Panhandler (unrevised)

written for my Play Analysis course, the assignment was to narratize and create a story out of a small interaction between people.

THE SCENE: A young man is sitting on the curb of a street in downtown Portland with a backpack on. He is wearing worn jeans, an old band t-shirt and has multiple piercings on his face. Moderately overweight but with dignity and hair cut short enough to see his scalp, he has a pair of large round headphones slung around his neck. A couple walk past him, hand in hand. As they pass he says “Spare some change for a traveling kid” almost to himself without making eye-contact. The couple both say their I’m Sorry’s and keep walking.

MY SCENE: It had been pretty cold last night, so he walked down to the wharf and slept on the back of a big expensive boat, wrapped uncomfortably but manageably in a rug he found on the dock nearby. He woke early to seagulls and the chill morning air. The sky was pale and opaque, anxious for the sun to rise. His stomach reminded him how unsatisfactory last night’s dinner of two Iced Honeybuns he bought at a Seven Eleven with the change he made that day. He had kindly asked the clerk if he could hang out in there for the night, possibly lie down and sleep somewhere out in the back. The clerk said something about policy through his thick Arabic accent. It was around 3:30 am at that point, so he headed to the docks as a last resort but it turned out to be all right.
Mark Hotz had been traveling for a couple months now…was it months? He didn’t always know the date anymore, much less the time. He had hawked his watch in Portsmouth, New Hampshire one day when he hadn’t made any change for food. His sojourn had started in Hoboken, New Jersey. He was originally a student at N.Y.U. studying film. After a full year he decided that it didn’t really suit him. Since the first grade at Hoboken Elementary, Mark had been living a life of routine and plan. His mother was always keeping calendars and schedules, making sure they both knew exactly what would be going on every minute of his future and there would be nothing either of them would be unprepared for. After the surge of independence one feels after being out in college for the first time, Mark decided he was through being perpetually in anticipation of the next step in his life. He wanted out of the structured and planned life that was built around him. He wanted spontaneity, he wanted to be unprepared, he wanted to never know what the next day would bring. Mark wanted freedom.
That was all it took to bring Mark back home to Jersey one last time, during his April vacation. He packed a backpack and began to walk, one foot in front of the other, away from home. His only real target was Montreal, Canada. He knew a couple people there. If he couldn’t find them it wouldn’t be too bad though. It’s not really about the destination. He hitchhiked most of the time, he rode a bus once after getting some cash from a pawnshop for some of his books, some CD’s and his leather wallet. He tried to not eat a lot, to save on money, which he usually got from working people on the street or selling off his remaining possessions. He would sleep wherever he could. Sometimes there would be homeless shelters, sometimes he’d find parks. He’d only slept in an alley twice, because it had started raining too hard to keep looking. He’d made it as far as Portland, but he was in a spot of trouble here. There weren’t really any major cities close enough to hitchhike too. North of Portland, he only knew about Bangor, and nobody seemed to want to go to Bangor. He decided to stick around for a couple of days and see if the situation improved. He was scared he’d have to hawk off his CD player, his one luxury he didn’t think he could live without, in order to buy a bus ticket to Canada. For now, he would just keep begging a bit to keep his hunger in check and maybe find a warmer place to sleep.
After leaving the boat and the rug behind, Mark walked into a Denny’s around six-ish to catch the early morning crowd. He refused to be seated and waited until some people left there table before swiftly moving to it and grabbing what they had not eaten. The staff at this Denny’s must have been used to this and caught him with half a pancake in his mouth and kicked him out. At least he had finished the hashbrowns in time. He wandered the streets for a bit, looking for more early-morning joints, but had no luck. He walked down Exchange Street and found a nice little park. The sun had come up so he lied down and took a nap on the warm grass. He’d learned to find alternate uses for everything, in this case his backpack became a pillow. In his backpack he had another pair of jeans (the pair he was wearing still had a couple more days in them) which could cushion any hard sharp areas he decided to lay on for the night. There was his CD player with headphones and spare batteries, and the barest minimum of albums that he painfully chose and decided he needed to keep with him. He had a short hunting knife, a lighter, four dollars and sixty seven cents, an empty water bottle, and two books: “Rule of the Bone” by Russell Banks, and everyone lonesome traveler’s Bible, “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac. Mark picked himself up and walked up the street a ways. He sat down by the curb and turned on his CD player and lifted his headphones to his ears.
Halfway through Track 11 Mark saw two people walking up the street. He was starting to get that hungry feeling again and thought he’d better start soon before it got late again. He took off his headphones and waited for them to get close. It was a man and woman, holding hands and smiling and talking to each other. The girl was shorter than he and had long curly brown hair. The guy had scrawny little arms and unkempt long blonde hair. As they walked past, Mark adverted his eyes and said loud enough for them to hear:
“Spare change for a traveling kid,” and he trailed off after that.
“I’m sorry, I wish I did,” said the guy quickly, almost as if he had prepared what he was going to say before he even reached Mark.
“Nope, sorry,” the girl said with him at the same time. As they walked on past but not out of earshot, he could hear the girl say to the guy:
“Honestly, what’s spare about my change? Money I worked for…”
“It’s not about money…” the guy responded and then their conversation faded too faint to hear down the street.
It wasn’t about begging for money. It wasn’t about giving money away. It was about being a generous person. It was about recognizing another person as a living breathing human being who would like some help, and only if it wouldn’t trouble you, and not seeing them as some broken cog in a machine called “Capitalism” or a native of local tribe called “Poverty.” It’s not like we’re Untouchable, it’s just that our lives are different than yours, just like yours is different from everybody else’s. People make choices, some good and some bad and either way you’re going down your own separate path in life. Forgive me, thought Mark, if something that is important to me is not important to you. You can keep to your family, your home, your school, your job, your cars, your auto-insurance bills, your mortgage rate, your designer shoes, your full and complete and successful lives. I’ll never look at you funny for it. I’ll just do whatever it takes to make me happy, and to me, that means doing what I want to do, making my own decisions and living the way that I choose to. That’s all it takes for me, these days. I do get hungry sometimes, so if you’re feeling happy enough to help me be happy, then could you spare me some change? It’d be really nice, and you could bet your full and happy life I’d do it for you.