What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen a pandhandler beg money for/use the money to buy?
There is a ‘regular’ near where I work. The sight is rather depressing, not just because its a homeless man begging for money, but because all the guy does is lay in the sidewalk all day like he’s paralyzed (he isn’t, I’ve seen him stand up briefly to fetch pennies laying on the ground)
One day, I don’t see him, but there is a new homeless man. This fella was rather corpulent, in fact I jokingly wondered if perhaps he ate the previous resident homeless guy (I am so going to hell for that :o ) Anyway, this guy was asking people for change as well. I never have cash on me- just about everything I need is payable via credit card and if that gets stolen I can cancel it ASAP. Anyway, I politely told him I don’t have any money on me, sorry, and went to work.
My work as a lot of windows- it is easy to see the goings on in the shopping center from day to day. One day I was talking to my boss, and out of the corner of my eye I see him talking to an elderly woman. She hands him three dollar bills and he gets all giddy, bolts into the comic book store nearby.
Comes out with…a batman tshirt. About one or two sizes too small…
My favorite panhandler of all time was a guy I ran into on the streets of Paris. He asked if I had any money I could spare. Seeing how he had an English accent, I asked him what he wanted it for, figuring he’d tell me he was “stranded” and needed train fare.
With exquisite dignity he straightened up and intoned, “Well, frankly, miss, I’m going to use it to get drunk.”
I gave him all of my loose change. I figured honesty ought to be rewarded.
The weirdest panhandler I ever saw was one who accosted my friend Sara and me in D.C. When Sara declined to give her any money, the woman grabbed Sara’s crotch.
Way long ago, there used to be a great panhandler in my neighborhood. He looked (and smelled) like a Yeti. He’d stumble towards you grunting “Beer, beer, beer, beer.”
I mean how could one not hand him some change? I always did.
I’ve mentioned this before (there’s a pit thread somewhere), but anyways…
I’m sitting at Subway, eating supper, when this random guy comes up to me and hands me a slip of paper on which it is written–“I am deaf. Give me money.”
If I’d had the presence of mind (I was a little too surprised to think straight), I would’ve reached into my backpack, extracted a pen, and on the other side written “I’m illiterate.”
I don’t have any panhandler stories - they are strongly discouraged in this city, and I can’t say I’ve had anyone ask me for more than a cigarette. But I want to tell you about a panhandler encountered by musician Joe Walsh. He told the story on David Letterman, of the time he was walking down the street in LA, and he sees this guy panhandling. Joe is going to pass him, so he sticks out a handful of change, and the guy says to him, “Got any gum?” Joe was so amused by this, he called his next album “Got Any Gum?”
I lived in San Francisco 15 years ago, and it seemed to me that there were street people on the city payroll purely for entertainment purposes. To wit:
On 16th Street in the Mission there was a guy who used to paint his face and hands bright red. He sported a pencil moustache, fedora, and neat 50s-style suit. Because he looked exactly like the picture on the sign over the bar El Tin Tan, we used to call him El Tin Tan. He would mostly just prowl around and act weird – a typical peformance was crouch on top of a trash can holding a broom like a sword. For a solid year I saw him probably 80 times but never heard him speak. One day I was sitting in Café Macondo doing some work and El Tin Tan strolls in, clears his throat, gets everyone’s attentions, and states, in an overenunciated tenor that sounded theater-trained: “I’d like a really cheeeesy grilled cheese sandwich.” And with that he walked out.
He doesn’t really qualify as a panhandler and didn’t look homeless, but there was a nutty guy who haunted the Mission distributing a one-page flyer that he entitled “The Karnakly Review,” or something like that. It was handwritten, filling both sides of an 8x11 sheet, and it was entirely made up of pretty nutty tin-foil-hat ranting on politics and weird inventions that made no sense. He only charged a quarter, I think, and there was a new one every day; I almost always bought one when I saw him. However, I do recall that when the printer’s union was threatening to shut down production of both the Chronicle and the Examiner, he did have the presence of mind to add to his masthead: “Soon to be San Francisco’s Only Daily”!
There used to be one guy who took up a position outside a local video store:
He was a big guy, with wild hair and a big bushy beard, dressed in a poorly-fitting business suit and running shoes. As you walked past him, he’d usually say exactly the same thing, in a low rumble:
“Spare a dollar for the Son of God?”
I’ve never been entirely clear on whether he was coming from an “…in the name of,” angle, or if he actually believed he was the son of God.
The place was the Krystal near the corner of 5th Street and Peachtree in Atlanta in the 70’s. (For those of you outside the South, the Krystal is a hamburger chain that sells burgers a lot like White Castle’s.)
A lot of homeless men hung out in the neighborhood. A friend of a friend got sick and tired of being asked for change all the time whenever he went there for some gut bombers.
Since most of the time the panhandlers claimed they were trying to get something to eat, he started buying one or two extra burgers. When he’d leave and a panhandler approached him for money “to get something to eat,” he would hand them the little cardboard box with the greasy little hamburger in it.
It was a real hoot to walk away and then look back to see the wino staring quizzically at the little box as if asking himself, “Huh? How’m I gonna turn this into a bottle of wine?”
Once in college my mom had sent me a bunch of cookies (not home baked, I woulda kept those. They were like Chips Ahoy), and since I was watching my weight and didn’t want the temptation, I decided to give them away to some homeless people.
