Beggar's Banquet

On the way home from work the other night, we were stopped at one particularly long light when I saw some sort of commotion on the sidewalk. There seemed to be a writhing Chimera of tearing, dirty flesh right there on the corner amongst a crowd of beggars. It turned out to be two street girls in a cat-fight. It took me a while to ascertain what was happening, because it looked like one of those old Peanuts cartoons where you can see the legs of the fighters but the rest is lost in a cloud of swirling action, disembodied limbs, lightning bolts, exclamation marks and ampersands. The girls were literally tearing at each other’s hair, circling round and round, locked by their locks. Another girl tried to intervene, which was noble, but of course it led to an immediate three way cat-fight.

While I was busy trying to decide whether it would be inappropriate to take a picture, one of the girls reached out to find a weapon, and her hand fell on an inflatable plastic hammer toy that they must have been selling car to car. I’m sure she would rather have found a rock to bash the sweet bejesus out of the other girls, but, as they say, beggars can’t be choosers. In light of this, one of the other girls took off her sandal and started wailing away. Now, of course, things were out of control, yet comical beyond belief. Try to imagine three girls screaming and yanking each other’s hair and beating each other wildly with flip-flops and inflatable hammers.

At this point, a grubby young boy with a monkey ran over and started yelling down the street. Soon a grubby man with a monkey arrived who was obviously the head beggar of this corner. (Begging is a full, systematic profession with territories, payoffs and its own Mafia – which I learned to my detriment one Friday night when I tried going down to the intersection to make some extra cash). The Monkey-Man, and the boy, who I thus named "Tweeter", burst into the fray in a fury. Tweeter and the Monkey-Man (who, presumably, were hard up for cash…) tore the girls apart, and doled out swift justice. While Tweeter held them, the Monkey-Man gave each girl, including the one who had tried to break it up, a good cuff to the face.

And as quickly as it began, the episode was over, and everyone was big smiles again. We finally made the light and moved on. Of course, the ironic thing is that I usually hate to see kids begging, but I certainly would have paid for that show.