I just saw this guy last week! I am guessing that his sobriety is not why two women aren't taking him home and having their way with him--maybe their sobriety.
In India the beggars are pencil-thin from eating nothing but dirt and cow droppings. In Africa the people are so hungry that they have resorted to eating air and so their bodies are thin and their bellies are full of emptiness. Only in New York City do you see fat fucks begging for money.
This is like an eight-foot man with a sign that says, “TOO SHORT FOR THE NBA” or Tiger Woods holding a sign which reads, “THEY WON’T LET ME WIN BECAUSE I’M BLACK!” or a midget holding a sign which says, “PLEASE CONTINUE TO FART IN THE ELEVATOR.” It just doesn’t make sense! The problem is that no one challenges these people with logic. “So wait, if your face is right at ass-level, Mr. Midget, why would you be asking for people to continue to fart in the elevator? That would mean they would be blowing them right in your face. I mean, I’m into some sick shit but that’s downright perverted!”
I see guys on the subway all the time begging for money and their clothes look newer and better than mine, they look freshly showered and probably have doctorates in Thermodynamics to boot. One guy on the subway had a spankin’ new looking backpack with a pen with a hairy rubber guy on it that I had seen in Staples selling for about $4. I said to him, “Dude, forget the new designer clothes you’re wearing and the backpack that is top-end at Eastern Mountain Sports—are you asking the passengers to finance your $4 pen habit when a Bic would do you just fine?”
One night at 10:00 p.m. a guy asked me for money, “For a little soup.” I told the fat bastard that perhaps his late-night eating was why he had a weight problem.
So after a trip down to Chinatown where I wandered around aimlessly looking for mason jars to hold my herbs for my soon to be created herbal case, imagining that a China man would come up to me and say, “You need mason jar? Me got whole bunch of them!” I wasn’t totally in the mood for some fat fuck asking me for money.
This Hispanic fat bastard approached me and held out a card with some written information. I glanced at it and walked by him. I then turned around and asked him, “Why do you need money?”
He started to babble a little and I said, having picked up a little from his handwritten sob story, “Look, it’s not about feeding your four kids, so what’s it about?”
“I don’t speak English too good,” he said, which caused me to go into my broken Spanish, as pieces of high school Spanish class—the moments when I wasn’t either asleep or screwing around—flowed back into my head like a gluey sponge. My few words of Spanish combined with a mastery of the game Charades made me quite the communicator.
“Tu es guardo,” I said, as I held out my hands in the universal Charade gesture that indicates Santa Claus with a big belly. I was careful to say guardo, which means “fat” and not guapo, which means “handsome” or instead of getting some answers I might have gotten a date. “Por que necisitas dinero?” (“Why do you need money?”)
The man started to walk away from me and I was not in the mood to “Just let it go.”
“Don’t walk away from me when I ask you a question!” He turned back around and approached. Apparently he had a set of juevos almost as big as mine, granted mine are due to a congenital malformation in which a grapefruit was inexplicably attached to my nutsack.
He told me that he had a job and babbled a little more and I cut him off and said, “Is it for your four kids, por comida? [“for food”] Is it for medication? You have a job, you are guardo—why are you asking people for money?” He kind of shook his head in a pathetic way and if his logic wasn’t so flawed and I wasn’t such a prick, I might have felt bad.
In case there was a communication issue, I re-did my “You’re a fat bastard” Spanglish and Charades combo. I told him regarding him needing money for his four kids, “No es la verdad” (“That’s bullshit.”) To this he pulled out a picture of his four kids. I said, “Listen Paco, I’m not saying that you don’t have four kids. I’m saying that you being a fat fuck and asking for money has nothing to do with your children. If they are not eating enough, maybe if you only ate half a truckload of food and gave them the other half they could be like most of the other children in this country—obese and destined for disease—instead of destined to work as a dishwasher.”
Paco The Obese finally gave up on helping me understand his predicament and walked away. I shouted after him, “No es la verdad! I don’t like that!” and finally left, feeling that satisfied feeling you get when you waste valuable time in nonsense.
My experience with berating the homeless has shown me that many of them have drug addiction issues. I have had more than one street beggar come clean after I looked fiercely into their eyes and said, “Just tell me you’re a drug addict and I’ll respect that more than listening to your bullshit.”
For others it’s just a good gig. There was one guy outside a gym I used to work at who had crooked, nasty-looking teeth and looked pretty pathetic. One day I had bought a 10 lb. bag of potatoes and after eating a couple of pounds of them I was so sick of potatoes that I felt like Yosemite Sam when he was stuck on an island and had prepared a meal. “For an appetizer: shredded coconut. As a drink: coconut water. The main course: sautéed coconut—I HATE COCONUT!” So I brought them to work and gave them to the guy.
I said, “I slightly undercooked them but I ate a bunch of them and they’re fine.” He stunned me with his response and I don’t mean by the little pieces of food and spit that flew from his mouth as he talked but by the content.
“I don’t like them undercooked. I’ll take them to my friend’s place and microwave them.” After subsequent talks I found out that he wasn’t homeless by any stretch of the imagination, only a guy using his natural attributes—which in this case was a nasty set of chompers and a pathetic look—to get over. It was a good gig for him. Beat going to the office!
I don’t particularly like the fact that they are exploiting the very kind and caring nature of people. This results in the kind and caring either getting duped and justifying it with, “I’m sure he needs the money more than I do,” or the route which I have chosen where the kind and caring turns into the mean and bitter.
I just don’t want the stories of these fat bastard beggars getting out to India and Africa. Because while my grandparents came to America with the stories that the streets were lined with gold, this could cause a whole new slew of “your tired and poor” coming to America sharing stories of, “I hear that the beggars in America all have fat bellies and make as much in a day as we make in a year!”