Panhandling
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P
anhandling”—what it is, who can do it and where—has been a hot topic in Iowa City recently ever since the city council proposed—and ultimately passed—a new ordinance prohibiting “aggressive panhandling” in response to some folks’ concerns over solicitation on the ped mall. That there already were laws on the books prohibiting this—laws that had never resulted in a single arrest—was apparently of little concern to them. This new law was, in the words of council member Mike Wright “a solution that’s roaming around searching for a problem.” When it comes to “solutions roaming around in search of a problem,” I can always tell it’s summertime in Iowa City by the humidity that makes me wish I lived someplace dryer, like Cambodia, as well as by the arrival of the Mormon missionaries who arrive every year about this time. I see them strolling through the neighborhoods—and patrolling the ped mall—talking to passersby while trying, I suspect, to convert folks to Mormonism, but I don’t know for certain as they’ve never actually approached me personally. Considering the amount of time I spend downtown in areas where folks might be especially susceptible to conversion, the fact that I’ve never once been approached by them makes me wonder if there isn’t a photo of me taped to a wall someplace in Salt Lake City with “Do Not Save This Man” written across it in bold red letters. I’ve considered stopping some of them to ask if this was the case, but, on the off chance that it was, I’d just as soon not know about it. It’s good to feel wanted and if I found out that there was an entire religion that wanted nothing to do with me from the get-go it would probably hurt my feelings. There was an early morning knock on my
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18
August 2010 | Little Village
door a month or so ago and I crawled from bed to see an almost unnaturally beautiful woman standing there smiling at me. I knew this wasn’t part of the dream I had been having because she was dressed far more modestly than the women in my dreams usually are—and also because she was clutching a handful of The Watchtower, the flagship publication of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I normally dispatch religious solicitors by
A panhandler might tell me that I should go to hell and a proselytizer might tell me I’m going to go to hell. But that’s ok, who am I to stop them? pretending I’m not the actual resident of my apartment, but just a plumber there to fix a pipe that was, At That Very Moment, spewing raw sewage all over the bathroom and I had to rush back to it, but I never do any plumbing while wearing only my boxer shorts so my story might have seemed somewhat suspect. Besides, she was so compellingly beautiful that I was happy to listen to her for a few minutes just to stare into her eyes. I listened for a bit (pre-coffee, I heard mostly just high tones and low tones) and when she asked me if “we could come in for a few
minutes to visit?” I was so busy trying to picture what she might look like in more locally appropriate garb and wondering how I could convert her to my way of life that I said “yes” almost before I realized I had done so. It was then that the “we” part of her question stopped the fantasy reel that was running through my head and I peered over her shoulder to see another woman standing just a few feet to her right who may have once been a professional wrestler—or at least someone who had given birth to several of them. She, I suppose, was the “bad cop” to the first woman’s “good cop,” part of a routine they had no doubt perfected over time as it had worked quite well on me. The first woman—the actual knocker—would use her beauty to get a foot in the door, literally and spiritually, while the second one was there to make sure that nobody got to “know” anybody else too well once she did—in the biblical sense of the word anyway. A guardian angel in comfortable shoes. Once it dawned on me that our “visit” wouldn’t possibly transpire in the way I had imagined it might, I feigned obligation to “something I had on the stove,” bade them well, and retreated back into my apartment to lay some more groundwork for my inevitable eternal damnation. A few weeks later I was sitting on my porch one afternoon when a group of young Baptist folks carrying Bibles walked by and stopped to ask if they could talk to me about my soul. Always interested in talking about myself I said “sure,” and they gave me a compelling pitch about the coming End of Days and what I needed to do beforehand to guarantee that I wouldn’t be left behind, and how I would be if I didn’t cast my lot in with them. They laughed when I asked them whether the Rapture would wipe out my credit card debt (but didn’t actually answer the question, leaving me to believe that it won’t, unfortunately) and invited me to come to a meeting