There’s a guy who panhandles at the entrance to my Metro (subway) station. He always chants “Don’t chunk those pennies way!” and rattles his cup. He’s a regular.
He chats up pretty girls when they let him, and occasionally makes remarks under his breath about passerby that are quite loud enough to be heard. I’m sure he knows we hear them, but counts on no one wanting to confront a “crazy old mumbling guy.”
It is in this way that he sometimes speaks truth to power.
Last week it was again cold as heck out here, and everyone was suffering while outside. I don’t know if he’s technically homeless, but he was out there, asking us not to chunk our pennies, whatver that means.
We, the collectiove commuters, were having none of it. Collars up, faces pinched and pale, we rushed past his darker face and into the abyss of the underground station. I was rushing past myself.
“Don’t chunk…” he started, then, seeing us all rushing past shivering in the antarctic-esque conditions, he stopped himself.
Sotto voce he muttered, as I passed, “Look out! March of the White People!”
I really should have given him money. His timing was hysterical.
Sailboat
No, he should have given you money, by analogy with Emperors. “Render unto Caesar,” eh wot?
chirp chirp chirp
Wot-wot? Emperors! “Render unto Caesar.” Anybody?
chirp chirp chirp
Thank you for explaining the difficult, grown-up words for us. No, really.
For a long time there was a homeless guy who lived in the subway station near my office who would declaim things on the platform at rush hour (Fifth Ave/53rd St. on the E/V lines, or as it was back then, the E/F lines). Topical things related to the holiday season or current events as often as simply hostile or surreal things.
One time he announced, in what was almost biographical free verse almost (but not quite) in the fashion of Langston Hughes:
Look at all these people on their way to work.
Hurrying to jobs given to them by the White Man!
The White Man gave me a job once…
But I ran away!
Runaway slave!
Come back! called the White Man, We can use you!
But I stayed away.
When he went missing all of a sudden a few years back there were a lot of inquiries at the token booth, and even a write-up in the then-regular “Tunnel Vision” column of the NY Times about him. He got mugged and stabbed in the middle of the night by some hoodlum but was recovering in a hospital.
I’ve never seen him again in the station so maybe he even got help in rejoining mainstream society.
Probably given to him by the White Man 