Some didn’t even want them. Others took them but didn’t seem very appreciative. One guy, when I asked if he wanted some cookies, said:
The best one I’ve got is that a homeless guy came up and asked for money for booze; he explained that people would often buy him food, but that he really just wanted the money so he could get drunk. I gave him 50 cents.
Oh, there was also this wonderfully charming guy on the M. St. bridge to Georgetown. He used to work at a ballet company in Florida and he was always ready to have a long chat with you. It was incomprehensible to me that this guy couldn’t get a job.
When I was a teenager, I lived in a condo with my mother. The parking lot had a huge locked gate around it, and the only way in was with a key or a code. My friends and I used to sit in the parking lot at night smoking cigarettes and hanging out. There was a man who came by frequently. I don’t think he was homeless, but he was definitely poor, and either mentally ill or high. He’d come up to the bars on the gate and call, “Hey fellas!” He’d only call if there was a boy or two in our group. If we were all girls, he’d just wave and keep walking. He’d say, “Fellas, come over here. Y’ll got any ovaltine? I’m just lookin’ for some ovaltine.” Because of these bizarre exchanges, we all started calling him the ovaltine man. One time, a friend of mine actually brought a jar of ovaltine to my house and gave it to the man, and he was THRILLED!
Once I was panhandled by a woman who claimed to be addicted to nail polish remover. Through her spiel on why she needed my money, she repeatedly pulled a bottle of the stuff out of her purse, wetting a cotton ball, and sniffing it. Making things even weirder, the spiel went on for about twenty minutes and took place at a deserted playground at 1:30 AM. My friend and I kept trying to leave, but she kept talking and was pretty harmless, so we stood and talked and she kept sniffing…
I suppose that could get you high, and maybe she had a serious huffing addiction, but at the time, it was hilarious in a surreal sort of way.
Sat on the metro a few weeks ago in Paris - young-ish non-French male gets in the front door of the carriage and starts his speil … at the same time I can hear another male, older & French, starting his (very similar) speil at the back of the carriage … they meet in the middle and all we can hear is something along the lines of
“What the hell are you doing getting in the front of the carrige you idiot ?”
“I’ve got as much right as …”
“Don’t be stupid you always start at the back of the train and work forward!”
“Nobody told me I’m sorry”
“Don"t be sorry you idiot get off!”
The young guy, looking a tad bewilderd gets out at the next stop and the oldre guys flops down next to me really deflated & his professional pride in tatters
“I mean did you see that guy, I mean, working front to back! I mean when you knit you don’t knit front to back do you iyts always back to front and I mean what was he doing ? I was doing a good job I was and then he comes along and mucks it up like that, amateur!”
I’ve told this story a few times here. Back in '93 I went to the UK on a English Lit trip, at the bottom of one of the escalators in one of the Underground stations there was a panhandler. I saw one of my classmates throw a loonie (Canadian $1 coin) in his hat and he yells out “Hey, no foreign curency!”.
I was a van pool driver about 10 years ago. On many days there was a guy at the bottom of the offramp next to the park and ride lot and his sign was a simple “Homeless, God bless”. I also noticed on the days he was bumming a nice red El Camino was parked behind a Texaco next to the offramp. The El Camino looked very well maintained and had some expensive wheels on it. One nice day I stopped next to him and commented to the other riders in the van that is was too bad that that nice red El Camino was being towed away. The guy dropped his sign and took of running to the Texaco. A few days later I noticed the El Camino was parked in a different spot. He flipped me off as I drove by, I just smiled and waved back.
Get you high? That stuff’s pretty much straight acetone! It’ll puree your brains and make the goo dribble out your ears, and it’ll quite possibly stop your breathing, but it’ll sure as hell get you high.
I was at a house party here in Atlanta a few months ago, and a guy walked up towards the porch (home of the keg, natch). He started with the typical “Can I ask you a question…” line, but instead of asking for money or beer he said “Any of y’all got an onion?” When we were able to stammer out that we didn’t, in fact, have an onion, he said “Hah. Bet you didn’t expect that one!”
There’s a crackhead panhandler in our neighborhood. Everyone calls her “Yo’ Momma”. She’s not homeless-- she lives with her mother ‘round the corner from me in a gorgeous Victorian house. Yo’ Momma is just, as my young nephew calls it, “burnt up” from years of drug abuse.
My workplace is just down the block, so I recognized her when she rang my doorbell about a week after we moved into a house in the neighborhood. She asked me for five dollars so she could buy a pizza. I told her we didn’t keep cash in the house, sorry. She said pleasantly that it was no problem, have a nice evening.
She came back two days later and rang the bell. Hubby answered the door this time. She said, “Hi! Your wife told me if I’d come back today that you’d give me five dollars.” Hubby politely told her we had no money, and she left with a smile and “welcome to the neighborhood.” She never came back.
I told this story to my boss, Bill, and he shook his head and laughed. He said that she had accosted him in the parking lot of the bank down the street, shouting from the other side of the lot at the top of her lungs, “Sir! Sir! Excuse me, but do you have a few bucks you could give me? I need to buy tampons!”
Another co-worker listening to this said he had caught her peeing in the alley behind our museum, and had overheard her running down a price list of sexual favors with a prospective client.
One comes to mind. I was walking from work to the parking garage in Albany when a Black man came up to me and said, “Excuse me. Would you care to donate to the United Negro Pizza Fund?”
