A few times a year a New York friend stops in town and hands me a pile of New York Post, and rare finds from the used book store scene. The story I am about to relate is adapted from the New York Post, Tuesday, December 4, 2012, page 4. It is an old tale as well, six months gone now. But when you go through life in the Luddite Lane this is how you get out-of-town news. You might consider this piece an addendum to The Case for the Panhandler Genocide, for which, I have yet to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize—you bleeding heart Europeans!

Fifty-eight year old Queens resident Ki Suk Han, had argued with his wife, had a few drinks, and left for the subway station. As he arrived he noticed that a crazed, filthy panhandler, about twenty years his junior, and taller and broader as well, was harassing commuters for change as they waited for the Q train headed downtown.

The older man approached the panhandler [one witness said aggressively, and others said in the interest of protecting others] and tried to calm him down. He was heard saying, ‘You’re scaring people’.

The panhandler said, ‘You don’t know me! You don’t know who I am!’

A freelance Post photographer later described seeing a body fly through the air. It was Ki Suk Han, tossed down onto the rails as the Q train approached. The driver was not able to stop in time and Han, scrambling out of the concrete chute, was dragged fifteen feet and ‘crushed…like a rag doll’.

Meanwhile the panhandler was heard saying ‘Goddamn motherfucker’ as he picked up his change cup and fled.

In a just world Han would have been Chung Lee and the panhandler would have been squished by the train. Of course, we live in an unjust world, and you need to look out for yourself, even when looking out for others. I have no way of knowing the exact circumstances. I can tell you this, about a third of panhandlers may escalate to violence in response to a show of weakness by a target, or, in response to verbal aggressive by a third party.

About a third of the hundreds of panhandlers that I have interdicted as a store manager have gotten aggressive with me. Of the thousands of panhandlers that have solicited me over the last three decades I can recall being hyper-aggressive towards them for a three year period when I was shedding what was left of the civilized veneer my mother had managed to lacquer on in my childhood. At 150 panhandlers a year for three years we come to a total of 450 that I stepped over, threatened, went after, chased, and snarled at. I actually robbed one mooching maggot and then threw his money in the sewer. I felt really bad about it until another scumbag began screaming at me for money while I was on my way to work in the freezing cold, to work in a freezer, for a cold ruthless bastard who stole money out of my check by editing the payroll program…

…Yes, thank you, I feel better now.

In any case, of the guesstimated 450 lowlifes that I was barbarically rude to; who I stepped over as they clung to life on the frozen sidewalks of South Baltimore, only two of those dudes threatened me back. This has a lot to do with self-justification of aggression. The begging maggot knows he is wrong; sells his soul on a minute-by-minute basis, as he grovels for your misplaced charity. When you lash back, if you have the requisite physicality—and more importantly that rusty hammer you carry to work to bang the wheel pins back into the forklift legs—to lend weight to your indignation, they back-off. They have no self-respect to begin with. Unless they are swarming in zombie mode or juiced up, ‘back-off pal’ is an easy sell.

Conversely, when this degenerate shred of humanity rises from the effusive gutters that spawned him to harass some easy target, someone who deserves to be preyed upon, and you interfere with that—well now, that is different. You see when he approaches someone who can smash his face in he is like the dog that just barks to see if you are afraid, and will never attack unless you run. But once he has homed in on some soft juicy guilt bucket in a suit or dress, he is on the hunt, maybe even primed to escalate from begging to demanding, to threatening, to force. He is no longer a barking dog, but a famished wolf, and your, are messing with his meal! If you can’t convince him that you can and will beat him down you have a fight on your hands.

To begin with, even though he does not deserve to breathe our air, he is tougher than we are.

So you think he is not tough, because he proved unable to handle the daily stress that squeezes the humanity out of you like paste from a tube?

Do you sleep on concrete?

Do you have to knock hard crust off of your biological drainage device just to relieve yourself?

Do you fish pizza crust chewed on by hookers out of the gutter, wipe off the grease and lipstick with your filthy paws, and then eat it?

It doesn’t take a genius to see where this all heads. You have just backed a really big smelly rat into a corner. Believe it or not, when it comes to our own real world zombies, the congealed human puss of the Urban End Times, you are better off with your back to a wall, and their back to the street.

Pushing someone into traffic is a classic defensive maneuver. A friend of mine killed a violent criminal by shoving him in front of a bus. I once punted a pit bull that was menacing me into a busy city street—and believe it or not the yuppies speeding through the ghetto on the way to their ivory tower office jobs swerved out of the way and risked their own lives to save that neck-ripping machine that had just run up on me. In a just world that unemployed four-legged prize-fighter would have landed in a yuppie lap and drained the Starbucks from his throat. As it was my welterweight quads did not pack enough punt to gain much lift, so my white-dappled brown foe whirly-skidded across two asphalt lanes and smacked into the curb, fixing me with an indignant look, before rejoining his pack and slinking away.

This brings us back to the beginning. Do not defend people against panhandlers unless the targeted person is with you, and is also your dependent [Mom, the wife, your daughter]. That way the justification is on your side. Even whack job panhandlers generally need to feel they are in the right. The guilt-rags who hand over change and the cowards who cringe or scurry away, have already justified his pursuit. They deserve to be intimidated; have indeed begged for it themselves.

Panhandling is his job. Do not mess with a man’s job. He is working harder for his money than the people who own us, and he knows it. He has dropped out of Your World, and, if you defend yourself he will retreat back to the lonely trash-blown margins he inhabits like the undead creature he is. But if you try to bring Your World to him; invade his last vestige of dignity, unsavory as it may be, look out.

I might want to live in a world where we have ‘panhandler season’ in Baltimore just like we had ‘buck season’ in Western PA. But even if my fantasy comes true, and the dregs of the ghetto who have occasionally chased me through the cold nighted streets pining for the coat off my back, and have attempted to make me feel guilty for working hard at every turn, are reduced to the status of hunted animals, I would not underestimate such feral prey, and neither should you.

By the way, if this article has upset you, do not purchase When You’re Food. I wrote the whole book in a period when I was repeatedly threatened while on my way to work, and while I read over a stack of decade old interviews with crime victims. That process brought out the darkness within that has sustained me well in the face of my subhuman enemies on the streets of Baltimore. An hour ago, when I sat down to read that six-month-old out-of-state paper before I lay down to sleep, I glanced at the cover and all that darkness came back. Looking now at the hauntingly dark photo of Ki Suk Han gazing into the headlights of the metal monster that is about to crush the life out of him, I am reminded that we are all a mere moment away from being food.

Oh, can you spare some change Big Guy?