TO GIVE OR NOT TO GIVE

Late on a gray and chilly Tuesday afternoon, the Canarsie L subway train is making its way toward Manhattan, through the working-class Brooklyn’ neighborhoods of East New York and Bushwick. At this hour, the demand for seats is slight, and passengers are reading newspapers, chatting, dozing with their construction boots splayed out into the aisle, or just sitting, gazing out at nothing.

And then, at Jefferson Street, Jose Santos boards the train. New York City subway trains are noisy, but Santos, a 41-year-old Hispanic man who is known as Rico, is louder still. Much louder. “I’m destitute,” he shouts. The riders look up at him. “I haven’t been able to get welfare. I was in an accident. I broke my leg and injured my back. I don’t mean to disturb anybody. I can’t get a job”. Rico is walking with the aid of pair of battered crutches. “I have to struggle to keep my balance,” he informs one man. If this is true, it is partly because Rico travells with one hand outstretched, begging. Rico’s jeans are rolled up over one leg to expose a bowed calf and an ankle that has been scraped to a flaky white hue, which contrasts vividly with his deep brown skin.

“Oh, mira – look at me!” he bellows. “Ladies and gentleman, thank you immensely. I hope you’re having a good day and are in good spirits. I’m under mental and physical stress. I suffer mental impositions. It comes from nowhere. It’s like a breeze. It makes it hard for me to plead with you for change”. He leans close to the faces of three elderly women in cloth coats who clutch their purses tightly and look away. “They don’t give!” he shrieks, before turning his attention to a man listening to music through headphones. “Please, hello,” Rico yells. “I want to be sure you hear me calling”. A little farther down the car, a middle-aged woman is napping. In an instant, Rico is at her ear. “A little change,” he bawls. “It would be very nice of you ma’am. Do you hear me? ”And then, louder yet, “Can you hear me?”

During the 10 minutes it takes until the train pulls into the 14^th Street and Eighth Avenue station, its last stop, Rico makes his way through all 10 cars and collects about 5$. “It takes work to do this with a broken leg,” he has told one well-dressed man, who then gave him money, no doubt unaware that Rico suffered his injury more than two years ago and is often seen walking around his neighborhood without the crutches. The scrapes at his ankle he made himself, with a fork. “I have multiple problems,” Rico informed another carful of people. “This is the only way I can support myself. I have to feed myself – I have to live!” This was also somewhat disingenuous. It is well known around the Jefferson Street station that Rico spends his days shuttling between the subway and the streets, where he buys his drugs.

As winter turns to spring, things have become more complicated for Rico. New York’s Major of four month, Rudolph W.Giuliani, was elected to office in November after a law-and-order campaign aimed at middle-class voters, a campaign that included anti-begging rhetoric: “Most of you are assaulted every day on your way home from work". He promised to get tough on those he perceived as reducing the quality of life in New York, and he has delivered.

Soon after Giuliani took office in January, he ordered police sweeps of the so-called squeegee men who wipe windshields without invitation and then request payment for the service. But New York is a mass-transit city where 3.4 million passengers ride the city’s subways on the average weekday. Those riders have become accustomed to sharing the trains with panhandlers, an increasingly aggressive horde who have transformed the subway into a Bowery for our time. So it came as little surprise when, on January 10, New York transit officials announced a crackdown on subway panhandling. Any unlicensed commercial solicitation was already illegal, but now anti-begging announcements are broadcast in 70 high-use stations around the city and over the radio. Transit policemen have been enforcing the rules by arresting persistent and aggressive panhandlers and pushing for them to receive the maximum possible penalty of 10 days in jail.

For Rico and other panhandlers, however, perhaps the most damaging feature of the campaign is a black-and-white poster that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has displayed in each of the city’s 5,917 subway cars. The ad, an internal monologue that purports to soothe the anxiety and ambivalence experienced by subway riders, gives riders “legitimate reasons to keep their pocket when riding on the trains,” according to Bernard Cohen, the M.T.A. official who conceived the sign. Printed within a thought balloon that was designed to look as though it were rising from a seated rider’s head, it reads: “Uh, oh. Come on, not me, NOT ME. Oh pleeeeeze don’t come stand in FRONT of me ASKING for money. GREAT. Now the whole CAR’S staring. What do I do, WHAT DO I DO???? I know. I’ll pretend I’m reading my book. Look. I feel bad. I really do. But HEY, it’s MY MONEY. And HOW do I know what you’ll spend it on anyway? I DON’T. SORRY. No money from me”.

In the begging game, where the deft application of guilt is everything, the sign is potentially devastating. Subway passengers have developed highly personal responses to the parade of desperate people asking for money. There are young women who give only to elderly women, blacks who give only to whites, advocates for the homeless who give to nobody at all. Some people prefer to contribute only to charitable organizations; others reserve a few dollars in change each day to be given away to every beggar they encounter. Like most people, though, I give only sometimes, and my decision is a spontaneous, instinctive reaction to particular panhandlers.

Whatever the formula, the decision whether to give or not to give is invariably a delicate one, precariously weighted by several other questions: Are the panhandlers truly needy? Have they earned our money? Will they simply spend it on drugs? When a panhandler enters a subway car and begins to speak, people cannot help listening, sometimes with eyes averted or tensed behind newspapers, and after a rapid calculus predicated on guilt, compassion, admiration, superstition and fear, they give or they don’t.

