Spare Some Change?
Thousands of tiny pinpoints of light stirred him from his slumber. “Better than any alarm clock or wake up call,” he used to say, back when he bothered talking to himself. Despite the many layers of fabric: the thick tartan flannel that smelled ironically of scotch, the grease stained olive fleece throw from the drugstore dumpster, and his trusty emergency-orange down sleeping bag, the morning light always managed to penetrate them, bringing with it the chill of dawn. He hadn’t had a job in ages, but the lack of proper shelter made him wake with the roosters, despite the city’s utter lack of living poultry.
He needed to get up and move to shake off the creeping cold anyhow, so he slithered out of his dingy cocoon and crouched in the doorway he had called his home for the last few hours. Expecting a dragon’s belch of vapor, he breathed onto his hands. The cruel morning breeze stole the warmth from his breath, and he muttered icy words under it. He attempted to crack his knuckles, and for the first sunup he could remember, his digits remained silent. It was bittersweet: first he marveled at the prospect of his rheumatoid disappearing, but was left annoyed by its disturbance of his daily routine. The frosty weather ignored the bundle of secondhand clothes he only removed on the most sweltering of summer days, and he felt as though the cold was trapped in the very cells of his well-worn skin.
He pictured himself a human snow globe, and laughed about this to no one in particular. Determined to disturb the blanket of white flakes dusting his imaginary skyline, he popped to his feet like a toy soldier and trudged off toward the financial district. A block down he had the distinct feeling he was forgetting something, grumbled that he maybe “left the stove on,” and cackled to himself loudly and suddenly enough to startle a young man cutting the plastic twine off a stack of freshly delivered newspapers. He paid no mind, keeping his pace. The newsboy looked around, shivered, and shrugged at the subway grate.
He found his spot by a large marble pot filled with dirt and a shriveled brown sprig of what used to be a well-manicured piece of professional shrubbery. It was the twin of a similarly unfortunate looking bit of plant life on the other side of the large glass revolving doors of an office building. Inside, a middle aged black guard sat behind his marble battlement, his eyes flitting lazily from screen to screen; a man in grey watching a grey world. The guard brushed crumbs of yeasty sugar off onto the gold shield embroidered on his sleeve, and looked up from his monitors to watch the slim blonde barista next door set up two sets of wrought iron tables and chairs, her ponytail bouncing through the back of her baseball cap. The look on the man’s face reflected his focus on her tight rear, accentuated by her tight black pants and her tightly tied green apron. The guard pursed his lips, and with a sharp intake of air, turned his gaze back to the screens.
This position next to the potted “plant”, between the office building and coffee shop, was no manner of happenstance. It was carefully picked in the time tested tradition of market research. His key demographic was between the age of 20 and 50: hipsters, yuppies, corporate climbers, salarymen, and the working rich. He had to catch their hearts when they were bleeding green, before they became jaded against his kind. He used to tell himself, “location, location, location,” a phrase he remembered from his previous life. In this piece of “prime real estate” he got commuters arriving to work, on their coffee breaks, going to lunch, returning from lunch, and leaving for the night. Sometimes he could ambush an assistant carrying large stacks of hot coffee cups in brown recycled cardboard trays, hold the door for them, and get the change. People were more likely to give him money if they were in a hurry, and if he did something polite or helpful enough to make them feel guilty. Time tested.
As the foot traffic past his pathetically landscaped nook picked up, he fished through the trash to find a suitably stained coffee cup. There was a stack of clean cups sitting on one of the tables outside, thin plastic pants around its ankles, but they were far too opulent for his purposes. He poured the remainder of the stale, cold coffee out, and leaned against the crystal clear glass wall of the office building. He had been chewed out by the security guard the last time he did this, leaving a greasy imprint of his scalp behind, but today he was left alone.
He was used to being ignored by the majority of faces trawling across his encampment. A spry older tramp he once knew used to say that if everyone stopped and gave him a sprinkle of change for a week, he wouldn’t have to live on the streets. The tramp equated panhandling to fishing, a philosophy that turned rejection into a baseline. The layman might ask why they couldn’t use their lack of fear of rejection to find employment; but their world and the world of the endless faces with the jingling pockets were in two different dimensions, wavelengths meeting briefly on the same band.
Today, however, the fish weren’t biting. Even on bad days he’d get a sad, sorry look, or even a flat out “no,” but today the torrent of busybodies flowed around him, unseeing, uncaring. He wrote it off to the economy, the weather, and his “shit luck”, and settled back into his glass and marble recess. The traffic slowed to a trickle, and while his voice wasn’t tired, he was bored of asking 27 variations of the same question to a sea of blank stares. He crossed his legs, pushed the filthy cup in front of him, and nodded off for a couple of hours, defeated.
