We stayed at the Palmer House in Chicago, with a solid history in the town dating back to a bash attended by Mark Twain. It is situated on Wabash Avenue with a cranky el above the street that covers the Loop and other destinations. The Art Institute of Chicago which is on handsome and wide Michigan Avenue rests a block or two away and contains Seurat’s pointillistic masterpiece, La Grand Jatte, one of my all time favorites dating back from my college years.
As we strolled about in the delightfully cool weather, stuttered here and there to go into stores, I soon became aware of the panhandlers that inhabit the streets. Last year while visiting my son I remember a man without legs in a wheelchair, shaking his paper coffee cup of change to attract donors.
I am not Eric Hoffer but I do recall his brilliant essay, The Role of the Undesirables, that has always rested in my mind like well-rolled out concrete, substantive. He would observe these Windy City panhandlers, each and every one, perhaps speak to and with them, register their attire and gestures, their rags, size them up, estimate their capacities through conversation and only then reach determinations and in his Montaigne-like essays reach some indelible conclusions about society. I have no inclination to even try. Bluntly, it all comes down to capitalism, its inherent evils which are callousness and cruelty. I live in this brutal system and I don’t like what it does to people.
Several beggars had interesting “ploys,” I observed, after a few days of walking the streets about the hotel and off into other directions. One sat on the pavement, his hands clasped in prayer, eyes closed, his head bowed, and some words on his cardboard placard asking for god’s blessing while in such dire straits. He shook no container with coins, although one was nearby for contributions. Let us forget if it is a ploy or scam — I prefer to call it a performance of a kind, what he think needed to be done to eat that day.
One woman sat against the wall of a building and on the pavement. I felt she probably had not washed in a few days and she displayed a subtle distinction on her placard, declaring that she had done some “bad” (her word) things in her life but she herself was not “bad.” Was she a “fallen” woman seeking redemption through handouts? Or was it a plea that we forgive her and show that capitalistically by giving her coin of the realm?
Allow me to interrupt myself and share an association I just had — The poor are objects. I sense in some way they turn themselves into that so as not to disturb society — too much.
At one corner for no other reason than I wanted to, I gave a dollar to one grizzled old beggar and turning his head, he thanked me in a graveled voice so that I could see the three or four teeth left in his mouth, worn away chiclets stained as if from cigarette smoking. I had the fantasy then of taking 50 singles and like Johnny Appleseed or John D. Rockefeller who handed out dimes to youngsters, each the size of his own wizened anus and go about stuffing Washingtons into coffee cups at all the corners beggars had congregated. Bad fantasy. Good idea, if I think about it.
On the last day of our stay we walked over to the Art Institute where a long line had queued up that Monday, some French women tourists behind us. A black man with a sheath of newly printed weeklies produced by the homeless was bantering, kibitzing, and telling us awful jokes so as to engage us to fork over two simoleons for the magazine, making the point that the homeless were trying to support themselves. I associate to Tom Paine who lived close to beggary for significant parts of his life.
Most of the beggars I had seen were black men and women, except for one white girl at Midway Airport on the ground, reading a paperback with a sign that she needed bus fare to return home, and she appeared as if she was auditing a course in beggary. She evoked nothing in me. She rang false. I didn’t see hard times on her face as I had elsewhere that day.
On the train heading toward Midway a broad-chested black man with a big cross on his chest came into the car. Within a few minutes he called for our attention to announce who he was, what his needs were at the moment, what time he had spent in prison, his hopes to do better and to advance himself and asked the riders to make some contribution — nickels, dimes, quarters, I recall him saying — to assist him on his journey ahead. Some men gave him change and then he disappeared into the next car.
Many of my feelings are confused about degradation — self-degradation and societal degradation. One is exuded from the nether self and one is heavily applied like cement to a brick. At what point in my life might I expose my mistakes and misfortunes to others, asking them to help me out with change because I was way beyond the pale of being down on my luck. What I might garner might be sufficient for a coffee and doughnut at MacDonalds.
Despair, as I had seen, is granulated sugar in that cup of joe.
These beggars are invisible and when they look straight at us in our eyes we avoid their faces and conditions. I watched people walk past them, perhaps discomfited or feeling awkward, as I first felt. However, I really sense they are the invisible poor. There really is little if any difference between the circumstances of the poor in Dickens’s novels and the poor here in America. The milieu has changed, the poor persist, and capitalism grinds on.
Like most people everywhere, we are a heartless species, regardless of the economic system we inhabit. That sounds very harsh, doesn’t it? The poor person on the street in a twisted convolution of thought might argue capitalistically that he or she couldn’t survive without the handouts. And so they do what they must.
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