Sir Ian McKellen in Melbourne a few weeks ago, taking a break in rehearsals for Waiting for Godot, sitting on a bench behind the stage door, in costume, found a $1 coin tossed into his hat by a passerby, with the timeless words, “do you need some help, brother?”*
In London the relationship with tramps and beggars is complicated by their relentless ubiquity. You could easily spend £70 a week, even with a strict £1 cap, giving money to them. When I lived in Hackney Central there were at least ten regulars, plus others every day. There was a young Spanish guy I always gave money to and had a chat; he had been kind to my children when I was at a low ebb. I defended him vociferously one night when a smartly dressed, ostentatiously middle-class man began to abuse him, really nastily, outside that cesspit of humanity, Tesco in Morning Lane. He was always reading, and was also constantly in and out of hospital with what I later learned were needle injuries, of course. Subsidised by me.
I was taken in by some crack-addicted woman’s fake story one night on my way home, the tears, and gave her £5 (she was crying, she seemed nice, I wanted to be a nice person), only to see her comparing money with her friend, right as rain, two minutes later. It was annoying, and unnerving – a bit late in the day to be taken in! I felt betrayed, and unhappy for days. Once in my lunch hour I was put under a curse by a gypsy lavender-seller in James Street for not buying her lavender; that was in the 80s. (I’m not slating the Romani; no one told her to be a cartoon gypsy and put people under curses.)
Then there’s Big Issue fatigue, vendors on every street corner assuming that they have some moral right to your purchase of their magazine – which is not exactly unmissable journalism, is it. So you’re not really buying it, you’re just allowing them to give you something for your charity. And no one ever seems to think you might have bought it off someone else – that’s where the “selling” facade falls apart: you’re expected to give them the money and pretend you want their magazine. One guy even said to me: Well, you could buy another!” There’s a really in-your-face couple of them in the doorway of Whole Foods in Stoke Newington – you literally can’t get in, or past, without being accosted. (This particular fatigue is less brutal now we’re rid of the people who used to shove the free piece of rubbish London Lite in your face every ten feet… God I hated them. It’s a shame to tar The Big Issue with that brush but sometimes you just want to walk to the station, you know?)
People with blankets on their laps by the ATM, by the station exit, outside the supermarket. Places where they’ve got you cornered. Three guys in Old St Station the other night, as I went through it, every one of whom approached me. I had about £2. I snapped at one of them (I know: rudely, churlishly): “I’m not even working.” He said, “neither am I.” (But I’m not asking him for his money.) (And felt like rubbish all the way home.) And a woman wanting money “to get home.”
I remember years ago, when I was young and in New York
, a man came into a pizza place and started begging from table to
table. You couldn’t exactly say you had no money – but then I hadn’t,
it was my friend’s treat – I sat frozen in horror and embarrassment, unable to respond at all…
(NYC before Giuliani, I remember being chased along in midtown by a man
with no legs, on a skateboard sort of thing, with a sign saying “Viet
Nam Vet”.)
Maybe the strangest thing about tramps, beggars and “homeless people” is that no one ever talks about them. Taboo: we don’t discuss it in polite society, except as a policy issue, or to tut it (“tut tut – so awful, isn’t it? Shall we try that bar over there?”). Why? Because no one wants to look mean. Or seem to piously brag. To expose themselves as a mug, or a prude, a skinflint or a pushover.
Someone I know was walking along with a friend, and they were approached by a beggar, and the man turned on him: “Look. My business is failing, I’m paying x amount in alimony, I’m putting two kids through school, I’m this, that, I owe this, that – why should I give you my money??“
Ten times a day the rising tide, of anger – at them, for bald-faced asking you to give them your money; at yourself, for being pinched, sour, broke; at the world, for being such a shit place; at the government, because our cities are broken; then sadness – for them, for being like this, for it not being simple; then numbing brainweary shutdown. A daily gauntlet of human desperation, much of it (we’re told, we can’t imagine otherwise) self-induced (and Ms Baroque does not condone the use of drugs, which in turn support organised crime). But then, if someone hasn’t got the resources to do more than they’re doing – if someone is, after all, doing the best they can – is it their fault it isn’t more?
And the fear: what happens if one day it’s you?
Ian McKellen says: “The dollar coin is now lodged between two drawing pins on the board above my dressing room mirror. My lucky talisman.”
* I’m told there isn’t really a recession in Australia; but here in London that question, with its canonical use of the word “brother,” inevitably heightens the sense that we are, indeed, going through something like the Great Depression, and is even – in and of itself – a word of encouragement.
Baroque in Hackney 