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Sucker’s Bet

By Chris Colcord

Fort Wayne Reader

2018-10-05


Driving home from Wisconsin late last weekend, I stopped at a gas station and a stranger approached me and immediately launched into a tale of woe. It was the usual stuff—something about his fiancée and some misfortune they had and how they needed gas money to get to Kenosha—but I stopped him before he could get too far.

“I can give you ten bucks,” I said.

“Really?! That would be incredible. We were expecting to spend the night here. That will get us home.”

I gave the guy the money, and he gave me a hug and thanked me and told me he wouldn’t forget it. I was approximately 99% sure that the story was fake and that I had been taken for a sucker, but that didn’t bother me. I had been drinking $10 beers at the Packer game earlier in the day, after all, and I figured $10 was a fair price for the 1% chance that I was actually helping somebody out and not being played.

At the gas pump, I was getting ready to leave when the guy’s fiancée walked up to me and thanked me for what I did. She looked me in the eye and said that I really saved them that night. I said, “You’re welcome. Good luck,” and got in the car. Now, I guessed that there was about a 20% chance that the story was true. I figured that those odds were good enough for me and my peace of mind, so I decided on the spot to just believe them and leave it at that. I got back on the highway.

I know most people would have just shook their head and walked away from the guy and I honestly don’t know if that’s right and I’m stupid. Maybe I am; I never know. If I lived in a big city and had to constantly deal with panhandlers, down-on-their-luck types, hustlers, whatever, I’d probably respond differently. But I don’t. Every encounter seems brand new and I have yet to set a playbook to guide my actions.

In the what, three minutes? of that encounter, though, there were a lot of things going on in my mind. I wasn’t worried about my safety or if my money was going to substance abuse (what, was I going to check their pupils? Do a blood test?), but I was very pre-occupied with one notion: how do I make sure we all maintain our dignity here? If I was
to be a sucker, so be it, but I’d like it to be on my terms. And if they were going to get money from me, I didn’t want them to have to fawn over me, to diminish themselves.

Which explained my clipped responses, which weren’t cold but were formal and matter-of-fact: Here’s what I’m going to do, hope it helps, best of luck. I was pretty sure they left me not feeling embarrassed, or humiliated, or that they had groveled too much. And I felt fine parting with the ten dollars that (I could argue) might still be used for something good. I’ve learned that sometimes being formal in situations like these is best; it’s the right tone to strike. And “You’re welcome” is a better response than “No problem.” Always.

Of course, it’s not inconceivable that the couple never left the gas station; they could have stayed there, tried the story again on others, increased their pool in $10 increments until they reached their goal amount for whatever nefarious purposes they had in mind. Totally possible, totally plausible, maybe likely. I’ll never know.

But in that transaction, I wasn’t just giving ten dollars away. I was buying something as well. I was buying (and reinforcing) the notion that you shouldn’t go through life imagining the worst of people. For I refuse to believe that life sucks, the world sucks, people suck, and that the only way to live is by showing strangers your great, mean, stone face and pitching a lonely battle with every human interaction you encounter. It’s a miserable way to live, and the people that are committed to it are the most miserable people I know. I refuse. If that means I get played every couple of months out of $10, that’s okay. I still make out in the end.

And if the worst-case scenario was true—maybe it was a scam, I gave them drug money, whatever—well, at least I treated them like people, and not some annoyance that I flicked a $10 bill at and then walked away from, grumbling. I let them know that I saw them as people, as fellow humans. That I respected them. Maybe they would remember that,
maybe it would help down the road. And maybe—just maybe—they really were down on their luck and needed ten bucks.

Last year my wife got played by a scam artist. A woman at Target was walking around, pushing an empty cart, with an absolutely lost and forlorn look on her face. A little girl was with her. My wife approached the woman—not the other way around—and asked the woman what was wrong. I’m in an abusive relationship, she said. My husband beats me, and I don’t know what to do. I want to go to Georgia, to my mother’s house, but my husband cancelled the credit cards and I have no money. The woman seemed completely authentic. On the spot, my wife gave her a not insubstantial amount of cash. Take care of yourself, my wife said. The woman hugged her, crying.

The next week, same Target, same woman walking around, same forlorn look on her face. My wife saw a middle-aged woman talking to her, and then she saw the middle-aged woman go to her husband. “We have to give this woman some money,” she said. My wife interceded. The woman with the cart saw my wife, then made a bee-line for her car, leaving the cart to roll away.

My wife was embarrassed when she told me of the second encounter. We had set that money aside for bills, after all. Forget it, I told her. Believing in people is a sucker’s bet, but it’s one we’re going to make every time.

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