Trust Me?

I had this neighbor who moved into the apartment below ours in Madison some years ago, and I got really pissed off at him when he decided to (technically) break into our house one night. Twice. On the same night.

I know, I know, there's way more serious things going on right now. There's a global pandemic that is pushing its way into every part of our lives. Concerts are cancelled, sports seasons are postponed, travel is restricted. Schools are closed, workers are getting laid off, stocks are plummeting and then soaring and then plummeting. And apparently every single mother fucking roll of toilet paper is getting bought up like there is no tomorrow because SHIT IS HITTING THE FAN.

It's important to talk about these things, and we should talk about them, but here's a blog post that isn't about any of that.

Welcome back, by the way.

So the house we lived in downtown was a duplex apartment type place. The ground floor had 4 bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a common room, and it had a front and back door to the outside. It also had a staircase down, which took you to a short tunnel that let you get to where the laundry and some other storage space sat in the basement, and there was a staircase up the the attic, a front balcony, and the door to one of the bedrooms on the 2nd floor, where my friends and I stayed. We had our own kitchen, we had the 4 bedrooms and a bathroom, and we had another main door to the alleyway on the side of the house. And we had our own way down to the basement to get to the laundry and storage, which connected with the path that the ground floor apartments had access to. So, even though there were two different places, you could get from one apartment to the other without leaving the house, and we were friends with the group that was one the first floor for the first year that we lived in this building. So this set up made a lot of sense.

It was not quite as advantageous, however, when that group moved out and the random group of guys that took their spot moved in. I'm not saying they were bad guys, just that I didn't know any of these guys and they could have been psychopaths or meth dealers or Spurs fans, I don't know.

Anyway, about a week or two after they moved in, these guys met two of the guys in our apartment, and they hit it off. They had a mini party and got familiar, and I'm told that they gave them the OK to stop by our place anytime that they needed something.

I was not a part of this conversation. I was out of town until the next evening, I don't remember why. But I had no idea who any of these guys were, and at this point we had more random people over than I would have preferred. I had had a previous apartment of mine robbed and wasn't in the mood to invite a similar situation. So I at least had my antenna up for sketchy people hanging around under weird circumstances, especially when no one else was home.

Enter "Woody".

...now that I think of it, I think that really might have been his nickname. I was just going to make one up, but...why?

Woody had been at our place the night before and had learned about the two different ways to get from upstairs to the downstairs side, where he now lived. He was a big dude, like 6'3 or so, muscular with a Robin Thicke-like haircut. I met him for the first time at about 11:30pm on a Friday night because he woke me up while stumbling around our apartment when no one else was there. I had gotten back from wherever I was a few hours prior, and had been tired enough to try to go to sleep. At the time I got back, there was no one home. I assumed they had only left recently, because all of the lights were on, the front door was unlocked, some reggae music was still playing fairly loudly, and the oven was still on since god knows when. You know, the typical way our house looked when I got home. So I shrugged it off, turned stuff off and cleaned up a moderate amount, and quickly went to bed. Well, that was probably around 9:30, 10ish, we'll say.

A while later, I drifted out of a weird sleep to someone stumbling back and forth in the hallway. I tried to let it go for a bit but they just kept bumping into either the wall or the banister next to the stairs. So at the time I figured they were one of my roommates, drunk out of their minds, who just needed help getting the last few feet to whichever bed, or to where they could stand over the toilet or have their head hanging out of the window until their body had properly rejected the proper amount of previously chugged cheap liquor. And I didn't want any of them to fall back down the steps to their possible death, so I lean out of the door to find this big ass goof standing there, looking confused that I'M there, as I try to figure out who the hell he is. And he kind of gives me a half-baked attempt to explain that he's my neighbor and he was at the house last night and a bunch of other shit you might say if you got caught trying to break into someone's house.

So I did my best to play it cool, and I told him it was cool and that he should try to get in through the passage where the laundry machine is, and I lead him down that way and close the door behind him. I didn't lock it, I remembered later, but I just figured he'd get through there and he'd be home. Well, about 10 minutes later, I hear the same stumbling in the hallway, and it's Woody again. And I'm like "Dude, seriously, what the fuck are you already doing back up here?" and it wasn't clear if the door on his apartment's side was locked or if he just couldn't figure out how to get through to his side. Or if he didn't even try. Regardless, he was back up there and it was like he forgot that I was still there. He even got indignant with me, "C'mon man, I was just here last night!" like I'm going to just shrug it off that a stranger is in my house again on such a quick interval. After a quick and spirited debate on why I wasn't comfortable with him yet, I finally reasoned to get him through the other way, through my roommate's side door. I then locked it behind him, and locked the front door so he wouldn't just walk around and repeat this a third time. And so that I wouldn't pummel him to death out of sleep-deprived frustration.

