Culture . 05/06/2008 11:43 PM . Christopher Newgent

I’ve never asked so much as a name. It’s a simple question really, simpler than, “Would you like a burrito?” But, I’ve never asked it—only, “Would you like a burrito?”

Then, I peel the Velcro of my messenger bag open, hand over the foil-wrapped, warm bundle of beans and rice, and go on my way. They say “Thanks,” often times “God bless you”, and I say “You’re welcome,” and often times, “No need,” and that’s the end of it. We visit the same spots every week—the mission on Wheeler street, the north end of Memorial Park, Roberts Park Church, Monument Circle—see a lot of the same faces, the same hands reaching for the burritos we are giving away, but I don’t know any of their names.

I’m scared of them. Not of them so much, as their situation. It’s easier to keep a distance from problems when they are simple statistics, when there are no names to the numbers. It’s easier for me to think, “This week, we handed out eighty burritos,” instead of, “This week, eighty people were hungry enough to accept burritos from complete strangers.”

• • •

None of us believe we are any more noble than anyone else. We’re not so disillusioned. The ten or fifteen regulars of the Naptown Burrito Project understand that we do what we do in part to help, and in part to feel good that we are helping. We don’t give our names; we don’t advertise what we are doing any more than is necessary to raise awareness of the hungry and get what donations we can to keep the Project alive. It was hard enough to justify the writing of this article to myself, and harder yet to actually write it. I’m not writing this to say, “Look at me,” but to say, “Look at what we have to do.” I’m writing to say there is likely a Burrito Project near you, and if there isn’t, it doesn’t take much at all to start one.

The Naptown Burrito Project is a satellite of a nationwide movement of Burrito Projectsthat started in Los Angeles. We started on a Sunday in early April, handing out sixty or so burritos that first weekend, which has grown to eighty this past weekend, and possibly a hundred this coming weekend. We meet at a house in Fountain Square and wait for the beans to cook, the rice to boil. We have wrapping down to an instinct. We stuff the warm burritos into our messenger bags, and pedal downtown. We hand them out before they ever get cold.

• • •

Ben, Sam, and I had been riding a good part of the night, playing in the traffic downtown and laughing at the tops of our buildings. We got a case of beer and found a shadowy spot beneath an overpass to lay our bikes down and sit awhile. It was one of those nights when we all were chewing on bigger ideas than ourselves. Sam was thinking about Portland, an opportunity to go there and be in the heart of a cycling culture we could only hope to encourage in Indy; Ben, about stretching the limits of our city, about helping the invisible children of Africa, the poor, tired, and hungry that we couldn’t reach sitting in Indy; and myself, I was watching the city breathe from a sewer grate along Alabama Avenue. Earlier in the evening, I had referred to Indianapolis as “my city”, and I was wondering what had changed.

I’ve lived in Indianapolis a year now. Until tonight, I had always seen Indy as just this place I lived, a locale, not much more. I had voted in the last mayoral election; I knew the restaurants to take my friends to when they came to visit; I knew thoroughfares and how best to get downtown from anywhere uptown. I had never taken the time to look at the details really, the wrinkled skin of the metropolis, and the dirt beneath the fingernails. The character of the city had been lost on me until the past month when I met Ben, Sam, and the rest of the Burrito Project volunteers.

I overanalyze myself too often, my speech especially. To say “my city” felt to me like taking responsibility, taking ownership of this place where I live—the shimmering glass of the new library as well as the grimy sidewalks of Old Northside. I was watching the three of us, the different parts of our lives: Sam, who was thinking of uprooting himself, myself, who had just realized he was home, and Ben, who’d lived long enough at home in Indy to begin realizing that instead of saying, “my city”, he was saying, “my world”.

I’d known them a month or less, but sitting there felt something like a long car ride in the back seat with your siblings as a child. There’s some pinching and name-calling, some “Are we there yets”, but when we finally get to where we were going, when we pile out of that car laughing and running aimlessly with our arms outstretched, breathing in big gulps, we’d be brothers. When the police pulled into the lot, we tossed our bikes over the fence and snuck out of sight. We rode home fast that night, we pushed our pedals harder than we knew we could, we didn’t know what else we might find out about ourselves before the night was over.

• • •

The man had splotchy hands that shook slightly as he reached out to take a burrito from me. He sat on a bench in Memorial Park wearing an oversized winter coat on a hot day in May, for no other reason than planning ahead, I’d imagine. A coat like that is a pillow on a hot night, a sleeping bag on a cold one, and if he got rid of it for the summer, he’d have to find another in the fall.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you, thank you.”

I closed my messenger bag and slung it back over my shoulder, tightened the strap to my back a little more, and as I stepped on to my pedals, I looked back to the man unwrapping the foil around the burrito.

“Excuse me, sir. What’s your name?”

He looked up at me, and I remember thinking of the shadows beneath the underpass when I saw the deep shadows in his wrinkled face.

“Paul,” he said.
“Paul,” I repeated. “Take care of yourself, Paul. And, thank you.”

Before he could ask for what, I stood on my pedals and rolled away. It seemed such a pedestrian thing, to know someone’s name, and after I asked, I almost felt silly. I didn’t think to ask anything more. It was enough for me to know his name, that small pang in my stomach knowing that real people with real names have to be that far down. To be honest, I was too scared to know the rest of the story. Just Paul, there because there’s nowhere else for him to be. And myself, there because there’s everywhere else that I could be, and honestly, would rather be, but this is Indianapolis, this is my city.

Christopher Newgent lives as a writer in Indianapolis. His work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Poetry East, and other journals.


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