What I Learned as a Panhandler

No one who gave me money helped me

Begging for money is really, really hard to do.

It would be difficult enough if you were hungry but when you’re suffering from another case of the shakes because you badly need some booze, it’s excruciating.

I know. I did it for nearly a year before getting sober.

Standing on a corner not too far from the deli where I needed five quarters to buy my solution, a shortie of Wild Irish Rose White, but not in front of the place because that would be bad form, I’d work up my nerve and start the pitch. And it was a pitiful thing, my “pitch”.

Because I was filled with shame and burning with humiliation I never developed the kind of patter I often hear on the subways or near the corner bodega where I live today. I mumbled. Half the people didn’t hear me and the rest mostly ignored me. Very occasionally someone would put a quarter in my hand (this is how clueless I was: I didn’t even have a cup).

I can’t imagine what those people thought of me or why they thought giving me a quarter was a good idea.

It wasn’t.

Some people seem to think that anything that gets you to your bottom more quickly is “helping”. I wonder about that. My bottom was never about consequences. As horrific as it was to be standing on a street corner trying not to vomit, weep, or scream, that wasn’t my bottom. Getting stopped by security at the grocery store with a bottle of shoplifted diluted vodka was not my bottom. Taking my partner to the emergency room, dying of an overdose (he pulled through that time only to overdose and die when I was two years sober), not my bottom.

Not one of those quarters, few as they were, that someone handed off while not looking at me, helped me.

My only hope came when the booze and drugs flatlined and completely stopped working. Now it’s true that they hadn’t been working all that well for a long time, but the day that they stopped working was grace. I just didn’t know it at the time.

I became the one with the quarters to give

I began sliding a buck into Ike’s cup whenever I’d see him on my way to work. We’d nod and sometimes say hello. That story is detailed above and worth a look if I do say so myself.

Then I moved to New York City, more specifically I moved uptown in Manhattan, first to Inwood and now in Harlem for the past 18 years. Every day I run a gauntlet of people begging me for money. Some are begging for food (until one tries to buy them food, that is, then the story changes). It’s overwhelming which isn’t to say that I haven’t dropped a buck here and there into an outstretched cup.

There was Michael who, daily, would haul everything he needed to set up a comfortable living room near the 2/3 subway entrance. Rug, chair, upended milk crate for a table, maybe another chair in case of company. Then he’d do his business from his “room”, collecting enough money for a bottle and a sandwich. For some reason, he would yell at me from his room: Hey, Catholic Lady, how’s it going today? Daily I’d give him a buck and daily New York’s finest would dismantle Michael’s room.

And then there was Israel.

I thought he looked like a gypsy kid with his flashing dark eyes and an impish grin (with missing teeth upfront). In the early years of seeing Israel, he was kind of endearing. He was always laughing and kind of dancing throughout his life as he asked for money. If I had anything in my pocket I’d give it to him. As the years went by he got worn down by life on the street. I don’t see him anymore but I wrote this story using him as the catalyst:

These days I pretty much never give beggars money. There are too many and I just can’t pick and choose who “deserves” my buck (if I’m giving anything, it’s going to be folding money, not coins, dammit).

No one who gave me those hard-won quarters back on that street corner helped me. Worse, by ignoring me even while handing me that quarter, they let me know I didn’t deserve to exist. I was non-human. That ground me down worse than almost anything. To be utterly invisible is a nightmare. I found myself clamping down hard on the sobbing screams that wanted to tear out of me knowing that if I started screaming on that corner I’d never stop.

I don’t give them money but I look right at them, right in their eyes, and I say that I’m sorry but that I can’t help them.

Because I can’t

My money won’t help them any more than those few tossed-off quarters helped me. There is help for them. There was help for me and I’m grateful every day that I hit the point where I accepted that love and that help.

Maybe I’m wrong. I know people who keep a couple of extra singles in a pocket just for the beggars. Maybe I’m being selfish or operating from my old standby position of scarcity. But I do know that I won’t ignore the person standing there with their hand, or cup, out asking me for money. I may not give them money but I see them and they’re going to know that, at least in my eyes, they do exist. And maybe even that doesn’t really help.

But I don’t know what does.

© Remington Write 2019. All Rights Reserved

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