Fabio, My Homeless Friend

             I was looking for the ugliest homeless man in the Santa Monica.  I know that’s not a very Christian thing to think, but if I’m going to be honest in telling this story, that’s what I was thinking.  I was a UCLA sophomore, and I came out weekly with a bunch of collegians from church to hand out sandwiches to the homeless.  Since I had made the effort on a fatigued school day, I wanted this trip to matter, and somehow in my pooped mind, I equated finding a needy homeless man with finding an ugly one.

            “Anyone need a sandwich?”  I called out at a group of them.

            There emerged the ugliest homeless man I had ever seen- weather beaten, scarred, potholed skin, a bumpy nose pushed out of his raven eyes, with frizzy hair half sticking up like a jiggity top sail at the top of his head, with the rest of his frizzy, oily mass lagging in a sloppy pony tail down the back. Imagine a distant cousin of Cosmos Kramer gone really sour.  He smiled a huge crooked smile of black, metal, and missing teeth. He was gorgeous.

            Waving his hand awkwardly, he lunged towards the sandwich and devoured it.  His name was Fabio.  He was refugee in his mid 40s from El Salvador, having run away because he was hunted for the murder of one woman and two men during the Salvadoran Civil War. 

            We hit it off.  We communicated with a mixture of Spanglish- his broken English and my broken Spanish- and an exaggerated set of pantomimes that would have made Charlie Chaplin jealous.  With a Spanish/English Bible, we shared favorite Bible verses with one another- verses about grace, hope, our future.  Sharing a series of jokes, we laughed huge belly laughs.  He was just about as ridiculous as I was, and when you find a kindred spirit, you don’t need language to confirm it.

            He became a regular at our church Bible study and Sunday service.  I have snapshots of him in my mind:  one at Subway when his face lit up like a giddy kid at Christmas because we bought him a hot cup of coffee.  Another shot has him at the church Christmas party with a silly Santa hat on top of his head, grinning and goofing around.

                                                                        ***

            The day he told me he hated me started out very run of the mill.  On a cold, rainy Sunday in early January, I pick him and three other homeless people up and squeezed them all into my white Toyota Camry to take them to church service.  He was sitting shotgun, and he was annoying me.  As if he'd never been in a car before, he pushed every single button and switch on my dashboard, wagging my side mirrors up and down, turning the car lights on and off, flicking my emergency lights on and off.  Since the three other homeless people were new to our church, I did my best to block him out and converse with them about their origin, what their history was, about their spiritual journey.

            After church, for some reason, we were lacking cars, so my brother decided to take all the homeless people back to Santa Monica, and then drive back to church and pick up all the Bruins and take us back to Westwood.  After he left with the car headed back to Santa Monica, I walked into one of the church trailers and found Fabio still there.

            "What are you doing here?" I asked.  "My brother just left with everyone going back to Santa Monica."

            "Why I go with him?  I came with you," he answered.

            "No, you didn't, did you?"

            "Yes, I did!  Why you forget?"  His eyes flashed with pain.

            "Are you sure?

            "Yes, I came with you!"

            "You sure?  Oh yeah, you did! I'm sorry!  I'm just really forgetful!  I once took my little brother to church, forgot him there, and went to eat lunch with my friends!"  (True.  Another story.  Another time.)

            My apology was too late. His face was filled with anger.  "You treat me like NOTHING!  You treat me like HOMELESS!  I HATE YOU!"

            I had denied having him in my car three times, and the only thing left out of convincing me that I committed a flagrant foul was the crowing of a rooster.  In hindsight, I realize that I tried so hard to block him out during that ride to church that I effectively did forget that he was in the car.

            He ran out of the trailer and into the rain.  I chased after him, and we spent time yelling at each other in the rain.  Imagine the rainy romantic scene of "The Notebook" but with me and ugly Fabio and no romance.  I once had another friend who had murdered someone, and he had this huge spewing temper and could boil from zero to a thousand in a millisecond. I knew Fabio had murdered people, but I had never seen him fly off the handle; in minutes, Fabio soared from hurt to rejecting me to incensed.

            "FABIO, I'M SORRY!"

            "GO AWAY!"

            "FABIO, I'M REALLY SORRY!  I don't think of you as nothing!  I really care about you!"

            "I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN!  I HATE YOU!  GO AWAY! GO AWAY!"

            He screamed with animal, savage spite, shutting anything I said out. After five minutes, I had no choice but to walk away.  When my brother came back to drive us all back, Fabio sat in the back seat of the car with me, stone silent.  When we dropped him off, he refused to look at me or say good-bye, and I watched him walk away in the rain standing tall, indignant, resenting me.

***

            The following month, I stopped going out to Santa Monica during our weekly homeless outreach.  Our group of collegians would get out there without much of an agenda but just love on the homeless, which meant listening to them and building relationships.  There were a handful that I loved out there, but it seemed as if Santa Monica were Fabio's realm, his home.  And if I told someone that I didn't want to see them again, I'd find it pretty disrespectful if they showed up on my doorstep the following week.  So out of respect, I stayed away.  And I prayed.

