On Begging, Giving and Second Thoughts

There is a man who stands curbside in front of a supermarket in my neighborhood selling his poems to passing motorists. The price is whatever you want to pay. They are not very good poems, but I occasionally pause and buy a batch, not to encourage his poetical career but to commend and support his entrepreneurial drive. He creates. I buy. Capitalism at its purest.

There is a woman named Willie who comes to our house every Monday morning, driving a battered old pick-up truck that goes slightly sideways down the street, to collect our used newspapers. She is 76, all bent over with age and arthritis, wearing sagging stockings and an old watch cap. She moves haltingly, but always with a smile and an optimistic word. I usually go out and give her $5 or $10 and a hug, for I admire her vastly. What pluck and fortitude!

Then there are the street vendors who stand all day in the blistering sun, inhaling exhaust fumes, selling oranges and peanuts at big intersections and freeway on-ramps. The oranges are no bargain and the peanuts almost invariably stale, but sometimes I buy them just because I want to help someone so willing to help himself.

There was also a street person--now disappeared to who knows where--on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica who carried a sign that said, “Why lie? I need a beer.” And another, a 50-something black man, whose line was, “Could you help send a nice Jewish boy to college?”

I have given them money, too, the first for his honesty and the latter for his wit.

Underneath this unpatterned layer of the lamentably unfortunate is another class, another tier, however, where the judgment call of whether to give money is more complicated.

Some carry placards that say. “Will work for money,” and I think, well, they will not work for money, else they would be working, or trying to, like the knots of men who gather every morning near Home Depot. So I pass them up.

Some are aggressively drunk, reeling in your face, not even needing a drink right then, but planning ahead. I don’t give them money.

Some seem plainly capable of work, but plainly don’t want to, vagabonds with backpacks who have opted out of the system or never enlisted in it. I understand them, even envy them a little, but feel no need to finance their chosen lifestyle.

Some want to work but have been downsized or let go, or overwhelmed by money or health problems, rendered suddenly homeless with no address, no phone, making it difficult to get back in the system.

Some are women, some of them beaten down literally or figuratively, some just rendered homeless and irrelevant by an accident of fate. I invariably think, “That’s somebody’s daughter. That’s somebody’s mother.” And depending on how I feel that day, I offer them a dollar or two. In this way at least, I am sexist. Interestingly, some refuse--though I have never had a man refuse.

Interesting, too, is that among the street people and the panhandlers, I have never seen an Asian, a European or a Latino--any kind of apparent immigrant, in fact. Our homeless and mendicant appear to be all home-grown, made in the U.S.A.

Many on the streets are mentally ill, as many as 60%, the experts say, and many, obviously, are alcoholics or drug addicts who might get sober or straight with some help, and some self-help, if somebody intervened.

But which are the able and which the crazy ones? And which among the addicted might try to get straightened out with a buck or two and a gentle nudge toward an AA meeting? Maybe just one might. But which one?

It is impossible to tell. So what to do when the hand comes out? Sometimes I tell myself that there but for the grace of God, or a gene slip, or a job loss, or a crippling depression, go I. And when I think that way, I dig down.

Sometimes, when I am peevish, I walk on by, trying not to look into their faces. But then I feel bad. And sometimes I go back. But sometimes I don’t.