#so literally on october 1st i tried making my first payment. they rejected it for no reason

[valkysrie]

does anybody else have student loans with nelnet im literally going to kms thinking about this stupid company !!!!

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

STREET SAINTS #3: THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO RON

     This week’s episode of Street Saints™ is brought to you by...me, your Better Days Are A Toenail Away beat reporter. I’m kidding. This episode is about Ron, a man I met several sabbaths ago.      Now, in a recent post about payphones I briefly touched on how people these days are reluctant to let strangers use their mobile phones. I won’t argue with that. I mean, our phones contain our entire lives. But I let Ron use mine. Here’s what happened.      I was walking around aimlessly one Sunday almost two months ago when...well, that’s not exactly true. I had a definite aim in mind. I hadn’t had a cigarette in a few days and was getting desperate. I’d already asked a few people and had been rejected by all of them when I passed a barefoot man sitting on a bench outside the food bank I used to go to.      The man looked like he was having a rough day. Or a rough month. Or year. Or life. The soles of his naked feet were scabbed and black and he was wearing a collared shirt, unbuttoned and open, revealing a scarred and hairy chest. Wearily, he lifted his head as I passed and asked if he could use my phone. He asked with the same defeatist energy I’d been asking for smokes with...that is, expecting to hear a firm “no.” I freely admit that I didn’t want to loan a stranger my phone, what with COVID and germs and all that, but my heart went out to him because he looked like he really needed it, so I handed it over and sat down on the bench beside him.      “God bless you, brother,” he said. “My name’s Ron. I’ll be quick.”      “Hi Ron,” I said. “I don’t suppose you have cigarette by any chance?”               “Nope, but I can get one! Hell, I’ll buy you a whole pack, hell…two packs, for helping me out. I got a friend coming who’s gonna give me a hunnert bucks!”      I nodded, even though I didn’t exactly believe the guy. Not because he seemed like a liar but because broke people always have that one mythical payment they are waiting on, the one that will lift them above their circumstances. I’ve often borrowed money to buy heroin on the strength of some random payment I’m anticipating, money that forever waits just beyond my reach, like the baby on the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind. (Aaaaand that simile allows me to continue my tradition of inserting Nirvana album covers into the Street Saints™ series. I am a professional writer. Do not try such similes at home.)

     ^ That baby’s name is Spencer Eldon, btw. Eldon makes his living these days by charging outlets $1000 for interviews. The interviews are pointless, given that Eldon doesn’t remember the Nevermind photo shoot because he was six months old, but unscrupulous or desperate editors continue pay his required fee. I distinctly remember a Rolling Stone feature from 2001 featuring a ten-year old Eldon in which he agreed to a reshoot of the underwater photo, and was quoted by the magazine saying “Nirvana’s okay, but Blink-182 are way better.” 

    Eldon reshot the photo again in 2008, now telling the New York Post that he preferred the Clash to Nirvana. Getting warmer, Eldon.

