"You Never Know"

I was parking my car the other day when I noticed a couple walking down the street. I was just finishing up—turning off the radio, closing the windows, pulling in the side mirrors—when they stopped, just across the street from where I was. It was a man and a woman, in their middle 30s, a genial looking couple, and they were getting into a car just as I was getting out.

I could tell that something wasn’t right from the very first, as the guy got out of the car just as quickly as he had gotten in. The woman, who hadn’t yet opened the door on the passenger side just stood there with her handbag resting on the car’s roof. The man went to the front of the car and opened the hood, then went around to the back and opened the trunk.

Watching all this over my shoulder as I walked down the street on my way back home, I had the feeling something was unfolding that was more than it seemed. I could feel my feet slowing down and my body torquing back toward the couple and the car.

For the last few years, I have been volunteering at an organization that runs a 24-hour suicide prevention hotline—the only 24-hour hotline in the New York area.

It is an organization with discerning protocols and a well-developed philosophy meant to provide its volunteers with the necessary skills to handle the broad range of calls that come in to the hotline, without getting caught up in other people’s problems, without giving advice, and without suggesting solutions based on the volunteer’s own personal experience.

Essentially, the idea is just to listen, to listen without bias and without preconception. A metaphor they use to describe the organization’s work goes like this: If a person is afraid of the dark, we can’t turn on the light for them, but we can sit with them in the dark until the moment of crisis passes.

One of the cornerstones of this organizational philosophy, informally, is the phrase, “You never know.” This phrase is meant to remind volunteers to give everyone who calls the “benefit of the doubt,” whether you understand what they are going through or not. 

As I was walking down the block—alert to a need I could sense coming from the couple at the car, yet at the same time not wanting to butt into other people’s business—I found myself muttering under my breath, “You never know.”

So, I stopped, turned around, and headed back to where they were.

“Everything okay?” I asked when I got close enough. 

By this time the man had a set of jumper cables in his hand that he had pulled from the trunk of his car.

“We were over at the hospital,” he said, motioning toward the compound of buildings just a block or so away from where we were, “and I must have left my headlights on.” 

“Can I give you a jump?” I asked.

“That would be great,” he said.

As I crossed the street to my own car, I asked softly, “Everything OK over there?” nodding, as he had, toward the hospital.

The man slowed a little and I could see him turn momentarily inside himself.

“My dad,” he said. “It’s lymphoma. We came as soon as we heard.”

The simplicity of his statement hit me and I was surprised by how quickly the situation had moved from the mundane to the incomprehensible. It was so random I felt like crying. I looked over at the woman waiting beside the car. She gave a little shrug of her shoulders, as if to say, “Who knew?”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said as I reached into my own car to open the hood. “I guess you were a little distracted,” I added, nodding to the car with the now-dead battery. He nodded back.

For a moment, we busied ourselves in the business of attaching the jumper cables, adjusting the clamps to fit over the respective nodes, and when all was in order he motioned to the woman, who had climbed behind the wheel of his car, to start the engine.

With a slight clicking sound, a mechanical sort of knocking and an incontrovertible rumbling whoosh, the starter turned over and the engine was on. Unhooking the cables, like a heavy-duty umbilicus, we looked at each other once more.

“Thanks,” he said.

“No problem,” I answered.

As they pulled away, I thought to myself how grateful I was that I could provide some measure of help to that couple, and I thought back to a time in my life when nobody wanted my help even when I offered, a time before I got sober.

As often happens, my mind went directly to a particular episode, an incident I remembered from many years before where I had picked up a hitchhiker one day. I saw the guy at the side of the road, a young hippie-ish person like me, and I immediately pulled over.

I was drunk at the time, swigging out of an open bottle of wine, on my way from Connecticut, where I had just visited my mother in one of the many rehabs she attended over the course of her own alcoholism, to Pittsburgh for a completely unannounced and uninvited visit to an old high-school friend of mine. A road trip would do me some good, I had told myself, and the wine made it all seem so manageable.

The guy wasn’t in the car too long before he started acting a little nervous. He was headed for Philadelphia and seemed pretty happy after an hour or so when he saw his exit coming up.

“Uhh, you can leave me right here,” he said, indicating the upcoming highway exit.

The prospect of being alone in the car again suddenly seemed untenable and, as I thought about it, I said to the hitchhiker, “Tell you what... I’ll drive you all the way to Philadelphia.”

“But, you’re going to Pittsburgh. It’s way out of your way.”

“Ahh, don’t worry,” I said, swigging more wine. “Who cares?”

The hitchhiker got more and more fidgety as the exit approached, turning over in his mind possible outcomes to this situation. Finally, as the exit sign loomed, he turned to me from the passenger seat and said, quietly but firmly, “You really need to just let me out here,” and, as I began to wave him off, repeated, “Really.”

As I pulled to the side of the road, he got out of the car quickly. I remember flipping him the bird and shouting “Ungrateful bastard!” out the window as I pulled back onto the highway in a shower of gravel and dirt.

But that was long ago, and sitting in my car as the couple from the hospital pulled away, I remained choked up, thinking how unpredictable life is and how little we really know.