Transcript: "Charity Thief", a Story By Matthew Dicks

This is a transcript of Matthew Dicks's story, Charity Thief, at a Boston Moth StorySLAM. You can watch Matthew telling the story here:

It’s the fall of 1991. I’m twenty years old. I’m driving down a lonely stretch of New Hampshire highway. I’m driving home from the very first booty call of my entire life, and I’m excited because I don’t know that this is also going to be the very last booty call of my entire life.

It’s in this moment of excitement that the right front tire of my 1976 Chevy Malibu blows out, but it doesn’t just deflate. It disintegrates. It throws rubber and wire across the road in a way I didn’t think was possible, and it takes everything I have to get the car over to the shoulder and to a stop.

And it’s 1991. I don’t have a cell phone. I don’t have a spare tire. I haven’t seen a car on this stretch of road for a long time. So I do the only thing I can think of doing: I start hiking back up the road to search for help.

Seven hours later, after having given all my money to a half-naked mountain man named Winston in exchange for a balding spare tire, I’m back on the road, heading home, a hundred miles between me and my apartment in Attleboro, Massachusetts, when I look at the instrument panel and see that I have no gas.

All the money I had — every penny to my name — is in the hands of a half-naked mountain man. I don’t have a credit card. I don’t have an ATM card. I don’t even have a checking account.

So I take the next exit and roll my car into a Citgo station, and as I park the car on the edge of the lot, facing a field of fall foliage, I grip the steering wheel in anger. I’m angry, but I’m also sad. I’m twenty years old. I’m a McDonald’s manager. I make $7.25 an hour, and I am the richest person I know. My mother is living on welfare with my pregnant teenage sister. My brother joined the army a year ago, and I haven’t heard from him since. My father disappeared from my life ten years ago. The only person I know who can help me, who even has a credit card or a car that can make this hundred-mile trip to New Hampshire, is my friend Bengi, and he is off on some college weekend. I can’t get in touch with him, because in 1991, when you want to call someone, you need to make a phone ring on a wall, and you need to make that phone ring at the moment the person you want to speak to is near that phone, and you need the number for the phone to make it ring, and all of that is impossible for me to get.

This was not the plan for my life. I’m sitting behind the wheel, staring into a field of bright colors, yet I feel anything but bright. I was not supposed to be this alone this early in my life. You’re not supposed to be twenty years old and have absolutely no one in your life to call for help. As I sit there in my car, staring into that field of orange and yellow, I see my future ahead of me. An endless series of moments just like this one, when I need help but will have none.

So I make a plan. I’m going to beg for gas, because it’s 1991. Gas is eighty-five cents a gallon, so eight dollars is all I need to get me home. I’ll offer my license, my wallet, everything in my car as collateral in exchange for eight dollars’ worth of gas and the promise that I will return and repay the money and more. Whatever it takes.

So I rehearse my pitch, take a deep breath, and walk in. There’s a kid behind the counter, probably about my age. I tell him my problem. I ask him to help. I make my offer. The kid refuses. He doesn’t want to risk his job.

So I leave. I go back to my car. My plan is simple. I’m going to wait for this kid to go home. Wait for the next person to come on duty, and while I wait, I’ll refine my pitch. I’ll beg again. I’ll beg until someone, anyone, gives me some money for gas. But as I climb back into the car, I see my crumpled McDonald’s uniform on the backseat, and I suddenly have an idea.

An hour later, I’m standing on the porch of a small, red-brick house on a quiet residential street. I’m knocking on a blue door.

I’m wearing my McDonald’s manager’s uniform. Blue shirt. Blue pants. Blue tie. Gold name badge. I’m holding a gray McDonald’s briefcase with a big M engraved on the front like a shield.

I knock on that blue door again.

When the door opens, a man is standing in front of me. He looks about fifty, but he might as well be five hundred. He’s one of these guys who looks as if he has all the wisdom of the world wrapped up in him, and in that moment, I know that he knows that I’m about to do something terrible.

And I agree. This is a terrible idea. I know this now.

But it’s two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. I’m standing on his porch in a McDonald’s uniform. It’s one of those moments when you realize that the only way to get out of a terrible situation is to go through with it. So I

take another deep breath and say, “Hi, I’m Matt, and I’m collecting money for Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities.”

The man doesn’t move. He doesn’t say a word. He’s like Stonehenge. Frozen in time and forever waiting for this moment. Waiting for me to arrive.

The next words that come out of my mouth surprise me as much as they surprise him, because they are completely unplanned. “My mom died of cancer when I was a little boy, and now my sister is dying of cancer, and I’m just trying to do whatever I can to help.”

The man finally moves. He points his finger at me and says, “You stay right there.” Then he walks back into his house, and I know what he’s doing. He’s calling the police, and they will come and arrest me for stealing money from McDonald’s (which will actually happen two years later, but not on this day). On this day, he returns to the door with a twenty-dollar bill in his hand, which is like $20,000 to me on this day. As I raise my hand to say, “No, it’s too much,” he says, “No. My wife, Lisa, died of cancer five years ago.”

Now it’s my turn to freeze.

He keeps talking. He tells me about her cancer. Her death. He tells me that his two kids came back from California for the funeral, but he hasn’t seen them since that day. He says that the last two years of Lisa’s life were hard, but it was the very last year that he regrets the most. He tells me how hard his wife fought to stay alive, and he wishes now that he could have told her that it was okay to go, but he loved her too much to say the words.

Before I realize what is happening, I’m sitting on the porch with this man as he spills his guts to me, and in that moment, I know that I am, without a doubt, the single worst person on the face of the earth.

The man talks to me for twenty minutes about his wife and his children, and when he’s done, he hugs me as if he hasn’t hugged a person in

five years. Then he presses the twenty-dollar bill into my hand. It feels like poison now.

I say good-bye. I walk down the stone path, up the street, and back to the gas station. I use his money to put gas in my car, and I hit the road, once again heading in the direction of home. And as I pull onto the highway, I remember the last time I was sitting behind this wheel, just an hour or so ago, feeling lonely, worried that I would be alone for the rest of my life. Now I know how stupid I was, because tonight I’ll sit with my friends in the living room and eat pizza, drink beer, and watch The Simpsons.

But that man — he will be alone tonight behind that blue door. He’ll be alone tonight and tomorrow night and probably for many, many more nights. I leave New Hampshire knowing that I know nothing about loneliness, but also knowing that I never want to know about loneliness the way that man understood it that day and will probably understand it for many, many days thereafter.

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