"He's much older than you."

I’ve been subbing recently for a male client whose job is to collect carts from the parking lot of a Walmart. We walk the parking lot two or three times, collecting six or seven carts at a time, when there are any, and then walk the circle inside the store looking for strays left by shoppers who have decided against buying anything.

As we walked the inner circle the other day, weaving around palettes of diapers and DVDs, my client informed me that there would be no black people left in America by the year 2050. (He’s African-American.)

“Oh?” I said, trying to be neutral. “Where’d you hear that?”

“It’s true,” he said.

“Yeah, but where did you hear it?”

“I heard it. It was on TV.”

“Well, sometimes the news predicts things that they think might be true, but they can’t really know what’s going to happen in 2050, because it’s not 2050 yet.”

He took on a condescending air: “My father says it’s true. You know, he’s much older than you. He’s wise. He’s wisdom. He was in the Army for 26 years.”

I bristled. There were too many things wrong with this set of statements: the misunderstanding of predicting the future based on current statistics, versus fact; the idea that age naturally confers wisdom; the grammar; the appeal to my faith in the Army as a source of wisdom (as a pacifist, I would argue that the Armed Services do all they can to NOT make people wise; as a Navy brat, I snort derisively at the idea that the ARMY, of all services, could do it. Not bloody likely).

“But I’m just saying I hope it’s not true,” I said. “I hope there are still African-Americans in 2050. These things could change.”

“You don’t understand what I’m saying,” he said. “I’m smart. I’m very smart.”

I stared straight ahead to keep from rolling my eyes.

“Yes, of course you are,” I said, not sarcastically.

He’s one of the only clients we have who lives on his own, with full-time staff, and who has received a high school diploma. He is smart; unfortunately, that wasn’t the point. It’s that he’s not teachable. He refuses to receive instruction.

It’s rare that my teaching instincts are at odds with my professional responsibility as a job coach. I wanted to set him straight, but saw that we would probably have an issue if I tried. I let it go. We spend most of the rest of the day discussing his workout routine and how impressed several of his staff were at how “cut” he was.

“Sometimes I wear a muscle shirt,” he confided in me, looking at me sideways. “I look really good.”

“Uh-huh,” I replied. “It’s important to be healthy. What about that cart over there?”

The next time I was with him, a few days later, we were coming in from the parking lot when a man in one of the complimentary automatic-riding carts – provided for people who have trouble walking through the store – rode out. He saw us coming in and waved his arm up and down, shouting “Hi-ho, Bingo! Away!” as though spurring on his cart the way a cowboy would spur his horse. I laughed. My client glowered.

As we continued into the store, my client turned to me.

“Did you see what that man did?” he said, almost sputtering in anger.

“Yeah, he was pretending his cart was a horse,” I said, trying to cut off whatever interpretation he had of the customer’s joke.

“He was so rude!” my client said, still fuming.

We went outside for more carts.

“I’m going to find him,” my client said, beginning to head off in the direction the disabled man had gone, a menacing look on his face. (This was not an idle threat; he has physically confronted customers in the past.) I said the man had probably already left, that we needed to get more carts in, that the customer almost certainly hadn’t meant it as an insult but as a joke. It must be hard to be in a cart that can’t go very fast, I said. A person has to be able to joke about that kind of thing. My client was beginning to calm down and attend to errant carts again.

“Sometimes, I imagine what it would be like to not be able to walk,” I said. “I think it would be really hard. Do you ever imagine that?”

“What?”

“If you couldn’t walk?”

“What are you saying? Don’t be rude!” he responded.

I thought he meant the customer, but a few sentences later he made it clear that he had meant me.

“You know I’m ignoring you right now, don’t you?” he said, facing me and waiting for me to respond.

“No, I didn’t, actually,” I said, and pulled the magazine out of my coat pocket. “Well, just let me know when you’re ready to talk it through, and we can do that.”

It took about ten minutes of my following him around – which, after all, is my job – and reading my magazine before he started to talk to me again. He had thought I was accusing him of not being able to walk and had taken my attempt at modeling empathy as an insult. (He probably should have, but not as this kind of insult.) I explained that I had just been telling him what I sometimes do – imagining myself in other people’s shoes – that might help explain why some people did what they did, and that most of the time, people probably weren’t meaning to be rude. He seemed to accept this, but couldn’t imagine the customer’s actions as anything but a personal insult. I dropped it and changed the subject.

We went the rest of the day without incident, even joking, but I knew that I would never really bond with this client.

As we left the store at the end of his shift, he waved his hand in front of his face to indicate a bad smell. There was a nail salon right next to a Subway just inside the Walmart, and I didn’t know which he was referring to. Somehow, there was a smell of fish lingering in the air.

“Smells like fish in there,” I said as we headed out to my car.

“No, the opposite of fish,” he said.

I was interested to hear this.

“What’s the opposite of fish?” I asked.

“Woman fish,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. I don’t want to embarrass you,” he replied, and laughed to himself.

“Alright,” I said.

Whatever, I thought.

And I drove him home.