Modern Begging

I’m up in San Francisco at the moment for some business meetings. I stayed at a hotel on Geary Street last night, near the train station at Market and Powell streets. Early this morning I walked down from the hotel to the train station to catch a ride to the office.

Just outside the train station a man in a business suit approached me. He was clean-cut, carrying a briefcase, and at first glance looked like exactly what he claimed to be — a businessman whose wallet was stolen and who desperately needed fare to either get home or get to work. He asked me for $4.25 to get him to work, which was cheaper.

Call me cynical, but something just didn’t seem right about this scenario. In particular, I had a hard time imagining that any mature professional businessman would ever behave the way this guy was behaving. So I took a closer look and noticed that his hands were quite dirty. Then I looked at the police report he’d been waving to validate his assertion about a stolen wallet — and I saw that it was dated in 2004, and was for a vagrancy offense.

So I asked this fellow to show me what was in his briefcase, and that earned me a dirty look. But unknown to this guy, a cop had walked up behind him, and just then he said “Go ahead, Chucky — show him what you’ve got.” Chucky opened his briefcase, and what was inside isn’t what you’d expect from a businessman. Not quite. There were some filthy clothes all wadded up; a bottle of some cheap booze, half gone; a couple of crumpled black plastic bags; and what looked like $20 or so in coin. Chucky left, indignant; I talked to the cop for a moment. He told me that the beggars were getting more and more inventive with both their stories and their props, and Chucky was a completely typical example of this. Chucky has been in this businessman-in-distress role for several months, and apparently it was working fairly well for him. His big error, according to the cop, is it ran his routine at the same train station day after day, so all the commuters using that station knew all about Chucky.

There are no Chuckies in Jamul that I am aware of…