Got some more for ya. I’m going to keep going with this for a while.
This is the first thing I saw when I walked out the door yesterday afternoon. Normally I wouldn’t post such a blurry image, but in this case it’s probably better that it is blurry – it’s one of the area’s career panhandlers, urinating on the side of my apartment building. What a lovely thing for Downtown’s tourists to see as they walk down Main Street.
Oh well, it could be worse, I’ve never seen one doing “number two” in the alley.
If I rubbed a magic lamp and a genie appeared and told me I could make one – but ONLY one – panhandler disappear from Memphis, the woman pictured above would be my choice, without a shadow of a doubt. This woman first approached me about 10 years ago in the parking lot of Piggly Wiggly in Midtown. She showed me papers from a mental hospital and told me she needed money for cab fare to Millington. When I told her sorry, but I couldn’t help, she started screaming and cussing at me, loud enough to be heard a block away. She followed me all the way to my car, yelling.
Since then I’ve seen her all over Downtown and Midtown. She’s usually accompanied by a black male, 6’4″, thin, about 40. He won’t walk right next to her, but about 20 feet behind, or across the street. He lets her do all the begging, as far as I can tell. Sometimes she’ll walk right past you, but when she wants money she’s aggressive. I once saw her coming on Second and crossed the street to avoid her – and she crossed too. So I crossed back – and so did she. So I crossed a third time, and she did too and by this time she was within 10 feet of me – but I ducked into the back door of McGuinness and she couldn’t follow me. So she stood there in the middle of the street, cussing me out.
I’ll try to get a better picture of her, and the guy too. She’s short, only about 5 feet tall. This is definitely one to watch out for.
I stood and watched this guy begging passersby for about 5 minutes at the Madison/Main trolley stop and in front of Walgreens. I pretended to be a tourist taking pictures of the entire Main Street Mall, so he wouldn’t figure out I was really taking pictures of him. At one point he crossed the street, I pointed the camera at a nearby trolley. As he got right next to me he stopped and looked at the camera, and made the following attempt to start a conversation: “What are you taking, pictures?”
I turned to him, looked him right in the eye and said, “HEY, GREAT OBSERVATION, GENIUS!!!” and he darted off. Maybe he was trying to make me believe he was mentally challenged by asking the stupidest possible question. But, Downtown already has a bum who does the “retarded” gimmick (and pics of him will be coming soon, don’t worry) so that one’s taken. I guess if I hadn’t had the camera he would’ve asked, “Hey, what’s that you’re wearing, a shirt?”
Since then I’ve seen him all over the place – Main, Second, Peabody Place – begging for money. He’ll walk up to one person right after the next. He definitely understands that panhandling is a numbers game.
Here’s another one doing the popular “flower man” gimmick, where he tries to sell you a flower. You can tell he picked this at a public park, because no flower shop in town would be caught dead selling such a pathetic flower. Needless to say he doesn’t have a vendor’s permit to be selling on public streets.
… And that’s all the pics for now. Setup of the online panhandling forum is going well – I’ve got a select group of about 15 people on there now, to get some discussion going before I roll it out to the public. Look for an announcement on Monday.