Panhandler Accepted
By the compassionmongers* on Morrissey Boulevard, aka the Boston Globe, where they are celebrating economic diversity at Morton and Blue Hill and other panhandler-plagued intersections:
Panhandlers come and go, moving on to the next street corner or the next fix, but Robbie Felder has claimed his own block on Morton Street in Mattapan, by his account and others, for more than a decade.
With a calculated precision gleaned from years of experience, Felder weaves in between traffic at the Morton Street and Blue Hill Avenue intersection, timing his moves with red lights, traffic crunches, and U-turns.
Some believe he’s an MIT professor who lost his mind, to others he lost his family in a car crash. In truth, Felder’s story is not that outlandish. But still it seems everyone knows him, making him one of the most colorful panhandlers of the city.
“He’s got love from everyone around here,” said Nikitas Tsoukales, who runs the Virgin Credit office on Morton Street and who recalls seeing Felder while growing up in his father’s doughnut shop next door. The aging panhandler looks the same, and moves the same even today, Tsoukales said.
“He’s here every day, seven days a week,” he said.
Afternoons, evenings, and nights, clad in soiled clothes and New Balance sneakers that are too big for him, Felder trudges up and down the intersection with a work ethic that rivals any daytime, more conventional laborer as he collects handouts from the thousands of motorists who pass by him, recognizing him as that guy always in the middle of traffic.
This is how Felder makes a living. He’s survived blistering storms and economic plunges, and the looming recession will not deter him. All he needs is his winter jacket and a charitable donation.
“I can’t complain,” he says, “I’ve seen worse and I’ve been through worse.”
It takes a certain discipline to panhandle. City officials estimate more than 6,000 people are homeless in Boston, and many are likely to hustle for a dollar. Some take odd jobs. A few will let handmade signs do their begging for them. Others claim street corners from East Boston to Roxbury and ask for handouts, car by car.
“Work ethic,” “certain discipline” … that’s an interesting take on begging.
Try ”public nuisance.” Police Commissioner Ed Davis, you see this? I have drive through Boston’s panhandler-plagued intersections on a regular basis. Call me meanspirited, but I don’t appreciate having to worry about stumblebums wandering between moving cars. I’m also offended by people at intersections who claim to be collecting for charity, real and otherwise … including firefighters with their boot shakedowns. Excuse me, I’m driving here. But then again, I’m also opposed to people putting their little hockey players and cheerleaders out shaking cans in front of supermarkets. Have a damn bakesale or a car wash.
Now that I think of it, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a panhandler working the Globe’s big intersection on Morrissey Boulevard, remote from that and other examples of quaint inner-city vibrancy. I’m pretty sure you can make it from there to leafy Newton without passing one, which may in part explain the Globe’s enthusiasm for panhandlers in other people’s neighborhoods. The same regrettably is not true of the Boston Herald, where my nightly flight to the burbs forces me to question my self-worth as I dodge disciplined intersection workers.
* The Boston Globe once wrote a heart-wrenching series on prison rape. A horrible problem. Globe’s poster boy? A child rapist ruefully behind bars and on the receiving end. Malkin, on the panhandler thing, wonders if this is why newspapers are dying. Well, I doubt it helps, though if the Globe ran something this absurd every day, I’d happily tout readership. Unfortunately, their ridiculousness is typically of a more pedestrian … bad choice, make that … stock variety.
Topics: Boston, media, moronocy
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:49 am Comments (2) on Tuesday, December 9, 2008
2 Responses to “Panhandler Accepted”
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December 9th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Wow. That story would be perfectly at home at The Onion.
We are the satire that we seek.
December 9th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
This is a painful subject for me, as my only brother has been a street bum almost his whole adult life. He also exhibits schizophrenic tendencies, which I believe were triggered in high school when he got into drugs. His whole life has been wasted, and not only his, as he made our mother’s life miserable, and it’s been so bad that he and I are now completely estranged.
There is nothing noble or self-disciplined about these people. They’re mentally ill, usually, but that doesn’t mean they can’t control themselves. They don’t give up the street life because they don’t want to. That would mean they’d have to give up drugs and their near-total freedom from inhibitions that govern civilized society. That “journalists” chose to romanticize Felder means they don’t understand him at all.