Helping the Nicely Needy

There’s a particular panhandler in downtown L.A. that I give to more than the rest. He’s a black man named Richard, and he works a freeway onramp, a “Please Help/God Bless You” sign in his lap.

His gray hair is always combed, and he tucks in his T-shirts. He lets you make the eye contact first. He won’t embarrass himself or you with phony sob stories when you roll down your car window. It’s thank you, God bless, and goodbye.

I am not proud of my feelings toward him, and not sure why I am so much more inclined to give to him than to, say, the enormous Samoan guy who sometimes works the same curb, or the toothless woman outside my parking garage.

But I suspect that it has to do with the fact that he seems less “aggressive” than the rest.

Which is to say, he isn’t so needy that he is frightening.

Next week, the city of Los Angeles will begin enforcing its tough new anti-panhandling law. No panhandling in the bus station. No panhandling in the subways. No panhandling at the bank machines. No panhandling near the interstates.

And, in particular, no panhandling in a way that involves shouting, swearing, touching or being crazy or desperate. It is unclear if this ordinance--or the hundreds of others like it across the nation--will ultimately stand up in court. But if it holds, it will almost certainly rule out the bearded white guy who was begging outside the downtown state building the other day.

Red-eyed and reeking, he violently rattled his foam cup at every office worker who passed. If you ignored him, he would stomp on the concrete and roar, “Hey, goddammit! HEYYY!”

He was indisputably aggressive, so aggressive that people were crossing the street to avoid him, and I would have, too, if I’d noticed him quickly enough. But I was daydreaming, so I all but tripped over him before he rattled at my face. I fumbled in my pocket, felt some dollar bills, meant to give just one, but then got so nervous, I bobbled them, and ended up forking over the whole, crumpled wad.

“HEYYY!” he shouted joyfully. “God bless! Thanks!” He was needy, but not so needy that he had lost his capacity for gratitude.

“What’s your name?” he chatted. “My name’s Johnny! See? Johnny! Right here on my tattoo!”

Our eyes met, and we both smiled. He was needy, but, as it turned out, not so needy that he should have been so frightening.

Now, with an office that is just this side of skid row, I am as battle-hardened as anyone when it comes to bums. In fact, some years ago, my editors sent me out to report on freeway panhandlers; I ended up hanging out with a bunch of beggars who camped at a concrete median near the Hollywood Freeway, taking turns “working the ramp.”

They worked harder than I’d expected, harder than you’d think, but some were lucky and some were not. The troubled man with the fake priest’s collar didn’t get many takers. Nor did the ex-con with the “Don’t Talk to Me Till I’ve Had My Second Cup of Coffee” hat.

One guy, I remember, stood there with a pastel plastic clothes basket and an unintelligible sign outlining his plans to open a chain of T-shirt shops. He wore a mismatched leisure suit and, on good days, he pitched his idea to passing cars. On bad days, he had breakdowns. He was unlucky too.

The biggest handouts, it turned out, went to the least desperate beggars: The dope addict who seemed so polite that people actually believed he’d work for food. The little old wino who panhandled from a lawn chair with the sports page in one hand and a long-suffering dog at his feet.

Unlike the others, they hadn’t entirely lost it. Like my friend Richard, they could still smile and say thanks. They could hold a conversation and not shuck and jive, or babble drive-by gibberish about investment opportunities, or become enraged behind their weakness and shame.

It was a function of being nicely needy, as opposed to desperately, aggressively, frighteningly needy, needy to the point that a person might do anything. It was not unlike the working world in that respect--the more well-adjusted you seemed, the more successful you were.

Of course, homeless panhandlers don’t tend to be well-adjusted. That’s generally part of why they don’t have homes. They lose touch with themselves and with their humanity, and after enough time and enough neglect and enough anguish, they’re making unwanted eye contact and telling you sob stories and slamming their gnarled feet against some urine-stained sidewalk, screaming, “Hey, goddammit! HEYYY!”

They get so needy in so many ways that “truly needy” doesn’t begin to tell the story, or hint at what it might cost us to be truly merciful. They get aggressive, which is to say, scary. And so we take care of our fear and run away. And that is what’s truly frightening.

Shawn Hubler’s e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com