Save the children. No, really!

I’ve been working off of the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica for about a year and  a half now.  It’s a pretty nice location.  Walking distance from the beach.  Nice weather most of the time.  Pretty ladies abound.  But there is something about the Promenade that has made me prone to walking down the alley or 2nd street at times.  It didn’t used to bother me.

See, there seems to be three different groups on the Promenade all collecting money for the children.  Whose children?  I have no idea.  But the key word here is CHILDREN.  Screw the whales, if you say you want to save the children, apparently the money soon comes.

Now, this area is big with tourists.  I’m sure these groups get money.  Let’s break it down to the two different groups I see regularly.  

The first group, I’ll call “The Yellow Shirt Brigade”.   I first came upon The Yellow Shirt Brigade late last year.   There were two girls in particular that stand out in my mind, whom I have seen with their minions since.  They wear these bright yellow shirts and combine that with their beyond chipper attitudes and I’m scrambling to get away from drinking their koolaid.  I was walking to get lunch and this curly haired blonde pops seemingly out of nowhere waving her hands at me.  ”Come over here and talk to me!”, she said.  And of course, my first instinct is:  cute blonde wants to talk….Hello Lady!  But that soon wore off.  I immediately spotted the other members of her mini charity unit with my Jason Bourne hyper sensitive tracking skills.  Before I could keep walking, she was talking a mile a minute, her bubbly personality barely masking some sort of evil secret.  Or so that’s how it felt.  I got away from her.  But I see them, every day, 8 of them now in their yellow shirts.  

I don’t stop for them but there’s something simply annoying about their tactics.  The Promenade is a big stretch of street.  Spread the fuck out!  Four of you approached me within 2 minutes of me walking from Point A to Point B.  Come on now, spread out!

Now onto the second group.  This one is a bit more scammish to me.  Is scammish even a word?  Scammy?  Scamirrific?

Anyway, these guys have been coming to The Promenade for a long time as far as I can tell.  Originally, I thought they were homeless.  And hell, they very well may be.  If they are, then more power to them for pulling this off.  I usually see about 4 black guys at a time.  One is always wearing the same Nation Of Islam style suit.  The others are always dressed way more shabby.  The one who constantly tries to squeeze money out of me is missing a bunch of teeth.

But the thing is, they have clipboards.  They have organization badges hanging around their necks.  They have similar sales pitches that The Yellow Shirt Brigade has about saving children but these are inner city children.  I sometimes see these guys arriving in the morning on the bus.  I encountered a new guy today I’ve never seen and he was walking around in dirty torn up pants with the same clipboard and badge.  It smells scammy.  The thing is, these guys are tenacious.  All day long they approach people for five minutes of their time.   I’m not sure if I should have ever talked to the toothless guy but he kept approaching me every morning as if he didn’t remember me from the day before so I finally just shook his hand.  Since then, he’s been cool with me but still asks me for money and one day it turned into him saying, “Brother, can you at least spare a quarter?”  And that sounded rather un-charity-ish to me.  Hell, I gave him the quarter.  I think they need better organizational skills.  Leave the mentally ill members home.  There’s one guy that constantly screams Harry Belafonte song lyrics.  Another one who looks like a black version of John Wayne Gacy who is always smiling really big trying to talk to ladies.

Both groups get money.  I have no idea the validity of either of them.  Either way, my patience has run thin.  So now, I walk down alleys and shortcuts to avoid them.  Sometimes, I pretend I am on the phone.  It works, even though it feels lame to do.

Hell, don’t get me started on the Asian chicks that don’t speak English who walk up to you out of nowhere with the laminated index card inquiring about your faith in Jesus….

~ by Aaron on March 12, 2009.