Brother, Can You Spare A Dime
Boston aims to crack down on “aggressive solicitation,” aka obnoxious panhandling, possibly up due to hard times. It’s been chronic. I wrote about it in boom times in the mid-1990s,* when chi-chi Newbury Street organized to broom the bums. Have noticed an uptick at some intersections lately, though I have to say a lot of them look like they aren’t new to this, just seizing a new opportunity to tap into people’s economic sensitivities. Not that one pictured above, though, who’s been working an intersection near the Herald. Further investigation may be warranted.
* And met a guy who became a streetcorner friend, though I haven’t seen him in several years. Charlie Blanton, who hangs out at Downtown Crossing near the Jewelry Building, was more than happy to talk but said, “Just don’t make me look like the Little Match Girl.” His stark description of his existence is the stuff of classic literature.
Holding a Folger’s coffee can in his twisted claw of a hand, Charlie Blanton begs silently for cash.
Sometimes, along with quarters and ones, Blanton gets what he really wants - a few words, a cup of coffee, just a scrap of human contact.
Blanton has spent 45 years trapped in a body that is repulsive to most people who look at him. Cerebral palsy left him with barely intelligible speech and virtually useless limbs. He has to be bathed and fed by others.
“This is the only way I can meet people. It’s a weird sort of social assimilation,” Blanton said about his begging last week on a cold, wet day at Downtown Crossing, where he has parked his wheelchair for 13 years.
The few who stop to talk to Blanton learn that he is a well-read man with a sharp wit. He states his bitterness at the world matter-of-factly.
“When I moved out of the nursing home 15 years ago into so-called independent living, I thought I’d make friends. I thought I’d be recognized for the sterling intellectual that I am. Not,” he said.
Instead, he faced an empty life with only his Medicare-subsidized health aides for company. One day in 1983 he was out, pushing his chair with his right foot.
“I asked somebody the time. He ignored me, but gave me a dollar,” Blanton said.
He quickly realized he could add to his Social Security income, and be part of life - in the only way society would let him.
“It’s probably kept me from killing myself,” he said. “I hate it, but it feels so good when I go home. I don’t have a life except reading and my music.
“A good day is a day when I make some money and I don’t have a nervous breakdown with punks taunting me,” Blanton said. “It’s verbal, mainly. `You got a quarter?’ … `Get a job’ … Once two guys were walking by, and one said to the other, `Somebody should shoot that,’ pointing at me.”
There is a mailman and a jewel courier who stop to talk. For a while, a homeless alcoholic befriended him. But Blanton’s strategy had its biggest payoff 11 years ago when he was befriended by Bob Cortissoz.
“I was walking by here and I saw him chewing something,” said Cortissoz, 56, a retired nurse. “He was always chewing something. So I came over one day and said, `What the heck are you chewing?’ He said, `Gum.’ We’ve been friends ever since.
“I love Charlie. He’s my best friend. I come here every day just to see that he’s all right,” said Cortissoz. They go to dinner or a movie now and then, and spend Christmas together.
“He’s very educated. He’s nobody’s fool. He’s witty. You can’t help but love him,” said Cortissoz.
In a subsidized apartment, Blanton plucks at his electric guitar, watches some television and reads.
“I’ve read the complete works of Shakespeare,” he said. “I like Richard III. He was born disabled. He had a hunchback. People viewed him the same way they view me. They have a preternatural fear of the disabled. Once they thought it was a spiritual flaw. They don’t say it anymore, but deep down, they still think it.
“They don’t like to see someone like me because they see the frailty of the human body. They equate a twisted body with a twisted mind.”
Charlie liked the story, said he wanted people to know what it was like. Here’s the mainbar that ran with:
On a summer evening in 1995, a panhandler moved among the tables at a sidewalk cafe on Newbury Street. Some diners gave him money, some looked away. But one man brusquely told him to leave.
The panhandler left. But before he did, he spat in the man’s food.
“That actually happened. It’s no urban myth,” said Joan Jolley of the Newbury Street League.
Beggars have always been part of the city scene. But some observers say their numbers are rising along with their arrogance. And like people who work for a living in the 1990s, panhandlers are adapting to stay ahead in the quest for spare change.
“They’re not stupid,” said Back Bay restauratuer Jeff Gates, who has watched street life on Newbury and Boylston streets for 18 years.
“Just because they’re on the street doesn’t mean they’ve lost their entrepreneurial instincts. They respond to economic pressure like everyone else.”
He’s seen bums fight over a streetcorner, when one panhandler violated a “time-share” agreement.
“One guy was yelling, `Hey, you told me you were going to leave at 11.’ The other guy is saying, `I got here a little late. I want a little more time,”‘ Gates said. “So I asked the guy, `You guys rotate this spot?’ He said, `Yeah, we have to. This is a really good spot.”‘
Other growing trends in Boston panhandling include targeting bar patrons and the dinner crowd at night. Squeegee men - long a mainstay in New York - are showing up here, washing windshields and demanding cash.
