AS I STEPPED OUT into the street after a performance of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra the other evening, it occurred to me that there have been three distinct changes in the urban landscape over the past quarter century: the end of indoor smoking at all but a small number of public places, forcing smokers out of doors; the pervasiveness of cell phones, indoors and out; and the presence of begging on heavily trafficked big-city streets.
As a former semi-pro smoker–a two-pack-a-day man, now 26 years off the weed–I find I don’t miss the smell of tobacco in the atmosphere, though I don’t like the hounding of cigarette smokers, who may be the last pariah group in America. I used to mock people with cell phones, thinking them jittery jerks who couldn’t bear the least repose, even in their cars. But of course I have long since acquired such a gadget myself; and all I can say in my own defense is that I leave it in my car and only two people know its number.
Of these three changes in the urban landscape, the one I shall probably never get used to is the omnipresence of beggars, among whom I include those people who sell “homeless” newspapers. (The one in Chicago is called Street Wise.) Begging is probably the world’s second oldest profession. Every civilization must have had its beggars, but it is only relatively recently in America that begging has become so evident.
When I was a kid, most begging was confined to one or the other of Chicago’s two skid rows. Beggars were utterly defeated men, bedraggled, often toothless, asking for a dime or a quarter, ostensibly for a cup of coffee, more likely to be used for a shot of rotgut. Begging was rare enough for comedians to make jokes about it. Henny Youngman used to tell about the bum who asked him for fifty cents for a cup of coffee. “I said to him, ‘But coffee’s only a quarter.’ ‘Ah,’ he replied, ‘won’t you join me?'” Such jokes are no longer told, and we certainly no longer use the word “bum.”
The presence of so many beggars on the streets is a sad reminder that, even in our opulent country, lots of people can’t make a go of things. In my neighborhood, some of the same beggars have been around for at least a decade. Begging has become not a fall-back but a job. Many of them are black men and women, but some are white; and quite a few of both races are fairly young. An occasional beggar will be faintly menacing, but most are not; a couple of them are even cheerful. I blame the number of beggars in America not on capitalism, but on the great human lottery, which awards less skill, little power of forming good habits, and simple bad luck to a small but, it now seems, not insignificant number of people in every society.
A man I know who sells Street Wise tells me that he needs $25 a day to make his nut, or expenses. These include breakfast and lunch–I believe he gets dinner at one of the local soup kitchens–and money for doing his laundry, and a few bucks for a place to sleep. Street Wise costs $1, and twenty-five cents of each copy sold goes back to the publisher. In his 70s, he schleps all his possessions around with him in plastic bags and sits, while selling his paper, in a beach chair.
I cough up roughly four or five bucks a week to local beggars, plus odd amounts of change to the zonked-out, half-mad people who appear from time to time along the streets I travel. I give this small sum out of a goofy array of motives, none of them very elevated. If I can help someone make his $25 nut a little quicker, why not? The fear of feeling myself closed-hearted may be a stronger motive. Lowest of all is the superstitious dread of bringing the furies down upon myself by not giving, which could shut off my own good fortune in making an easy living.
The presence of beggars is a very great drag on the spirit. Going about the business of a lucky life, I am brought up by confronting a man or woman who so obviously eats dreary food, works in miserable weather, and sleeps in conditions under which I could probably not sleep at all. Mine is a merely normal, not an overactive, conscience. But the sight of people begging gets to it.
I don’t know what Sweden and Norway do with their beggars; I recall encountering beggars in Amsterdam, but nowhere so many as in big American cities, where the problem doesn’t seem likely soon to go away. For the most selfish of reasons, I wish it would. Beggars are too much in my and everyone else’s face, underscoring and italicizing the essential unfairness of life. In my American utopia, they wouldn’t beg but carry a coffee and flick open cell phones with which to call their brokers, like, you might say, the rest of us beggars.
–Joseph Epstein
