I never give homeless people money. I know this makes me heartless. For the most part I have come to grips with this. The rational explanation is that if I gave one person money, I’d have to give everyone else money, because how can you judge these things? How can say one person deserves help and somebody doesn’t? But I know that’s a bullshit argument, it’s just an excuse to tell myself to not worry about these people’s problems, they’ve got nothing to do with me. (When they very much do.)
I don’t even know what I want to write about the people who see a white man in business casual and hit him up for twenty-five cents, always twenty-five cents. They’ve got homes, almost certainly jobs too, but they’re poor and all they see is rich, somebody who can give them money without worrying too much about it, and what are they going to do to you for just asking, call the cops? And I in turn am heartless again.
One guy was different because he was pushing a stroller. He called me sir, which isn’t uncommon, but he showed me an id from the VA hospital down the way and said that he had just got discharged from the military and had ended up homeless.
“What branch of the service were you in?” I asked.
“Special forces.”
I frowned and peered down at the stroller. There was a tiny crocodile, not just a crocodile, but a sleeping one with its tiny legs hanging in the air. One of them stuttering like a dog dreaming. I startled back, thought I was seeing things.
“She’s my daughter,” he said in a voice only an uncrazy person could possess.
I bought them lunch, a tuna salad sandwich and a bag of pretzels, from a place down the way. He waited outside, seemed anxious or perhaps unhappy that I was giving him food and not money. I felt no trust for him and yet — he had a baby crocodile.
“Where’s your wife?” I asked.
“Turned into a reptile too,” he said. “Everybody does, in their time.”
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Tagged food, poverty, transformations
