Why don’t you just let some of those kids growing up on welfare (there is no cash assistance for able-bodied adults without children after all) know how much you disrespect them? Or are you going to just wait till they grow up, spout some crap about how the hungry kids of your own countrymen are robbing you at gun point, and force one of them to hijack a pit thread about panhandlers just to let you know how angry she is that assholes like you exist?
No problem, as long as you’re not subjecting us to your practice sessions. The subway stations here seem to attract people that can’t tell the difference between playing a song and cramming a saxophone into a trash compactor.
This was the day I knew I had to move out of the city.
I got up one Saturday morning and walked down to the local drugstore. There was always at least one panhandler in front of that store 24/7. If the store manager hassles the panhandlers and forces them to leave, inevitably the next morning at least one of the front windows of the store will be broken out. But I digress …
So I’m heading down to the drugstore, I look up and see two skinhead looking dudes just kicking the living shit out of one of the drugstore panhandlers, and I got some kind of vicarious pleasure out of that scene. That was the day I decided I must move out of the city.
After years of living in Hyde Park where 55th and 53rd streets are one of the Panhandling centers of Chicago, and traveling through the Loop to get to work is also infested with Panhandlers, I realized that there were several classes of them:
The truly homeless and hungry:
The not so well off but surviving:
The aggresive professional panhandler akin to what you would find in Oliver Twist or Threepenny opera. These move around town and I got to recognize them as they moved from downtown to Hyde Park in their nice cars. :wally
After a lot of thought I decided that for me, a triage approach would be best and that I would concentrate on the first group. I also decided that I did not want any money to go towards booze or drugs. My solution direct handouts of food in sealed containers or directly purchased from a food store they were outside such as McDonalds.
It was a good litmus test. If the food was refused I knew they were not in group 1 and in no time I would come across someone in group 1 eager for a cheap breakfast sandwich or a $1 burger or a piece of fruit. After awhile, I realized that many had stomach problems and I started to get extra yogurt the kind with the spoon built into the cap which solved the second problem. I concentrated my efforts on one or two people and was gratified to see their health improve until I no longer saw them. This happened several times over the course of several months.
This cost me less than a dollar a day and made me feel great. Cherry yogurt goes over best, but one preferred blueberry and since I saw him almost every day and ate it myself I was happy to comply. If my regulars were not there, I am sorry to say there was always someone to hand out to.
So that’s my advice. Give food that is sealed and too tempting not to eat.
Sometimes there is nothing so filling as giving away something you don’t really need to someone who really does.
Peter
You know, in the 24 years that I have been paying state and federal taxes, I’ve yet to have a gun pointed at me…
Panhandlers. It’s been a journey for me.
When I was a teenager, I had a cute punk girlfriend who liked to panhandle with her not-so-cute punk friends. The girl-next-door, she was. She lived with her folks and had every need provided for, including a substantial cash allowance. She didn’t have any expensive habits to support, or anything – she panned because it was punk. Oookay.
Anyway, I didn’t let that colour my perception of panhandlers in general. Nuh-uh. I knew that everyone else with their hand out had no other choice. She was just a crazy mixed up kid.
Anyway, I did all right straightaway in my youth. By the time I was twenty, I had a job that gave me a >$2000 salary, with bonuses and a nice raise every year. Not many of my friends were situated as comfortably, and my girlfriend (who was thirty) archly observed that she wished that well-paying jobs like that were open to proletarian females like her. (She made a little better than mininum wage as a kitchen wench, with which she was raising a daughter.) Buttload of guilt, right there.
I developed a sense that I didn’t deserve the amount of money that I was making, while equally qualified people couldn’t find suitable employment or even a job at all. This guilt led me to be pretty generous with panners. I considered it a tax, if I was going down the Granville strip to see a movie, or something. I’d give panners folding money. ($2s and $5s, nothing obviously crazy.)
This went on, for oh… a decade or so. And then something happened. I got laid off. My EI ran out, and I still didn’t have a steady job. I was destitute for quite a while, actually. I didn’t want to take social assistance, but I was up against it and swallowed my pride. Assistance being what it is, sometimes it wasn’t there, and sometimes it wasn’t enough. I was too (stupidly) proud to mooch off my friends, but I learned a lot about being really, really poor. There are resources out there. Yeah, it was humiliating to take advantage of them (although not because anyone humiliated me, except myself with my shame,) but I needn’t have starved. Still, it wasn’t uncommon for me to go without food for a few days, because I knew that if I held out for a bit, things would get sorted and I’d have some cash, and the hunger wasn’t as troubling as the shame of taking a handout (from folks who were glad to give it, funnily enough.) I’d been a faddish faster in flush times, so I knew that after a day you don’t feel hungry at all.
