It was, Cal Day, Berkeley, the semester before I would officially start my college tenure. Upon a stroll down infamous Telegraph Avenue was when I saw him: my first interesting – well, “interesting” is probably too strong of a word, more like “atypical” – bum.
As with many things Berkeley, bumming has really been risen to a supposed art form. The dude was tranquil, uncaring of his potential clientele save for his simple, honest sign: “Need money for weed”.
Eh, I’m getting ahead of myself. Ere the Berkeley experience, the beginnings of my interactions with these street collectors start in Asia. Growing up in 80′s Hong Kong, bums were a rarity; we were a prosperous harbor for the most part, and to be honest Hong Kong citizens aren’t exactly renown for their charity. To have to resort to basically bartering for their annoying absence took a lot of desperation and unemployability.
And though I haven’t experienced it personally, I’ve heard stories in various Southeast Asian countries involving gangs of beggar children. It’s a sad story that has no happy endings: children are put out with sad puppy eyes, and given a daily quota for earning enough money for their parents or broker. If a tourist feels bad enough to spare a dollar or two he gets swarmed by the entire gang, coercing charity on the bewildered philanthropist.
Anyway, from Asia to North America, the circumstances around bumming seemed a lot less grim. Hell, for the 7+ years I was in Vancouver, I didn’t even see much bummin’. I guess I didn’t hang around the downtown area too much, and the rain and cold weather probably made it an inhospitable place for the routinely homeless.
So we come back to Berkeley. Beyond the usual bumming for food, Berkeley introduced me to two new types of begging: the drugged up crackhead loser looking for a fix, and the creative, sometimes former-Ph.D who waxes poetically until a dollar bill shoos him to the nearest coffee shop and out of my study folder (1). I had much less pity for these guys; Berkeley’s tremendously liberal social programs gave them a leg up already, but only their lack of motivation kept them on the streets.
Nowadays, I commute to downtown San Francisco for work. Here, I’ve encountered yet another type of street begging – the creative storyteller. They don’t look completely like bums, and pitch tales of woe in a few short, well-rehearsed sentences to the unsuspecting pedestrian. One guy I foolishly gave a few bucks to told me he discovered, that day, that he was HIV positive and was scrounging around change to stay at a local hostel; another guy targeted specifically the Chinese, talking to me (and others) in Mandarin on the train about going to SFO but not having quite enough money to buy a ticket back to native Taiwan.
Hell, just the other day I saw a dude at the top of the escalator holding a “bet you 50 cents you read this” sign.
Any amount of compassion runs dry with shameless repetition, and I can’t decide whether to be impressed or disgusted by how street collectors are…begging for attention.
- Ok, I lie, I didn’t have any study folders. I was probably carrying around my 7 lb. laptop trying futilely to share a wireless connection with 30 other people in the cafe (↩)