He woke with the lunch crowd, rocked back, and playing like it was a monumental achievement to make it to his feet, stooped over, picked up his cup, and offered it to the masses. Nothing. Usually he could get something out of the talkative groups, or couples walking together; playing their guilt against each other, or making the boyfriend look cheap, but today was different. It felt odd. No one averted their eyes, no one acknowledged his presence, they simply walked past him, absorbed in their own conversations. They couldn’t be bothered with his poverty.
After hours of this, his frustration grew. He didn’t need anyone to speak to him, give him money, or even make eye contact. All he needed was someone to break his unbearable loneliness by letting him know he still existed. The lunch crowd returned to work, and he felt like screaming at them, tripping somebody, but he wouldn’t dare. They were better than him, after all, even if they went upstairs to twiddle their thumbs, read the newspaper, and play solitaire on their computers. His eyes begged other eyes to look at him, not through him, if just for a split second. He silently pleaded for some faint sliver of recognition, and beamed when he saw a certain wool knit cap and pair of thick black rimmed glasses bobbing above the throng of strangers.
The tall, wiry kid had always come to that coffee shop before class, and always had time for conversation with the likes of him. He felt privileged to bend the ear of the young man, and the young man felt cool for talking to him. In a zoological sense, their friendship was closest to that of the shark and the lamprey, or the rhino and the tick-bird. The kid would ask him, “How’s tricks?” and he would explain his haul, always downplaying it to get some change from the kid too. Then he would tell one of his time tested anecdotes from his life on the street, and sometimes drag up a story from his past life, pulling it through the ether like a tribe elder. Theirs was a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship. Time tested.
It took everything he had not to run up to the kid and embrace him. He let him turn on his heel and stroll into the coffee shop, hands in pockets. He’d wait just like always until the kid walked back out, blew gently through the pursed slit in the lid of his coffee cup, and sat at the corner table. He watched hungrily as the kid made his way to the front of the line, ordered, placed his change in his front pocket, and got his coffee. He let him walk back out, blow on his coffee, and sit at the corner table before he hobbled over to him and waved. Just like always.
His heart sank when the favor wasn’t returned. “Must’ve not seen me,” he thought, and barreled right up to the railing by the table, and tried again. “Hey kid, how’s tricks?” The response was the same. He felt horribly awkward, and betrayed. The kid sat, nose deep in Vonnegut, slowly blowing on his coffee, completely oblivious. “Et tu, kid?” he mumbled. He felt like knocking the coffee out of his hand, or closing the book on his nose, but was far too embarrassed by this snubbing to do anything about it. It hurt more than the rest. Of all the people that were better than him, the one who’d give him the time of day just turned his back too. If he had a hole to crawl back to, he would have dug even deeper to get away from this new level of shame and loneliness.
As he made his retreat, away from that awful section of town with those awful people who paid him no mind, he remembered what he had forgotten earlier. He dropped his pathetically empty cup, almost expecting a moth to fly out of it, and came to a half trot, getting back to the alcove where his “bed” lay. He hoped to God a bag lady or some other unwanted soul hadn’t snatched it up and slumped it over their cart, or he’d have to find a shelter tonight that wasn’t full, or had a selection of handouts that hadn’t already been picked over. The sun was going down, and his half trot turned into a half sprint, but he wasn’t winded, and his joints didn’t ache.
When he got there he found he didn’t need landmarks to guide him. Flashing lights bathed the street, and the uncaring faces of the dwindling crowd nearby. “Aw shit,” he thought, “cops’re bustin’ up the squatters.” He hesitated to cross the taped barricade, but found that nobody cared if he did that either. He was too worried about his belongings to let it get under his skin. He crept closer to the alcove to find his bedding gone. His head reeled, and so did he, hands to forehead, and he spun around to see the lights belonged to an ambulance. Relieved, he took up his theatrics again and limped to a paramedic, asking her for a blanket. The radio on her shoulder chirped out an almost indecipherable command, and she turned and walked away from him. He sputtered, “bitch,” and looked around the back of the ambulance to help himself. No one seemed to mind.
He stopped rifling through the supplies and tumbled out the back of the ambulance. It didn’t hurt. He straightened up and felt more frigid than he had even that morning. Even more alone than he had felt all day. More helpless than he had felt his entire life. His mind’s eye replayed what he had seen lying on the gurney. He refused to believe it, even though it made a lot of sense.
