Rain that just kept coming. Creepy warm winds on the first day of winter in Chicago as Jesus steps on to the evening Brown Line train and I start to turn my eyes away.
Because I know what he's about to show us.
I steel myself to pay attention as Jesus gingerly stands up to address the car full of rush hour soldiers. Listening isn't much. But it might be all I can do.
He begins. "I am sorry to bother ya'll. I am ashamed to bother ya'll. But I need money for gauze. And this is the only way I know how to get it."
"Money for gauze?"
This gets the attention of most all the riders. Turns out that even the best headphones can't shut out everything.
Almost instantaneously comes the protective shield of doubt across the faces of passengers watching Jesus. You can almost see the thought bubble question above each of them "What if this is a scam?"
Some scams are better than others. The teenager at the train station beneath the Prudential Building asking me for $44 to get back to Fort Wayne Indiana because he had just a little too much fun at a concert the night before, had fallen asleep in a park and had his wallet stolen.
He called his Dad back home in Indiana. Dad advised: "Find somebody who looks like he understands kids, maybe has kids of his own and ask him for help." That was the hook.
A really good story, but not worth $44.00. So I said to the young man, "Ok. Here's how I can help. I'll walk with you over to the information booth and we'll ask the guy from the railroad how we can solve this problem. I am sure you're not the first person to get stuck in Chicago cause you came up short on a train ticket. Maybe we can convince them to have your Dad get the railroad their money some other way?"
To which the kid answered, "I don't have time for that," and walked away without another word.
So yes. The scammers do exist. But what if "Are you scamming me?" is the wrong question?
What if the right question turns out to be, "Can I give them what they need?"
I remember listening to the story of Linda, the former nurse, former music journalist and young single mother who I met during the making of I Am Your Neighbor: Voices From a Chicago Food Pantry. I remember Linda's bitter laugh when she told me, "How would I describe myself? How about 'worthless piece of crap?' I get that a lot. You know, every morning I took my baby and stood on the platform of the Irving Park Train stop, begging for money. And I was every cliché those people think I was. Drug addict. Bad mother. All of it. But I was also hungry. Most important, so was my baby. We were so very, very hungry. I'd put up with all the dirty looks in the world, because my baby and I needed food."
Pretty hard to judge correctly how hungry someone might be. Maybe you'll believe them when they tell you. Maybe not.
But it wasn't hard at all to see what Jesus Emanuel needed.
With the deep breath courage of somebody who knows that shame and sorrow can't be the wall that stops you from surviving, Jesus rolls up his left pants leg and we saw it. Like strips of bloody red bacon, lean meat and fat, the leg, from the knee down, looked as if it had been sliced and left to rot and hang. "I am going to loose it, my leg will be gone. But I have to make sure that the diabetes, that the leg doesn't take all of me. My foot, I can't take my shoe off right now. But it's worse than my leg. And my check has been delayed by a processing error. So your help is my health care plan."
Jesus began to walk the car. The ID tags around his neck swaying with the rhythm of the train. Detailing how the Medicaid usually worked for him, but not this time. There were other treatments involved in trying to save the leg. Our new Illinois governor had laid off his caseworker in the budget cuts. Trying to cut more Medicaid. Meanwhile, Jesus kept the bloody red sliced leg out front for all to see.
Jesus Emanuel's health care plan. Splattering blood on the floor of the rumbling train. While some of us put money in his cup and some did not.
But none of us thought that this was a scam.
We all saw the blood and just for a moment, right before Christmas, we saw Jesus Emanuel's health care plan.