Anyway, I got through it. It wasn’t until after I got through it that it occurred to me that at no point had I considered taking up space on the sidewalk and hitting up strangers for spare change. Not once. And I was really desperate. How came that?
Now, when I see a panhandler, I don’t see a desperate, pathetic person, who needs my change to make it by. I see someone who thinks I’m a sucker. Especially since many, many more of them are obviously running Vicki (the cute punk chick’s) gig. Fuck off, kid, those are hundred-dollar shoes, easily. You’ve got fucking gold in your face. That’s a fresh tattoo, and it’s professionally done. Fucking bite me.
Yes, there are really needy people on the street, too. They’re not hard to spot. They’re usually being pretty damned industrious. Binning, collecting bottles and cans for deposit. I don’t mind helping out the obviously homeless – but it’s funny, they almost never ask.
I think I know why. They have a quality that most panners lack. Shame. This is why I feel sympathy for them and want to help.
Oh, and I forgot smoke-bummers:
My previous favourite response (stolen from my good friend Joe) is to look them in the eye and say “Sorry, I don’t smoke.” (While nonchalantly puffing away.)
It’s been superceded now by something better, lifted from a fella over at b3ta:
“Do you have a spare cigarette?”
“I tend to smoke them all, actually.”
I’ve only had the opportunity to use it a couple of times, which for some reason I find strangely disappointing. 
And the thing is, no store is going to hire you if you don’t have a permanent address and phone number.
I sometimes give and sometimes don’t. When I don’t, I always smile and say désolé, j’en ai pas.
The response is running about 9 to 1 “pas prob, bonne journée monsieur” at this point, which, in the Politeness Stakes, puts the panhandlers fairly far ahead of the wealthy paying customers I used to have at the DQ.
I’ll usually patronize street musicians, too. There’s a guy I see in Georgetown from time to time who plays the harmonica and guitar at the same time. He’s genuinely happy when you throw a couple quarters or a dollar in his guitar case, always has a huge smile and says nice things (“thank you pretty lady”).
My parents encountered a bum in downtown Baltimore who told them he was going to kill them after they brushed off his requests for money.
When I was in Boulder, CO last summer I couldn’t believe how many well-dressed, clean-looking beggars I encountered who said they would even take pennies when I told them I didn’t have any loose change. I asked a friend of mine who went to the university there and she said students sit on the Pearl Street mall area in the summer and panhandle for money to buy their ski passes in the winter. I’m even more glad I didn’t give a penny to anyone, I can’t even afford to buy a ski pass.
I used to encounter a lot of panhandlers in my college town of Gainesville, Florida. I used to carry coupons for cheap and free food, Subway cards filled up with stamps, etc.–Wesley Clark would have been impressed with me during my college days. When I’d get accosted by panhandlers downtown, I would usually offer free sub cards, and more often than not, they’d get pissed and refuse.
Once some of us were eating at a Taco Bell downtown, and this dirty bum sat down at the table with us and starting touching and poking all our food. He actually squished someone’s bean burrito with a dirty, fingerless-gloved hand. Needless to say, we were too stunned to react, and all of a sudden everyone was a lot less hungry. The employees threw him out and got us replacement meals, but he certainly got a lot of free food that day. That was probably my most egregious experience.
Gainesville also seemed to have a lot of vaguely punkish weirdos who wore black, had lots of tribal-looking tattoos and scary-looking piercings, safety pins and metal spikes on tattered leather jackets, lots of patches for bands I had never heard of, and they always looked dirty. I was never sure what “scene” these people were part of, but I heard them referred to as “gutter-punks” and “crusty-punks.” Apparently a lot of them traveled around the country in vans. Once we were walking downtown and a group of these guys started yelling after us for money. “What, you won’t give me money for my WHITE family? I’ve got a WHITE baby! You’re a traitor, for refusing your fellow WHITE people!” I picked up the pace and didn’t turn around, not wanting to get jumped by a bunch of racist gutter-punks.
When Phish came to town during my freshman year, fall of 1996, I was living in the dorms near the O’Connell Center, the on-campus arena where Phish was playing. Naturally, they brought a good number of hippies to town, following them. These people spread out over the entire campus, juggling sticks and hacky-sacking and panhandling everyone they saw. They even staked out the doors to the dorms to catch everyone on their way in and out. One acid-casualty asked me if he could get enough money for two tickets to Phish and “some vegan dog food for his dog Jerry.” Dude, why would you follow a band on tour if you don’t even have tickets? And why would I give you $70 for mere entertainment? And why would you force a dog to become a vegan? Jackass.
(As a sidenote, I went to that Phish concert myself, and ended up hating the band afterwards. They didn’t say a word to address the crowd, their showmanship was poor, and their target audience was a bunch of stinky, stoned losers–even worse than Gainesville’s usual hippie population, which was formidable.)
