Don Quixote at the Market

“His fancy grew full of…enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies…no history in the world had more reality in it.”
—Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Don Quijote de la Mancha monumento, Diógenes el Filósofo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The downtown EV charger hunches between progress and regress, optimism and depression. Across the street is the renovated market building, elegant but mostly empty: once a bustling warren of tiny, shabby food stalls—Korean, Cuban, Italian, whatever you hankered for—it’s now a gentrified ghost of future prosperity. Kitty-corner to the charger is our architecturally daring art museum, its sleek glass looming over the weathered brick of Billy’s Ritz like a crash-landed spaceship. When I take visiting friends, we’re often the only visitors under a guard’s bored stare.

Back to the EV charger: sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t; sometimes, presumably in expiation, it’s free. Today, it’s working normally. I lug the heavy black cable into place and plug in. As it hums power into the battery, I sit inside my car and watch people. That thin blonde man slumped against the market building in a ragged red t-shirt looks familiar, somehow. A few tourists stroll past, sipping coffee from styrofoam cups and exclaiming over our downtown’s quaintness.

I pull out my phone to plot my upcoming drive. Mindful of the car’s limited range, I map the back way along winding mountain roads: stretches where trees arc together overhead to create haunted bowers; chickens cross the road because they can; and abandoned shacks yield slowly to rain, wind, and graffiti. I’ve traveled these roads many times before, but without turn-by-turn GPS I might end up down in the holler with the Dunkards again, and I don’t wish to disturb them. They baptize each other by full-body dunking, farm in overalls and long beards, and prefer to leave the rest of us to our modern foolishness.

I’m still tapping and plotting when I hear an enraged howl. The skinny man in front of the market is shaking his fist and cursing a passing cyclist. I mean “curse” in the old-fashioned sense: an invocation of divine retribution for some terrible trespass. The cyclist, who clearly doesn’t know this ranting stranger from a bike pump, veers away from the sidewalk and zips past. Deprived of a living nemesis, the man then turns sideways and begins lunging with an imaginary sword. Jabbing and parrying, he curses his phantom opponent and then shouts triumphantly. Apparently, one of his jabs has hit its mark.

I feel a twinge of fear: anything might become a stand-in for the enemy, and I’m in his line of sight. An EV charger might well look like a dragon: look how it snakes into that woman’s car! Maybe she needs a knight errant to save her from the monster.

Here I have to confess that I’ve never gotten far in Don Quixote. I know that Cervantes’s satire is witty and, to many readers, riotously funny. But I don’t like the way the other characters humor the deluded hidalgo for their own fun. The only reason the story seems comical is because the butt of the jokes is a propertied gent who’s addled his brains with too many romance novels—not a poor man who has no Rocinante or Sancho Panza, can’t afford medication, and probably would forget to take it anyway. Real mental illness is anything but funny.

The man in the red shirt is still shouting at passersby and wielding his imaginary sword. In bigger cities, such scenes are common and routinely ignored, but here, they are shocking. I cautiously dial 911: “There’s a man having a mental health crisis in front of the market building. He’s not hurting anyone, but I’m afraid things might get out of control. Can you send someone to gently check on him?”

Hanging up, I instantly regret calling the cops. Moreover, I can’t shake the sense of familiarity. Oh, crap. Is that Ronny?

Last year in a local “free stuff” group, a disabled old man asked for food for his cats. Nobody replied, so I messaged him, sent over a Friskies delivery from Walmart, and then checked local resources for a long-term solution. Two animal shelters donate a small amount of pet food monthly. However, the bus didn’t run from the man’s part of town—the worst part—to the SPCA. His unemployed nephew, Ronny, would walk 4 miles there dragging a wheeled suitcase. It was the middle of winter, and he hated to ask, but could I give Ronny a ride to pick up the cat food?

I met Ronny in an Arby’s parking lot and checked my instincts. He was a reed-thin blonde man dressed in old but clean clothes. He had an embarrassed, shy expression and the kind of manners I recognized from other impoverished but proud folk in the South. My instincts gave the OK, so off we went to the SPCA, chatting about our cats. He said he lived with his uncle and step-aunt and gave plasma to help pay the rent. He’d gotten away once to the Southwest—Arizona, I think—but came back for his family. One of his brothers did manage to break free: he was a Navy intelligence officer in northern VA who didn’t have much to do with them anymore.

“Have you ever thought about doing work online?”

“Huh. What kinda work can a person do on the internet?”

It became clear that data entry wasn’t an option.

“Appreciate you,” Ronny said as I dropped him and his suitcase full of cat food back at Arby’s.

Something about him tugged at me as I drove home. He was uneducated, but there was depth there, and some private, sad struggle. Maybe drug addiction. What chance did a kid like that have?

The next month, it was the old man’s wife who got into my car. Surprisingly, she was around my age, though weathered with rough living and poor dental care. She had a hard, suspicious expression, as if this altruistic cat helper lady must be up to no good. Or maybe that was just the permanent set of her face. I smiled, and she relaxed a bit.

Somehow on the short drive, she found an excuse to start ranting about immigrants: it irked her how they could just come on over the border and “get everything” while Americans like her had to struggle. Clearly, it’s what she heard on TV and saw online all day, and she expected me to concur.

My sister has volunteered at the border. I know the reality for families who flee here to make a better life or just to stay alive, how hard they work at the back-breaking labor of picking our food in the fields, and how little help they get. I also couldn’t help but notice that Mrs. Hates Mexicans appeared healthy enough to work, herself. But I just said that I had good friends who had to come to the U.S.—legally—after saving American lives abroad. I said they were wonderful people who worked hard and loved their kids, and I was happy to know and help them. She went silent.

Next month, the old man texted to say Ronny was in “Bellevue.” He got off his meds sometimes, he explained, and then they’d take him away. Hey, I said, I’ll just pick up the cat food by myself from now on. No need for anybody to come with me.

Last I heard, they’d kicked Ronny out of the house, and the old man’s COPD was worse. His daughter out in the country agreed to take the cats. I’ve wondered about them from time to time. Were the cats OK? Was the man still alive? Was his wife still railing against immigrants at a border almost two thousand miles away? Was Ronny still selling his plasma for cash, lying on a cot while his only commodity drained through a tube? I hoped they at least gave him a glass of orange juice and a cookie.

Maybe it’s Ronny railing against phantoms in front of the market building, and maybe it isn’t. Maybe I should’ve called the cops, and maybe I shouldn’t’ve. Two officers show up and calmly tell Don Quixote to move along. He shuffles off, turns the corner, and disappears. I, who have someplace to go, unplug my car and drive away.