To Give or Not to Give

New York isn’t Calcutta, and begging isn’t all that common here. Even so, because I ride the subway almost every day, I come face-to-face with beggars all the time. Some subway beggars are regulars—like the scruffy guy who makes his plea on the early morning uptown A-train, or the legless man (who looked for sure as if he’d done military service) who used to work the No. 1 train. Wearing an old cowboy hat, he used his muscular arms to push himself along. His stumpy thighs, balanced on top of an old skateboard, and his beggar’s cup clutched between his pursed lips, made even the most pitiless passengers pull out a quarter. Like a lot of regulars, he simply vanished one day. Gone, like that.

Beggars like to step into a subway car like heralds bearing an important proclamation. Usually, it goes something like this: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry to bother you. I’m homeless and I’m hungry. Please. Any change you can spare would be appreciated.” Some offer a cursory attempt at a personal tale: “Ladies and gentlemen, I recently lost my job and am now about to lose my home. I could use your help.” Most subway riders ignore beggars by staring blankly ahead; some are presumably lost in their iPod world, while others keep their eyes glued to their newspapers or novels. You see an awful lot of people reading on subways — in part, I’m sure, because books double up as a great beggar-defense system.

Much like priests walking down an aisle, subway beggars move with a calculated slowness. Their begging styles range from the gentle to the aggressive, and I’ve slowly learned that begging is an art in itself. Some beggars are mighty fine thespians; others are complete novices. It doesn’t take a college degree to realize that none beg because begging manifests Aristotle’s good life or leads to his idea of happiness.

Unlike the street, where beggars like to stake out particular corners, the subway consists of vast caverns where beggars freely roam about and directly compete with one another. I’ve been on short rides where my car has been hit up two or three times by different beggars, each entering the car with a sad flourish, oblivious to the fact that another beggar just exited. Anger, resentment, fatigue, pity, a delusional sense of superiority and guilt all mix together into one muddied emotion whenever I watch a beggar walk through a subway car.

I have no idea what makes for effective begging, since none of it works on me. Early on, I learned that survival in New York depended on my wallet spending most of its life tucked deep inside a zipped compartment in my bag, and my eyes staying locked on a faraway, non-existent place whenever I am out in public. I also learned that giving a quarter here, and a quarter there, was a cheap way to earn a warm and fuzzy feeling without expressing any real liberality — the kind that requires disciplined giving. Besides, I always remind myself, there are posted signs in the subway cars entreating people not to give money to beggars, and instead to give to organized charities.

When my husband and I were young(er) artists, we lived in a loft building that was next door to the Union Rescue Mission, then located on Los Angeles Street, in downtown L.A. There we’d see men lifted straight out of a Ross Macdonald novel. They used to hang out in the back of the mission, freshly showered and fed, drying out and having a smoke. We’d exchange pleasantries across the chain-link fence that separated not just our bodies, but also their genuine poverty from our carefully chosen artists’ lifestyle. One time we came home and a man eagerly beckoned us over to the fence. He held out a present for our baby—a large, used plastic musical toy. I inhaled deeply and smiled at him as I held her up for him to hand it to her. What’s a germ or two to a healthy baby? Afterwards, I scrubbed the toy hard, using sudsy ammonia. She loved that toy.

Good citizen that I am, I’ve learned to stare straight through a miserable man begging for a quarter. Writing out checks to the Union Rescue Mission in Los Angeles never makes up for the sadness of that fact.

(Photo by Flickr user Rudhach under a Creative Commons license)