It would later turn out that Woody was telling the truth and was just drunk out of his mind after all, but I never really got past that image of Woody that I started with. I'm not saying it's fair either, but honestly, it just felt that the basis for any real trust was eroded before it even began. Trust, among other things, is very much based on a feeling more than anything really factual. Oh sure, we use facts to justify whether or not we trust something, but we don't honestly need to. Trust can come from truly nowhere, despite evidence to the contrary and tons of people saying they trust the opposite, and you can choose to just believe something that you want to, and that trust can just endure on its own power. It's kind of a crazy concept. It's part faith, part expectation, and part experience.

I'm sure if you think right now, you can find something or someone that has crossed you more than a few times, and you still keep coming back to them, thinking next time will be better. Maybe a friend or family member that is not reliable,  but likable so much that you can't help but give them another chance. Maybe a sports team, that has never won the big championship but will continue to get close over and over again, and you just keep rooting for them because maybe next time they'll not break your heart. You might even believe in certain institutions like banks, political parties, or food suppliers that have had numerous scandals that they never seem to fully reform from, but you just keep giving them your money because you want to believe in them regardless. I get it. I really do.

I think we want to be able to trust in most cases. We want to believe things that we are shown, sounds and voices we hear, smells we smell, and feelings that we get, but those feelings are not always necessarily telling us what we think or want them to. Actually, smell is usually pretty accurate, there aren't many things that have deceptive smells. Usually when you smell bullshit, you know to watch your feet closely. But plenty of things are built or designed to look like one thing yet serve as another. Sounds don't always communicate the full danger that is impending our way, and people go out of their way to show one feeling or emotion with their voices when they truly feel another. And feelings. Oh, feelings and their habit of leading us astray. How do you even trust your own feelings? On one hand, they're always there and you have no choice but to at least consider them, and on the other, there are way too many times that the way we feel about something has absolutely no reason behind it, and we trust it anyway, usually to our own detriment.

I'll say this: a guy I was told about by a friend from college said something to him, and I always thought it was an interesting quote to have. The saying was, "Trust everyone until they give you a reason not to. And then never trust them again." And if that sounds quite ominous and a bit scary, well, it should, because the guy who that quote is from was the head of a teamsters union and, frankly, known to be connected with organizations that I would rather not disparage on record. But the phrase itself makes a lot of sense. Trust is not easily acquired, very quickly can be lost, and may take a lifetime to get back once it has been broken. And then, when trust is lost in one place, it becomes easier to distrust everyone around you, until everyone you meet looks something like this:



For example:

I've mentioned before that I used to work at a car rental company. We got a lot of interesting characters at my location, also in downtown Madison. The majority of the people that rented there were great people, very friendly if not eccentric characters. I had a regular that would always rent a full size vehicle and would freak out if the car was white, but otherwise she was always very nice and talkative. I even met Kurtwood Smith, the dude from That 70's Show, while he was campaigning during Obama's re-election bid. Before you ask, no, he did not threaten to put his foot up my ass, no matter how many times I asked him to.

The thing is, there would also be, mixed in with the good crowd, a much more shady level of customers. There was a good mix but it was still a little glaring when you stop and think about it. You would get these normal folks with families and it would be very straightforward, and then you would get high school kids looking to see if you would "loan them a car for 25 minutes right quick." I had a guy I'm sure was too high to realize which state he was in, a woman who put loose change into the cd player of the car, a guy who paid with check every time just because he could, and oh yeah, a guy who rented one of our Mustang's, only to fill his address out as the post office, keep the car longer than he said he would, and then try to get me to return it in the system before giving the keys back to him so he 'could fill up the tank and run a few other errands'.

I know I'm a bit naive even at my current age, but I definitely have had to keep my guard up at work to not trust too much, because working there I genuinely did want to help people. I wanted to make it as easy as possible to get in and out, no muss no fuss. Moving is stressful enough without anything going wrong. But I usually was given some sort of warning before someone was going to do something shady.

Which brings me to an elderly man that came in to rent a moving truck. Let's call him Wendell. Short, small frame but with a bit of a belly. Balding white hair, thick glasses, had a white, buttoned short-sleeve shirt and khakis. This dude had the look of someone's beloved grandfather. Frankly, he looked even older than a Wendell should. Wendell came in without a reservation to rent a small truck, since we usually had a truck on site to advertise that we offered them too. It was a nice quick conversation, he mentioned he just needed to move a few things across town that were too big for his car, and he could probably bring it back after a weekend, and it wouldn't be a problem if he had to come back later to get it. I explained that the truck would be available right then and there for a fairly low daily rate plus a certain mileage charge over 200 miles that he wouldn't even need, and its next reservation wasn't until the following week, so he could get it right then and there if he had a way to come back and get his car, which he said he did. So he got the truck, I got credit for getting a walk-in rental, the company got more revenue. Everybody wins, right?

