A Tale of Two People
There’s been a kind of hush over the city for the past three days, the way it gets when everyone’s waiting for something to happen.
Well, I guess it’s happened.
By the time you read this, the likelihood is that a verdict has been delivered in what’s been called with awesome media arrogance the Trial of the Century.
They probably said the same thing about the Fatty Arbuckle murder case and the Errol Flynn rape trial a long time ago. Celebrity peril has always demanded lofty superlatives.
I have no idea this Monday evening what that verdict might be, so I’m not going to speculate. Guessing is a sport of fools.
Instead, I’m here to amuse you with tales of the people. Not famous people or rich people or even very important people. Just people doing what they do in a kind of special way.
Take Shelly Pfeiffer. She does nails at a hair salon in Valencia called Hairizons. It’s a nondescript place on a street where hardly anything newsworthy ever happens.
Pfeiffer sits near a window of the small shop. She began noticing that a lanky, middle-aged man rode by on his bicycle every morning carrying a large plastic bag full of aluminum cans. She watched him for months and then stopped him one day to give him some soft-drink cans she’d gathered.
He told her his name was Tom Cooper and he lived in a tent across the highway. He had no other home. Pfeiffer admired him because he never begged and even refused to take $20 she offered as food money.
He laughed and said, “You don’t give money to a wino” and rode on.
*
She didn’t know a lot about him, except that he seemed to glory in the freedom homelessness gave him, the way a bird glories in an open sky.
Pfeiffer introduced Cooper to her boyfriend and her daughter and began taking him to lunch periodically. She collected clothes for him and a couple of times paid for a motel room to get him out of the rain.
After awhile, she was inviting him to the home she shares with her daughter and letting him become a part of their holiday gatherings.
There was no conflict with her boyfriend. Pfeiffer’s feeling toward Cooper wasn’t romantic. Thirty-one and divorced for seven years, she’d worked hard to support herself and admired a homeless man who wouldn’t take a handout.
It’s the way people on the edge feel about each other, a kind of empathy the rest of us could never understand.
After living on nothing for years, Cooper reached 65 and began collecting $520 a month Social Security. With that and whatever he could scrounge selling aluminum cans, he rented a small trailer in a settlement not far from where Pfeiffer did nails.
The place cost him $300 a month, but because he was good at living on nothing, Cooper was doing OK. He piled his trailer with dented cans of food that markets threw into their dumpsters, and even managed to salvage a stereo set tossed into a garbage can.
He gives some of the food away to a large family in another trailer and fixes broken toys he finds and distributes them to kids in the area.
*
The story of Shelly Pfeiffer and Tom Cooper might be a pretty good one even if it ended right there, but it doesn’t. Pfeiffer, who just barely gets by, ran into a financial problem with car payments and didn’t know what she’d do to solve it. Cooper did.
He’d managed to save a little money, and one day put $500 in cash in an envelope with a note that said, “I took from you. Now it’s you’re turn.”
Pfeiffer still gets misty-eyed remembering. It was the kind of generosity that reaches across barriers of class and culture to touch another’s soul.
She wouldn’t accept the money, but it tightened a bond between them that is not likely to break under any circumstance.
You’d expect that, being the kind of guy who would give away what little he has, Tom Cooper would be a saint. He’s not.
He’s been on the bum most of his life, and hasn’t always supported himself collecting cans. Thirty-five of his 65 years have been spent in juvenile halls and prisons for stealing everything from cars to sporting goods. His last 11 years behind bars came after he tried to rob a bank to steal enough money to go straight.
A lot of that was done in an alcoholic haze, but Cooper is sober now and through with crime. His generosity represents a kind of atonement for all those years of taking what wasn’t his. Shelly Pfeiffer, who does nails in Valencia, is the angel of his redemption.
The moral here is that sometimes unassuming people on ordinary streets teach lessons far grander than anything we’ll ever learn from a celebrity in trouble. Think about it. It’ll get you through the morning.