            There are times when I pray and I'm just spouting off words that mean nothing; either reciting requests given to me or just listing things that I wish and want.  But there are other times when I pray that I sense a deep inner connection with the Godhead; He is here with me, listening and capturing every word, every tear, and can understand my cries in ways that I cannot even express.  There is an invisible comfort, a Fatherly ear, and a deep power that draws near and is attainable, who stoops to understand and have compassion upon me; and I cry out from the depths of my heart. That was how I prayed for Fabio.  I prayed for him to forgive me, and for my mistake to not ruin our relationship.  I prayed for a miracle.

            After the fourth week of skipping the homeless ministry, a collegian came back from Santa Monica with a message for me:  Fabio wants you to come back to Santa Monica.  He had a dream where Jesus appeared to him and told him to forgive you.

***

            When I went back to Santa Monica, I found Fabio sitting against a wall with a checker board in front of him.  He didn't look up to greet me with his silly grin or jokes.  I sat in front of him and asked him if I could play.  He went through the listless motions to play, his eyes empty and roaming, never connecting with me.  He had listened to his dream and asked me to come back, but his heart was absent.  Acidity lingered in the corner of his eyes.

            My college group was deeply invested in this homeless ministry for two years; we were used to the nomadic lifestyle of homeless drifters- some weeks you'd see them and then suddenly poof!  They'd disappear.  To be a jailbird set free, this was the reason many sane people became homeless.  It was a laugh in the face of society: no relational ties, no obligations, no bosses or bills, no responsibility, no, not even to hygiene: I'm not a hamster stuck on a treadmill like you, and I survive.

            Fabio left.

            And it left an empty spot in Santa Monica in a way that all the others hadn't.

***

            That was January 1993.  In 2000, I was married, a mom of two kids, living in Northridge, CA.  Every week, I prayed for my immediate family, but also on top of that, I had a weekly prayer list that I kept that looked something like this:

            MONDAY- extended family

            TUESDAY- close friends

            WEDNESDAY-  small group, church leaders

            THURSDAY- fellowship group, other church ministries

            FRIDAY- children, youth, college ministries

            SATURDAY- missionaries, other churches

            SUNDAY- government, world issues, homeless

            Seven years had passed since I had been invested in the homeless ministry, and whenever I revised my prayer list, despite all the new people God had filled my life with, I couldn't bring myself take my homeless friends off.  I had a lot of names listed next to each group, and for the homeless, there were five that I still prayed for:  Crystal, Miguel, Luis, Wes, and Fabio.

            These prayers were flimsy, fast food prayers.  I didn't reach down within me and draw out every ounce of faith in my bucket.  But I was consistent.  Like an annoying woodpecker, I knocked and knocked and knocked.  I didn't think of Fabio very often, but when I did, I wondered where he was and if he was alive, I wondered if Fabio hated all Christians because of me; I wondered if his life had gone awry and if every mistreatment he experienced reminded him of how I blistered him; I wondered if a path of warp thinking and bitterness made him want to kill me.  I prayed for the Lord's blessing upon him.  I prayed for him to forgive me.

            Those of you who have age under your belt know that seven years is a long time; you can forget a lot in seven years.  But a lot can fester in seven years.

***

            My son was home sick from church, but since he was feeling better, I was packing up to go to church for the second service.  My  husband called me right before I headed out.  His voice sounded funny, "Uh, Christine?  Do you remember Fabio?  The homeless guy from Santa Monica?  He's here and he says he wants to talk to you."

            My initial, sure thought was that Fabio wanted to kill me.

            "What should I tell him?  Are you coming to church?  He says he really needs to talk to you."

            I drove to church with a huge amount of trepidation; my husband assured me that Fabio meant no harm, but if I were going to kill someone, I don't think I'd be pre-announcing it.

             I forgot how much I had prayed for Fabio.

            When I got to church, there was Fabio, shaven, with his hair trimmed and combed back, leaning on a truck with a grim look on his face.  He had his hand hidden inside his jean jacket, which I was sure held his weapon of choice, so with a deep gulp and a prayer of "Lord Jesus, if I die, I'm going to die loving someone," I reached out to hug him.  To my relief, he didn't pull out a gun or knife out of his jean jacket.   He hugged me.

            He told me that he had gotten married, but that his wife had cheated on him and left him.  He confessed that that morning, he was just about to drive off a cliff and commit suicide.  But he said he couldn't do it; one nagging thought saved his life-  in his head, something kept telling him that he had to go find me and tell me that he forgave me.

            At that moment, all the memories of times I had prayed for Fabio- flimsy and shallow, week after week, knocking and knocking- flooded into my head and it dawned upon me with sublime weight that God heard phoneme that I ever uttered.  God listens even when I don't have the faith or attention to acknowledge His presence.  We limit ourselves by thinking we can only love people if we can see them, hug them, or bake cookies for them; we forget the invisible hand ready to hug for us, ready to guide someone away from danger.

            Fabio and I talked and talked and talked.  We parted ways with prayer and a hug.

            A few week later, I called the shelter phone number that he gave me and I found out that once again, he had moved on.

            It didn't worry me.

            I know how to reach him.