Cities across the country have launched campaigns to get panhandlers off their streets. Cambridge and Kansas City are fighting court battles over panhandler arrests. New York - which may have the most beggars this side of Calcutta - recently began a sweep. Springfield is mulling an anti-panhandling bylaw.
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said, “We don’t have the problem other cities have.”
But he said police are told to arrest aggressive panhandlers.
“It’s a commonsense approach,” Menino said. “If they are aggressive and will not move along, we’ll arrest them.”
No one knows exactly how many panhandlers there are in the city - the numbers appear to change day by day and with the season, and may range from the dozens to hundreds. Advocates for the homeless say the number of adults using shelters have climbed by 10 percent to more than 2,000 since 1991.
Panhandlers are usually found where the ready cash is, among the casual shoppers, bar patrons and lunchtime crowds of the downtown and the Back Bay.
“It’s probably the No. 1 complaint from restaurants and stores,” said Sgt. John Devaney of Police Area D, covering the low-crime, high-fashion Back Bay. “We’ve made hundreds of arrests in the last five or six years.”
Cops target nuisance beggars with a city law barring anyone from soliciting money on the street without a permit. Judges may drop the charges, but Devaney said, “the deterrent is the arrest. When they see the police coming, they move along.”
Sarah Wunsch of the American Civil Liberties Union said she has no complaint with Boston’s approach. But the ACLU has charged in an ongoing suit that Cambridge’s policy of arresting all panhandlers - passive or aggressive - violates their First Amendment right of free speech.
“We live in a society where people to some extent have to tolerate things they may find offensive,” said Wunsch, who said that by panhandling, people are expressing their need. “You can try to sweep these people away. I don’t know where they are going to go.”
Cambridge Police spokesman Frank Pasquarello countered that it is a matter of people whose need is often drink or drugs causing a public nuisance.
“Panhandling is panhandling,” said Frank Pasquarello. “A lot of people are afraid to come into the squares because of it.”
Some panhandlers may be in need, Pasquarello said, but many are professionals who won’t work, or alcoholics supporting a habit.
Restauranteur Gates sees a dilemma: “The difficult thing about it is that we want to help homeless people.
“But we need a tax base to do that,” he said. “We need to attract tourists and people from the suburbs. It’s hard to put our best foot forward when people are hitting up customers in the cafes.”
Panhandlers who spoke to the Herald defended their right to beg.
Anthony Bessette, 31, followed a reporter up the street asking for money.
“I’m a grown man. My mother taught me well. I’m not happy about this. But if you’re hungry, you have to do it. Or else turn into a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife,” he said, adding, “The police are constantly harassing me.”
Other panhandlers become local fixtures and are left alone. On Boylston Street, a man who calls himself “Amazing Grace” spends most days on a newspaper vending box, singing his trademark tune. Grace, 52, says he can’t keep a job due to back problems, and admits he likes a few drinks during his daily panhandling shift.
“To me this is my job. I like sitting and talking to people. It pays my bills. It keeps me eating good,” he said. “I don’t bother people. I stay neat. Everybody around here knows me.”
He’s been at it for five years, since he arrived in Boston in the wake of a bad divorce, with a bad drinking problem. As a shelter resident, he got a subsidized $143-a-month apartment three years ago but has no other income.
“I’m not making a million bucks,” said Grace. “An average day is $40. Believe me, it’s not that good.”
Pedestrians approached by the Herald had few complaints about Boston panhandlers.
“(William) Wordsworth wrote a poem about beggars. He said, `Don’t think they don’t have a purpose in life,”‘ said Connie Crosby, 35. “It’s to make us feel better. It gives us the opportunity to be kind to others.”
But some panhandlers are their own worst enemies.
A man on Newbury Street, when hit up recently, bought his panhandler lunch. A week later, the same beggar started swearing when he said he didn’t have any money.
“You know, that was really dumb of you,” the man said. “You asked me last week, and I took care of you. Now you’ve ensured I’ll never give money to you or anyone else.”
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:26 am on Tuesday, March 10, 2009
2 Responses to “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime”
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March 10th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
If only people would get behind my policy,
“Feed the Homeless to the Hungry.”
two problems could be solved at one stroke.
March 10th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
There are no beggars in the little village where I live, but I’ve been approached in the cities. Most of them obviously have mental health or drug issues, and if I can’t spare the money, I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it. But the most pathetic sight I’ve ever seen is the able-bodied black man who approached me one midnight in a parking lot in Cincinnati, with a little girl who couldn’t have been more than nine or ten in tow. He stood back and let the little girl come up to me clutching a tattered piece of paper, timidly asking for money to support her school’s “sports team”. I could have refused him, but there was no way to refuse her. It didn’t make me feel good. It made me want to cry, which is probably what the man was counting on. No use reporting it either, because no one in that city has done anything about it for years.