With all that said, I’ll always give money to street musicians, especially if they’re good. And I’ll always give to firemen who are out in traffic with their boots in hand, collecting for children’s charities. But I will never give to kids’ sports teams who are begging. They’re in good shape–let them do a car wash or a walkathon. And don’t follow me halfway out through the parking lot calling me “cracker asshole” if I don’t want to buy your stupid expensive peanut M&Ms. If you had some decent candy, I might actually consider it.
I see street musicians as an entirely different category than panhandlers. They are not panhandling, they are busking, that is working, performing their art and accepting what the public will share for their talents.
This is an entirely different thing. Here I feel no qualms about rewarding great performances with cold hard cash or buying albums if they have them, which some do. When the picture on the album matches the person performing I have seldom, if ever been dissapointed, especially if the busking is going on during a big music festival in Chicago.
Legitimate street musicians are generally pretty well fed, not addicted to booze or drugs and are highly talented. I would no more hesitate to support their work than a painter I liked, a leather or glass craftsperson, or a dancer.
One of the most spectacular performances was a large group of kids, a huge number of drums, kids doing street dancing and a few singing rythmically. Spellbinding. No adults present. The crowd showered them with cash. Well deserved. Huge talent.
Sometimes in life you stumble across something amazing
and all you can do is just be glad you were there in that brief moment of time that the art existed. A far cry from panhandling.
Peter
I must admit, I am totally unfamiliar with the word “busking.” Is it a verb, as in “to busk”? And it means playing music in a public place for money?
Because I looked it up myself and still had it in the other window:
One entry found for busker.
I knew the term but I didn’t know its etymology.
Wow, thanks! Some ignorance was fought today!
Some years ago, I was waiting for a streetcar and a smoke-bummer comes along. Hits me up, but since I don’t smoke, got nothing. Someone else did offer her a cig, which she takes, then naturally asks for a light. Next thing she said was "Oh ewww, menthol!"
If you’re gonna beg, you’ve got to be prepared to accept menthol.
Books in which busking is a theme.
By Mercedes Lackey and collaborators by Baen Books
Knight of Ghosts and Shadows and Summoned To Tourney, were both written by Mercedes Lackey and Ellen Guon, and were released by Baen in 1990 and 1992, respectively. In 1998, they were re-released in an omnibus version, Bedlam Bards.
In 1993, Baen released Bedlam Boyz, a solo novel by Ellen Guon that acted as a kind of prequel to the first books, following the backstory of a relatively minor character.
Finally, in 2001, Baen released the first hardcover in the series, written by Mercedes Lackey, and a new collaborator, Rosemary Edghill, Beyond World’s End.
I thought I would pass on my experience today. I was taking my daughter to daycare which is downtown. AsI was getting her out of her carseat I was approached by a healthy-looking man in his late 20s - early 30s. I got the usual story (Car broke town. Been stuck here 2 days. Nothing to eat. Can’t get home. Sleeping in bus station.) Instead of doing my normal ignoring routine, I thought I’d set a better example for my daughter. I began to give the man directions to a mission only 5 blocks away which does a great deal of good work feeding and helping people in the city. The response -
“Fuck you! I ain’t no bum, bitch.”
So instead I got to give my daughter a lesson on inappropriate language.
Someone once thought I was a “gas money” panhandler.
This is because I didn’t realize that the gas gauge on my Dad’s car was broken, and while his tank looked full, it was actually nearly empty.
I drive about 30 miles north to where I was going, and the car starts sputtering. I look at the gas gage and think, wow, it’s odd that hasn’t moved. Lightbulb.
I pull into the gas station JUST as the engine dies. My wallet & pockets contain $1.12 in change. I need another 80 cents or so to get enough gas to get me home. (This, btw, is before I had either a cell phone or an ATM card). There are 11 pennies in the cupholders, and the car is a mess. I figure, odds are good that somewhere on the floor of this car is enough change for my gas. So now I’ve got all the doors open, and I’m digging under the seats. I find a couple of nickles and dimes, and a parkway token. When I stand up, the woman at the pump next to me is staring at me.
“Drop something?”
“No,” I say. “Turns out I ran out of gas and am hunting the car for change.” I grin because I’m 17 and this is the sort of thing I find funny. “I’m one quarter away from victory.”
Well, she just about reads me the riot act! About how she’s seen my routine before and how I shouldn’t be begging from hardworking people and she’s going to go report me to the station attendant and blah blah blah. I’m like, woah, lady, I didn’t ask you for anything. She got in her car and drove away. I found $5 bill in the pocket of an old jacket in the back seat and got my gas.
It wasn’t until I was older and had encountered a couple of these people that I got what she was upset about.
True. However, “panhandler” doesn’t always equate to “somoene who lives in a cardboard box”.