbert on the airplane phone to discuss a few ideas and he reminded me that bills like that rarely make it through Congress because people like her tend not to vote. They don't have unions, nor do they have lobbyists fighting for them. But I knew if I could somehow connect the legislation to a farmers'-rights bill, I could pound it through with the support of senators in populous states as well as representatives of smaller agricultural states. This idea had cost me $105, but I worked on it relentlessly as I flew to California because I knew in the bottom of my heart that it would save thousands of broken lives. Ora may have stopped believing, but God had put her in the right place at the right time.

A year later I introduced legislation we called the “Helping Hands Bill,” to assist people who had fallen on hard times. It would help the farmers in Iowa trying to compete with the corporate farmers who were forcing them out of business as well as the homeless in more urban communities. The legislation was handily defeated by a two-to-one margin because the large industrial farmers had better lobbies then Ora.

But the move helped me in so many other ways. I was asked to speak more on a national level and I was even a part of the Farm Aid concert. In a way, I was bridging the gap between urban America and the heartland, and the motto I'd used in Florida in each of my campaigns, “One People, One Man, One Vision,” was starting to pay dividends.

When I returned home from the L.A. trip, I was tired. I had done fifteen cities, spoken more than forty times, and appeared on twenty-seven television shows, all in a two-week period. We knew it was imperative that we strike while the iron was hot to show America the new Henry Louis Davis, and the results were very encouraging. In the polling we did out West, I was doing better than most other potential Democratic presidential candidates. We were trailing Steiner, but only by a few points, which pleased us since he was from the Midwest and had been a part of three national campaigns.