I Didn't Forget the Homeless

Mad DC Cabbie always says "don't forget the homeless," so today when I saw a homeless man outside Burger King I decided to say, yes. He asked me for some spare change to catch the bus but he had a shopping cart, those aren't allowed on the bus. So I said, "I'll buy you something to eat but I won't give you any money because you'll just run off and go get something to drink with it." He nods and says, "okay, you mean it?" "yeah, I says, what do you want? "Oh, anything." So I go in and buy him a meal and I bring the cup outside while I'm waiting for the rest of the order, "What do you want to drink?" "Oh, anything." says he. I say to come in and get your drink. I turn around with his meal and find that he has poured coffee into the softdrink cup and he says to me, "I just love to drink coffee." I said "you should have told me so I could order you a coffee cup." Then he starts to talk to me a mixture of lies and delusions. Then I say good-bye and I hope he can make it to the VA. It was 3:30 p.m. and he said the bus ride was two hours so he'd never make it but I said I hoped he did. He thanked me for the 10th time and I said, "It's no big deal." He smelled like an alcoholic and he talked of not eating and of his ulcer, well you can't drink coffee with an ulcer. It hits like acid indigestion. But I didn't correct him on any of those points. I went to my car and as I was sitting there starting it up I saw through the front door of the restaurant that he was throwing the food away. My son said that the guy had alcoholism real bad and would be dead in eight months. I felt like I'd wasted my money but not the attention that I gave this man. I'm sure the people in the restaurant didn't know what I was up to until I left but that didn't matter, I'd tried to be nice. It just wasn't the right way to go about it. They say not to give money to panhandlers, to instead give the money to organizations that work with them to rehabilitate, shelter, and feed them. There's the reason why.