Today I gave away my breakfast

There's a homeless woman here in downtown who hits me up every single day. Her territory is pretty far-ranging, too—yesterday she caught me where she usually catches me, sitting outside the Grand, smoking a cigarette before I open the store. I frequently pass her around the corner of Wells and Van Buren, nearly a mile away, as well.

I've found that homeless people are something like clowns or vaudeville-era comedians; not that they're funny, or looking for laughs, but that they have certain shticks they stick to. In Augusta, Georgia, one guy who haunted downtown wore a white suit with a wife-beater, a hospital bracelet and said he was a college student who'd just been diagnosed as HIV positive. He needed money for bus fare so he could get back to his family in Birmingham, Alabama. In Aiken, South Carolina, there was a woman who needed money for baby milk. I've met people who've only just run out of gas, who've been challenged by Catholic Services to come up with half the price of a bus ticket in order to show their need is dire enough to warrant this charity giving them the other half, who've been getting paid under the table for working construction but got stiffed, who were rolled while out on a bender and people who, refreshingly enough, really just wanted to score a little weed.

Never mind that the college student in Augusta was easily 30 and had been begging for months on the two separate occasions I met him. Never mind that baby-milk lady in Aiken had been begging for at least 5 years, or that, if you actually gave her any money she would immediately ask you for a ride...not to a store, or a charity, but to "her parole officer's house," conveniently located in what passed for that small community's version of Crack Town. And never mind that I've heard the far-fetched "Catholic Services" story in locations as far-flung and varied as East St. Louis, Illinois; York, Pennsylvania; Biloxi, Mississippi and Key West, Florida. The fact that these stories....