By openly acknowledging this shared calculus, the M.T.A. poster aims to dispel it. But the sign had a different effect on me. I bridled at being told how to think about a decision so private as charity, and, in an odd way, I resented being let off the hook so easily. Still, the sign forced me to re-examine a decision-making process that had become almost reflexive. What makes me give? What makes me hesitate? There are now so many subway panhandlers that they blend into my daily experience. Perhaps, I thought, if I knew more – who they are, why they beg, what they spend my money on – I would know what to do the next time a dirty paper coffee cup was thrust in my direction. And so, with that hope in mind, I recently spent several weeks on the subways, where I met Rico and some 60 of his colleagues.

My heart sank. Try as I might, I could no longer deny that if I was giving money to a panhandler, more than likely I was giving money to a substance abuser. David, who struggles with his own heroin problem, had told me as much and now I believed him. “It’s very rare you get the real deal from us,” he’d said. “Ninety-five percent of us are drug addicts, alcoholics or have mental problems. That’s why put you in the streets. All of the houses that burnt down, the kids that are starving – it’s a joke. The truth is they’re trying to get high”. While this was a little extreme, the essence of it seems to be true.

Most subway passengers don’t want to support a panhandler’s drug habit, of course, and the panhandlers know this. Many of them say that their panhandling success is contingent upon making people believe that donations won’t turn into heroin or crack. A 37-year-old man named Benjamin who claims he makes “60$, 70$, say 100$ a day,” says panhandling “helps me watch myself eating-wise. You got to look like you ate, because people say, “He ain’t gonna eat, he’s gonna smoke crack, so I’m not gonna give it to him”.

The fact is, I might be tempted. Exposed to the realities of the panhandling life, I find my approach to giving remains unchanged. I give more to the obviously handicapped. I’m susceptible to a convincing pitch. I search for authenticity. I resist trying to decide whether or not someone is part of the “deserving poor”. And since I can’t give to everyone, my decisions are spontaneous, sometimes whimsical. What has changed is the sentiment behind my giving. I now assume the worst – that I will be deceived and that the money may be spent on drugs. though I am still astonished by the woman who gave 7$ to Roland Santiago, I understand why she did it. Hers is a gift stripped of romance, free of the burden of illusion. It is charity in its purest form.

Perhaps I am a soft touch. I’d prefer not to see someone put my money toward a bag of heroin, but I also know that even a heroin addict has to eat. David, for example, collects money and purchases food and distributes it to other panhandlers. In Berkeley, Calif., among other places, instead of giving beggars money, citizens can hand out vouchers redeemable for food or clothing. I like this idea in theory, except that when I brought food onto the subways and gave it to people, it felt patronizing. It also felt woefully beside the point.

I am annoyed by the tales some panhandlers use to coax a quarter, but to me these petty deceptions are offset by the larger truth they reveal: life is getting worse beneath the streets. The money I give them may be a salve to my conscience, but it’s not doing them much good. People who panhandle for money on New York’s subways subsist on crusts, booze and crack; they live in doorways, on flophouse floors or on the E train. Washing or changing clothes has become anathema to them. These are men and women who, as George Orwell said of early-20^th century Parisian derelicts, “have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent”. Poverty, he wrote, “frees them from ordinary standards of behavior”. In the end, I give simply because I feel I ought to.

Not all New Yorkers will subscribe to my approach. What they will surely agree on, however, is the need to get the panhandlers out of the subways, because are confined spaces, and also for some of the same reasons that Washington, Seattle, Atlanta, San Francisco and other cities are cracking down on vagrants: we want civility in our public spaces. But regardless of our individual attitudes, the city’s approach is distinctly uncivilized. We dispatch 4,500 policemen and complement them with a paltry 11 social workers and a poster that makes distant suggestions about giving money to charity. In the end, we give the panhandlers the boot and nothing else. Pushing them off the trains may put them out of sight, but it only creates the illusion of solving their problems.

We haven’t owned up to the nature of those problems, either. For years now, homelessness in New York City has been regarded largely as a matter of inadequate housing. “The advocates made a decision early on that the best way to engender public sympathy is to concentrate on housing,” says Andrew Cuomo, an assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development. “Ten years later we say: “Whoops! It wasn’t just a housing problem, it’s also drug abuse, mental illness, domestic violence”.

The most pressing problem among subway panhandlers – substance abuse – is linked to a complex matrix of intractable social issues, most prominently the lack of educational and employment opportunities for the urban poor. Something Rico said has stayed with me: “People don’t have compassionate understanding about why you use drugs”. He meant that when there is nothing to look forward to, distractions from the present become temping. “Say no to drugs’ is fine,” says Cuomo. “But in life you have to be able to say yes to something. We must be able to provide opportunities”. Solutions, of course, aren’t cheap or easy. But the city’s cosmetic approach is no more helpful than my own meager donations. Its facile cynicism was underscored for me by no less an authority than Sergeant Hardwicke, the architect of the crackdown. “A lot of panhandlers who suffer substance abuse, we get them some help, we’d probably clean up this problem”.

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