Well, not really.

I vaguely remember looking at the truck rental part of the system the next week, I saw that we were down a truck somehow and needed to get one from another location. Okay, no big deal. It didn't even occur to me until later to look up and try to figure out why we suddenly needed another truck. Did we get more rentals? No. Did a truck get in a wreck or need maintenance. Nope.

Then I look at existing rentals and I see that the rental from the last week, with Wendell, was still going. And that looks weird, like it could be a mistake somewhere, but isn't the end of the world, we have other resources. And plus I'm still getting credit for an unplanned rental in the system. I'm sure he'll get the truck back to us sometime this week.

So then an entire week passes. Then 2. Then a month. 6 weeks. 2 months. And this rental is still going. During this time, we called to check on the guy, trying to remind him that his daily rate (which was around $30 a day, I think) is still going. Tried emailing him. No response. My manager asked about it a few times, if there was anything off about it. I told him no, because I didn't think it the least bit of a suspicious based on how I met Wendell. He exuded someone you wouldn't need to doubt, for any reason. It didn't even occur to me that I should have looked twice at the rental, and the guy had all of the proper identification, and his credit card worked. So I'm still convinced this is all a big misunderstanding.

And then I received a let from Independence, Missouri.

Which was weird because it's the only letter I had ever received at work for that location. It arrived and just kind of sat on the back desk that we had set up, so I missed that it had arrived for a day or two. The thing is, it wasn't addressed to me, Victor Dupuy. It was addressed to "the very nice man that helped me on [whatever date he rented the truck] who I'm hoping will do me a huge favor..."

So for whatever reason, I finally see this letter and it just kind of clicks who that could be referring to. So of course I open it, and it's from Wendell. I don't remember exactly what it said, but I'm pretty sure I still have this letter somewhere just because of the sheer disbelief I was in for a full day after I read it. The gist of it is, this guy wrote me a letter apologizing for stealing this moving truck. He had no intention of ever returning it back to us after the weekend of when he rented it from me. He needed a moving truck that could take his stuff to where he was moving in Missouri, and he knew it would cost way more to arrange the truck as a one way rental. So he said it was going to be a daily rental (which by the way have both a daily charge and a mileage restriction) and after he was done moving he tried to return the truck in Missouri, which caused confusion on several levels. The place in Missouri figured out where he had driven from and was able to calculate the one-way rate that he actually owed, not to mention the additional fees for doing something different than previously agreed upon. You could easily make the argument that this guy thought he would pull a fast one on us, and it did not work even a little bit.

He went on in the letter to really try to tug on the heart strings. He mentioned he had recently also had a heart attack, then he said he had tapped all the money that he could to try to pay down his debt. Friends and family could not help him, and he was all alone in Missouri and had no one else to turn to, and could tell when he met me that I was a genuinely good person, and would I please do him this favor and honor the return price that I had given him anyway.

Now, there was a split second where I felt bad for the guy as I was reading the letter. I could picture this frail little guy just barely able to scrape by and make this long drive, and doing it in marginal health and at an older age that maybe he got confused with the agreement and blah blah, I tried to at least play devil's advocate for a moment to consider that everything he was saying was true.

And then I remembered that he was a stranger who had lied to my face, stolen rental property from my company that we had planned to use a few times over the past few weeks by then, had tried to return it to a different company for a lower price than he actually owed given the services he had used, and now wanted a favor. And he couldn't remember my name (it was printed on the rental contract).

I'm not saying he was a scam artist or anything, necessarily. But he didn't do things the way he was supposed to and, realistically, trying to help him out of the mess he was in would have constituted fraud. Fraud that would be easily verifiable and would only screw me over too, while not actually helping him. If I closed his rental on site, which was the only thing I could have done for him, then it would look like we had the truck on hand again to be rented. Which we didn't. So that would probably come up, and when it did, the end of the story would be impossible to justify. Everything else was not in my court, and would have to be worked out with wherever the truck actually was. I told my manager about it, and he had a pretty good laugh before fixing it in the system. That's the last I heard of it, since I couldn't help Wendell even if his sob story had worked.

I'm not saying you shouldn't do people favors even when you don't have to. I'm not saying you can't trust your instincts about people, and I'm definitely not saying that you should become jaded and distrusting about old white people that look like they're named Wendell. I'm saying two things:

1. People show you who they are. Believe them when they do. Even if they show you one thing face-to-face and write a letter that's completely different, you still have to take all sides at face value and understand who you're really dealing with. Whether or not you trust people from the start, always acknowledge those that show that they don't deserve it, and always factor that into them as a person moving forward.

2. I've been to Independence, Missouri. It sucks. Serves you right, Wendell, you senile bastard.

Later.