Bums in the City

I was wandering around Long Beach the other day looking for a place to eat when a guy came up to me and said, “You got any loose change?”

He was maybe in his late 30s and had the spacey appearance of someone who wanted the loose change for something other than food.

“Sure,” I said, reaching into my pocket, “can I see your license?”

I backed away a little as I said it because the guy smelled faintly of urine, which, as you can imagine, is not my favorite odor. I prefer Aramis.

He looked at me as though trying to figure out what it was I said and then repeated his question. “You got any loose change?”

I said, “You don’t get money until you show me your business license.”

At that point he became a little aggressive and demanded to know what the hell I was talking about.

I explained that bums in Long Beach were required to obtain a business license before they could panhandle.

“If I give money to you,” I explained, “and you don’t have a business license, I would be a party to a criminal act and we would both be subject to severe penalties.”

“Man,” he said, shaking his head, “this place sucks,” and shuffled off muttering to himself, as bums often do.

I was not in Long Beach specifically to find a place to eat. That was incidental to my primary purpose. Going to Long Beach to eat would be like going to Bellflower to vacation.

I was there to discuss bums with City Councilman Wallace (Waffling Wally) Edgerton, whose idea it was to require panhandlers to have the same kind of license needed by street vendors.

That is not in effect yet, by the way, and may never be in effect. I used it on the bum mentioned earlier only as a means of eliciting his response.

Edgerton proposed the law when his district was recently reapportioned to include the downtown area, a favorite place for bums. The proposal is being studied by the city attorney’s office.

I stopped by to see Waffling Wally after receiving several telephone calls from frantic liberals who would like to see him burned at the stake but worry about martyring him.

“What next?” one caller demanded of the proposal, “bumacide?” He was making up a word to indicate mass extermination of panhandlers.

“Just what do you have in mind?” I asked Waffling Wally as we sat in his neat-as-a-pin living room one sunny weekend morning.

They call him Waffling Wally because of his indecisiveness, but there is nothing indecisive about his current stand toward bums. He wants them gone.

“The people downtown feel imprisoned by panhandlers,” Wally said. “They’re afraid to walk the street and merchants are losing business because of it. They’re angry and want someone to do something. So I did something.”

The purpose of his proposal, he explained, was to create a dialogue. If it should become a law, however, that’s all right too. “Maybe all the bums will leave town and end up in Los Angeles,” Wally said.

I don’t think so. Even the people on L.A.’s skid row are getting tired of bums. Many businesses, and even a couple of missions, are installing automatic sprinklers to discourage them from hanging around out front.

By automatic I do not mean to imply that the sprinklers come on only when sensors pick up the aroma of bums. I mean they are timed to start automatically.

At any rate, the ACLU doesn’t like the idea and will surely make a case out of it. You can’t water down bums in America and get away with it.

If Waffling Wally is successful in chasing panhandlers out of Long Beach, I doubt they will come to L.A. The likelihood is they will go to Bumville U.S.A. Right. Santa Monica.

I asked a friend in Santa Monica how he felt about that and he said I should stop applying the blanket label bums to everyone on the street.

I said I wasn’t and suggested that bums had infiltrated the ranks of what he called “the legitimate homeless.” Bums are not people willing to work. Bums are able-bodied people who would rather beg and steal than work.

“Many of them are emotionally disabled,” my friend argued.

“A lot of editors I know are emotionally disabled,” I said, “but they still work.”

He replied that it was useless to talk to me and strode off. I suspect he spent the remainder of the day hugging bums along Palisades Park as a sign of compassion.

Waffling Wally has sympathy for those out of work due to the recession. But what bums need, he adds, “is a swift kick in the butt.”

I am not in favor of licensing, kicking or watering bums. But I agree something must be done about them. I intend on doing my part. I’m going into Santa Monica this afternoon and sprinkle them with Aramis.