So, last night, around 10:30PM, a few of us pull in to the drive-thru of Wendy’s up on Aramingo Avenue. (Don’t judge. It was late, and we needed to eat.) So we’re sitting there — there’s an oddly long line in the drive-thru for this time of night — when an SUV pulls up next to us. Guy rolls down his window, starts talking a blue streak: He’s a union member, ex-Marine, yadda yadda yadda. Slowly, but surely, we realize: This dude is panhandling. In an SUV! And if you’ve lived in the city for any length of time, you know this scenario: It’s the “I just need to get home” speil, which has been used by the homeless and the drug-addicted and the crust-punked since the day man dropped a bagel off of a table and realized it could be a wheel. The ruse is this: By some circumstance, our hero has been abandoned and has no way home, except for a train. And all he needs is 87 cents/$3.75/whatever and he can return to the people who love him, whereupon he will send you a letter, reimbursing you for your trouble, which you may then hang on a wall, safe in the knowledge that You Are A Good Person. It’s an insidious enough scam when it’s delivered on foot, but here was a horse of a different color: Here was a man, already in a car, IDLING AND THEREFORE BURNING THE GAS HE NEEDED TO GET HOME, doing the whole “I just need to get home” speil. Fascinating! We looked at him, incredulously. “No, buddy, sorry, we just have the money we need for food,” we lied. As he rolled up the window, one of us heard him mutter “Lying bitches” as he then moved on to the next car in the Wendy’s drive-thru line, and then the one after that. When he was finished, he circled the lot and tried again. By the time we got our burgers, we were convinced: This man was going to kill us all.
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