A homeless woman in Penn Station
The woman in front of me definitely had a beard. She also had a small protuberance - about half the height of a ping pong ball - on her right cheek, as if a ballbearing had been launched from her throat at a terrible speed and dented the inside of her mouth outwards. She was carrying two bags - both strong woven plastic, like the bags used at IKEA - and wearing a filthy overcoat. She had near-perfect teeth.
"Excuse me please, can you help me out?" she asked.
She had popped out from the corner of my vision: tiny, maybe 5'2", and squirrel-like in her movements. Her head darted around for other benefactors, but even Penn Station is quiet after a certain hour.
At some point, living in this or really any other city you have to confront the homeless. In New York, you get that opportunity pretty regularly since rent here costs a small fortune, leaving many people unable to make it.
New York also offers nearly unparalleled opportunity for panhandling in the form of the subway system, which guarantees a literally captive audience for two or three minutes. On any given day, in any given part of town, on any given train, you are relatively likely to encounter a woman or man, clearly world-weary and poverty stricken, who will announce in a loud monotone: "Excuse me please. I don't mean to bother you and I know you are all busy. I am down on my luck and I could use any help you can give me. Please give if you can."
The script can also vary a bit: "I accept pennies, I accept nickels, I accept prayers." Or "Please I only need to get enough money to get back to my family in New Jersey." (I twice encountered the same man claiming to need just enough for train fare back across the river at an interval of about a month. While I wouldn't dare impinge his honesty it does bare noting that if he really had to get to Jersey, he could have walked in that time.) The speech is usually delivered in the same emotionless drone. It sounds like a child reciting the pledge of allegiance or a CEO or politician explaining a recent and embarrassing indictment. When he finishes, the speaker surveys the scene, collects anything he can, and exits to the next subway car: another confined and unwilling group of potential benefactors.
I once saw two people try to work the same train car. The first, a drug-addled man in his forties, failed to collect. The second, a woman, made an impassioned plea on behalf of her children that really had emotion behind it. The man stood fifteen feet away from her as she explained her plight and screamed, "Don't you give her a dime. Not a dime. Don't give her nothin'." As this instruction fit with most people's initial intentions, we were obedient.
Obviously, it's impossible to give something to everyone who asks. You have to develop a strategy. I refuse to give to anyone on a subway on the principle that it encourages others to panhandle on the subway. If that sounds like an incentive-based excuse to act callous and hard-hearted that is because it is. It's also the strategy that most people follow.
"Can you help me out?" The bearded woman in Penn Station asked again. I was wearing a linen suit from a play rehearsal earlier in the day. It was pretty obvious I could help her out.
"I'm sorry," I said. I walked a few steps and she followed me.
"Please. Anything. Just a place to stay."
This was a weak bargaining strategy. It was like asking someone for a lift and, upon being refused, asking for a car.
When my former roommate Katherine moved here from Casper, Wyoming, she had basically never dealt with the homeless before and would routinely give people at our subway stop $10 and $20 bills. Until you acclimatize to dehumanizing desperate people - an inevitability if you are surrounded by them all the time- you can't help but see them as individuals, which requires either helping them or entrenching yourself in some right-wing philosophy that allows you to believe they deserve their horrid circumstances.
The bearded woman asked again: "Just someplace for the night. Just for the night." She stared at me and tried to make this line seductive, emphasizing a second meaning that was both sad and absurd. Her head darted around in case someone was nearby.
"I'm sorry," I said again and then walked down the stairs and away.
The trouble with my subway rule, along with other rules that people make for themselves about the homeless, is that you react reflexively to a call for help. Sure, it's impossible to alleviate the suffering of paupers simply through personal charity, but at a certain point a person's circumstances become so abjectly pathetic that ignoring her crosses a line and fractures your humanity. Something you hardly realize until after you have walked by.
Or that's how it worked for me anyway. After about a hundred feet, I grabbed a couple dollars from my wallet and turned back. There's a shelter on west 49th and the two-dollar subway fare would hardly break the bank. But, of course, by the time I returned the woman was gone, leaving only the vacant central corridor of Penn Station and echoing footsteps.