     Eldon did yet another anniversary reshoot in 2011 in which he said “Every five years or so, somebody’s gonna call me up and ask me about Nevermind…and I’m probably gonna get some money from it.”              I am not the first writer to make this trivial connection, but you might say Eldon’s famous photo is a metaphorical representation of his life. He is constantly swimming toward the next dollar bill on the next fishhook. You might even say that we’re all Spencer Eldon…each of us swimming toward the next paycheque, the next loan, the next stranger’s cigarette. I certainly feel that way sometimes. I definitely felt that way when all my money went to heroin. And even Ron, the barefoot preacher who spoke a few words into my phone then hung up and handed it back to me, probably felt that way too, waiting for his possibly-fictional-but-flush friend.       “He’s on his way,” Ron assured me, sensing my skepticism. “Two minutes or less. He’s driving a silver minivan. Keep an eye out.”      “Right on,” I said. “Thanks. I just need a single smoke, you don’t have to…”      “One!” scoffed Ron. “What’s one gonna do? I’ll get you a couple packs!”       Far be it for me to argue with a religious man, as both a baptized Catholic and penniless individual in need of a nicotine fix. “Cool,” I said, nodding again.       “I’ve been thinking about a woman,” Ron said, squinting at passing cars. “My first girlfriend, to be exact. Her name was Angel. As somebody who believes that the Lord Jesus Christ is my personal Savior, I’ve begun to understand the biblical importance of her name, and to understand that Angel really was an angel and that...that I shouldn’t have let her go.”      He looked at me and I saw with some alarm that he was crying. Then he began to rant about Moses and the burning bush and how he’d been “trying [his] best but sometimes your best isn’t good enough.” He told me he’d quit drugs and alcohol years ago but he still smoked because tobacco is in the bible. He said he was homeless but he’d just that day found a place for October 1st. It would be his first apartment in over a year. He said the Lord wanted him to do good deeds while he waited to move into his new place, his dollar bill on a fishhook.       As a frequent consoler of the downtrodden, I tried to think of something I could say, something that might cheer him up or summarize things, but then a minivan pulled to a stop across the street and a portly fellow disembarked and trudged over to us, smiling.       “Hey!” he hollered at me, still grinning. “Is this guy talking your ear off?”       Not wanting to make fun of my new barefoot friend, I shrugged noncommittally.       “He will if you let him,” the friend said, producing a roll of hundreds from his pocket and handing one to Ron.       Woah, I thought. Ron was telling the truth.       He hadn’t been bullshitting me. He wasn’t swimming toward some irretrievable dollar. He really did have a friend on the way to loan him money.       “Where the hell are your shoes?” the friend asked Ron. Ron shrugged and replied cryptically: “The Lord provides.”       I got up from the bench and moved away so the two friends could converse in private. I wasn’t going to hold Ron to his offer. He seemed to really need the money. But Ron and his friend didn’t talk long, just a few words and a handshake and then Ron disengaged himself and slowly sauntered over to me.      “Okay!” he announced. “Let’s go get those smokes!”       There was a bar nearby I knew about that sold reservation cigarettes for $5.50 a pack. It took us half an hour to walk one block because poor Ron was limping. He absentmindedly held the hundred pinched between two fingers as he walked, and it was flapping in the wind. Watching him, I got the sense that he didn’t really give a shit about money.       At the bar Ron bought four packs with the hundred dollar bill and gave me two of them. Two full packs of smokes. Then he asked for $5 bills in return, which struck me as odd until a few minutes later when I saw why.      On our way back to the food bank Ron told me he was training to become the oldest player to ever make an NHL debut. When you are homeless and marginalized, these kinds of dreams sustain you. They are the necessary fictions that get you through life. I won’t start talking about the dollar bill on the fishhook again, but you get my point. Then he talked about God again and expressed his faith that he was “on the right path for the first time in a long time.”      Back in front of the food bank, Ron, who was now preaching loudly about kindness for one’s fellow man, walked up to every single person in the foodbank line and handed them a $5 bill until he was down to his last $20.      I was gobsmacked. I was fucking amazed. He even tried to give me $5. And although I was totally broke, I didn’t accept the money. I had the cigarettes I’d set out to get. I might be an untrustworthy drug addict but I’m not a greedy prick. But this post isn’t about me. It’s about Ron and his selflessness.      Earlier Ron had said “the Lord will provide,” and although I’ve long been skeptical of religion and the literal truth of the bible, in that moment I could not argue with him. This was the gospel according to Ron. Sometimes you get to grab the fishhook and take your dollar.      It was a moving scene in that foodbank line. Some of the people Ron handed money to cried tears of relief. Others hugged him. All were exceptionally grateful and told him so. He just nodded solemnly and looked at me smugly as if to say see?      In the world of drug users and the downtrodden there are a lot of liars and bullshitters. You hear lots of dubious tales from people with delusions of persecution and/or grandeur. But here was a man who walked it like he talked it. He’d been preaching kindness and care toward one’s fellow humans since I’d spotted him on that bench and here he was handing his own money out to everybody like an unhoused Henry Sugar.      The man was barefoot and his feet hurt and he could have bought himself a pair of sandals at the nearby Dollarama for $3, but instead he gave everything but his last $20 away.       I walked him to the subway, telling him en route how impressed I was, how he “walked the talk.”      “Thank you Danny, I appreciate that,” he said quietly.      He was uncomfortable with my praise. I think he viewed himself an instrument of what he called “God’s light.” What he'd done, that generous display, wasn’t about him. It didn’t even seem uncharacteristic.       Now, I have a lot of atheist friends who would probably scoff at this story, friends who champion God-hating books by guys like Hitchens and Harris and Hedges, friends who delight in making fun of the devoutly religious, but I consider that attitude intellectually lazy. Bible stories are obviously rooted in the unscientific and the anecdotal. That combination is low hanging fruit for today’s well-read, well-learned skeptical individual. But I cannot disparage the actions of Ron that day, nor can I disparage the faith and belief that guides such selfless behavior.      Sensing his discomfort, I shut the fuck up and walked him the rest of the way in silence.      “I have to go now,” Ron said when we got to Spadina and Bloor. “Have a good night.”      “You too Ron.”      And as I watched him walk barefoot into the station, limping his way down the stairs to the subway, I realized I’d been in the company of a saint.