I’ve been hanging out with a lot of rich people lately. Or in the midst of. Have you ever smiled so much you thought your cheeks would rip? Or felt like some alien piece of felt on a field of chignon? Like you might be mistaken for lint? Impostor syndrome. I hate that. But its real.
I attended a charity auction to support a charity working with the homeless. There was a powerful and moving speech from a former homeless person who is now working for the charity. Living rough for 25 years, in and out of prison, face kicked in by rich college kids who just saw him as scum sleeping in a sleeping bag in the door of a shop one night. His tale was grim, yet hopeful.
It’s important to crawl inside and know what the “other” lives. “Vermin”, “dosser”, “skag”, “skiver”…all terms he related that had been rained down on him. He described dumpster diving for meals, a life on drugs, the lure of petty crime for a fix. Just trying to numb out his life.
Amazingly, he understood what people felt when they would see him and feel that revulsion. That he stank. That he represented their deepest fears [my words, not his]. But he said, “they never understood what got me here. Mother dead when I was 13. Growing up on a housing estate. Father drank himself to death before I turned 17. He would disappear for days on end. I spent Christmas at home alone as a 14 year old, wondering where he was, and living in a sea of hostility. I dropped out of school, and I turned to drugs as a way to not think.”
What pulled him out? “I didn’t want to die on the streets. And that’s what I was doing. Every day, I was dying a little bit more.”
To hear him speak made it hard to not feel intense emotion. To not feel compassion for him and his fellow street dwellers. He described how hard it is to help someone who doesn’t want help, just wants to die, or to wallow in hopelessness.
It was nice to sit at the table of honour. I sat at the table with this man who spoke to the assembled crowd. I sat with the head of the charity. I sat with the big donors. Not because I am a big donor. At all. I try. Do my best. Give until it hurts.
I wasn’t there because I was eye candy either. I was there because of being trans. Somehow being a marginal member of society made it important to fall within the protective halo of the event. And I felt it.
I bid on everything. I bid for people to sing. I bought raffle tickets. I bid in the silent auction. And I bid hard for a posh picnic basket from the UK purveyor of extraordinary picnic baskets. And I won. Being a force of nature is part of my thing. I think that I won also because I was coursing with witch power.
No matter what, I was proud to give and to be there.
And the rich people? Many of the gifts to bid on came from the assorted grandees. But what else? They would bid with idle indulgence, even for things they didn’t need, simply because they wanted the marker to be higher. There was an insane bidding battle over the most preposterous item of garden equipment, not because either party wanted it, but because they simply didn’t want the other one to have it.
If there is a life lesson in all of this, you will have to tell me what it is. I can’t figure it out.