The same white guy with the club foot and the whiny voice who I've seen for years, sleeping in the doorway of the Botox clinic down the block, comes up to me and Bill. "Spare some change for a homeless vet," he whines, like, Come on, already, fucking yuppies, and give me some change.
"Sorry, man."
He sucks his teeth and turns in disgust. "Would you please spare some change for a homeless vet," he whines at another passerby.
The woman on the corner of Fourteenth and Fifth, the one wrapped in a khaki tarp, the one who lays on the sidewalk covered in grime, shaking, like Tawana Brawley in her garbage bag. She's a tough case. She's only there when the United Homeless Organization woman isn't there on the same corner, the superduper chipper woman who calls me Pretty Hair whenever I donate. "Hi, Pretty Hair, god bless, have a good day!" The woman in the tarp looks awful -- you know how I'm always saying, "It's not Darfur?" This woman looks like she got dropped in the street directly from fucking Darfur. It's that bad.
Of course, then I see her from my window one morning, with a guy, a can collector, they're ducking under the scaffolding across the street, looking around for cops. They do...whatever their drug is. This is how it works -- the women panhandle, the men score. It's depressing.
Oh, these are the people in your neighborhood, in your neighborhood, in your neigh-bor-hood...
I talk to the UHO woman every now and again, she gives me the state of the union. She tells me about a fight she had with one of her "regulars." Guy used to give her a quarter every morning, then she commented on his dandruff, now he's angry at her. Her "regulars" -- like she's a vendor, providing him a service. Which she is. She is our neighborhood homeless person, the ombudsman for the rest of the crowd, the faceless lumps on the sidewalk underneath cardboard tents. You give her money, it goes to homeless people. What happens to it from there, you don't know.
The UHO does good, in my mind. It looks to me, through observation of the six or seven tables in my immediate area, that chronically homeless people turn to them, where they won't turn to other social services. At the same time, the UHO tables are fucking ubiquitous, and every single one of the collectors hassles you every single time you do not put a coin in the bucket.
Just one penny! Just one!
And everybody goes, la la la la la la la. Some people pat their pockets as they pass, like, checking for change, got none handy, too late now, oh well. I don't blame them. You don't want to pay people to be poor, and on drugs, like that's their job. Somebody's got to be poor and on drugs, and it's not going to be me.
I hardly sound like the bleeding heart liberal I profess to be, do I? It's not like people choose mental illness and chronic addiction. God, the whiny guy's voice is just so tired, he's like, I just want to go home and get high, man, come on. You're gonna have a bottle of wine later, I just want mine.
I'm not even volunteering right now. It's not official, but I'll make it official; I can't have it both ways. I can't show up when I want and not when I don't, that's not how it works. Volunteering is not supposed to be a photo op, or material for a column, and I don't want it to be.
I hope that, when I miss it enough, I'll go back.
In the meantime, I try to see the girls in the women on the street, to remember that this was where they started. The UHO woman, she could have lived with me back in 1984; so could the woman in the tarp. They are my age, though they look twenty years older; they just didn't have parents with money to run home to. I did. Therefore, these days, I get to do my drugs indoors, and they don't.
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