"Hi, I Am Here to Bug You"

So if you have worked in any crowded part of Manhattan in the last five years (I seem to only work in crowded parts of Manhattan), you are probably familiar with Children's International. This is the organization that sends bright-eyed twentysomethings out in the street to sequester and shake down office drones on their way to Starbucks, ostensibly for the benefit of starving children.

Being generally misanthropic and unsympathetic to children (or at least not more sympathetic to children than other people), I've always been annoyed by these people. I usually don't have much time or interest in giving cash (or as they would prefer my credit card number) to a strange young person with a clipboard and a jacket.

Now the Voice has done a little reporting on the subject and it turns out these branded street beggars are neither entirely altruistic nor particularly shady. Yeah, they get paid by the hour and get fairly substantial bonuses if they get a lot of contributions, but what a pain in the ass it must be to harass people all day for a living, so they're definitely not in it just for the money. (I've always wondered this about summer punks as well: isn't it more work to bother and piss people off all day than to, you know, just get a shit job somewhere?)

All in all, the fresh faces of Children's International generally irritate me. I wish there were a little pin you could wear saying, in effect, "don't bother, I'm going to hell anyway".

'Got a minute?' The young bleeding-heart carnivores who hunt you down on your lunch hour

Xavier in the park

Took the dog to Tompkins Square Park this afternoon. I ran into Xavier and he was talking about how he remembers too much. Like when this woman hit him when he was a child. "She was one of those black people who think they can discipline everyone else's child," he said.

Anyway, the thing about the park during a workday in the middle of the summer is that you really see what the East Village is about. Not what real estate ads say it's about, or what disgruntled Brooklyn people say it's about ("it's all baby carriages and high rises now"); it's still really fucking trashy. Take a tour with me:

Enter at 7th & B, and the Chinese people are doing Tai Chi in the entry walk to one of the children's playgrounds. Why in this park, I don't know, but there's a reliable stream of Chinese doing their unusual poses, then hopping the M9 at 8th & B to go back to Chinatown afterwards. It's sort of odd. Maybe Tompkins has some desirable properties.

Saunter over to "The Hill", that grassy area in the center of the park. Here we encounter East Village layabouts like myself with a heavy dose of gay cruisey-ness (hint: the shirtless men are usually looking).

Wander around to the walkway just to the west of the makeshift dog run (the real one is being renovated - for the last year now, we don't really know why), and we encounter the summer punks. In the afternoon they are very docile: taking healthy afternoon naps, staring into space, generally relaxing A LOT. They have dogs on leashes, cats on leashes, dogs off leashes and any number of disposable possessions.

The summer punks really make you question your layabout lifestyle: on the one hand you totally hate working, but their lifestyle seems like more work than your yuppie job you had at your office. Like, sure you are chained to your cubicle or counter or whatevs but you can run off to the drugstore or pub (ahem) or somewhere and people don't generally notice. These summer punks scrounge for every penny every second of the day. Sure they don't have to be anywhere, but they can't really be anywhere either. Unless of course they have smack. Then they can just be wherever they are.

True layabouts, but in a bad way.

Dibs and the summer punks

So as per usual this morning I walked with Cherie part way to her job with the dog, then I turned on 10th Street to walk the dog back home (that's one of my jobs now). Ran into my old locksmith friend Dibs who lives on Ave. B between 9th & 10th in an old storefront. He has been fighting his landlord since the 1980s (seriously), but he still hangs on to his storefront with it's inset front that he uses as a little porch. It could be a really nice apartment with a little work, actually.

He bought me a coffee and we chatted on the porch about how to replace window gates with those kind you can put an A/C into, Williamsburg and the summer punks.

The summer punks are in full bloom right now, by the way. They start arriving with their dogs and leather jackets with dated band references and drug problems around May. By now there are about 6 of them who sleep on 6th Street every morning and dozens of them that sit in Tompkins Square Park who probably sleep out in the East River Park. They generally make a mess and bother people, but they have become a seasonal fact of life in the East Village, like pollen in the spring. I wonder why no one told them that the East Village is totally gentrified and yuppie now and that the cool kids moved to Williamsburg then Bed Stuy years ago. Nothing ever really changes for the summer punks though. They have listened to the exact same music, worn the exact same clothes and done the exact same drugs for as long as I can remember.

It's funny what Dibs had to say about them. "I like those kids, except that they are all drug addicts." Ya think?