On Saturday, Rachelle and I went to Yonge Street to run some errands. Huddled beneath a blanket on the sidewalk were three people. The most confident of them, a man with a big, bushy beard and a scattering of teeth, lit up when he saw Rachelle.
“Hey pretty lady! Look, look, I’m the original panhandler!!”
As he said this, he held out a frying pan upon which a bunch of small change was slopping about.
As Rachelle was digging into her purse to find some change, he added, “ I like you, you’re spicy! You could heat me up any day!” A rusty, whistling laugh came out of his mouth, while his buddy– so similar in appearance that he could be his brother– gave him a high five. The third member of their group, an older woman who could have been their mother, stared off at an unknown horizon.
Rachelle gave him some change while I smiled thinly and made my eyes into hate-missiles.
Rachelle and I then went into the Levis store where I bought a couple of pairs of jeans. While paying I found out that the clerk was studying to be a nurse, which made me ask if she was planning on being “ a nice nurse or a mean nurse?”
It was at this point that Rachelle started to give my hand a firm squeeze, as she does whenever I’m about to do something stupid, like invite a pamphleteer over for dinner to discuss their ideas. However, as I am the undisputed Alpha in our relationship, I ignored Rachelle’s tightening grip, even though it grew so painful I had to squeak an, “OW!” and shake my hand free from her kettle bell grip.
I told the girl working the cash all about my recent surgery and the mean and lazy nurses who never fetched my pain medication quickly enough. (Rachelle later said that I made some inappropriate remarks about the ethnicity of the nurses, including imitating the way they spoke, but I don’t remember that.)
At any rate, I ended up showing the clerk my foot-long abdominal scar, which revealed just what a shitty nurse she would make, as she immediately threw-up into the bag she was about to put my jeans in.
I have to admit this didn’t do very much for my self-esteem.
As we hurried out of the store and headed to the car, we bumped into the panhandlers again.
The head beggar gave Rachelle a big, gassy smile, “thanks for the change, pretty lady, I ain’t forgot it!” and then he gave me a sour look, which I shot right back at him.
This set him off.
“You think you’re a big man just because you can buy jeans? You’re not, you know, God’s gonna strike you down!”
He then stood up (he was surprisingly short) and waved his frying pan at me, which caused all of his change to fall down a grate. And then the woman whom I had taken to be the mother of the two beggars, started to sob. I tried to help them find their change, but they pushed me away. At this point, feeling sensitive because I had put on a bunch of weight that necessitated the purchase of the new jeans, made the clerk throw-up and ruined a hobo Christmas, I, too, began to cry.
It was a kind of pitiful scene, I guess, but then Rachelle took us all into Starbucks where she bought us ginger cookies and tea, and after that everybody felt pretty good.