Street roots., March 31, 2017, Page 12, Image 12

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Page 12
P H O TO BY ZEN G ZH EN G W A N G
Gay Talese in the living room o f his New York apartment.
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He was famous for defining literary journalism with his
profiles of Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio, but then he met a
homeless woman near his house in East Manhattan
BY ADAM SENNOTT
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
he first encounter was on a cold
Autumn afternoon in 1989. A woman
carrying two bulky bags over her
shoulders caught the attention of legendary
journalist Gay Talese as she stood on the
corner of Lexington Avenue and 59th Street
in New York City.
She appeared to be in her early 40s, with
delicate bones, blue eyes and short curly
blond hair. Talese continued on his way, but
the image of the woman stuck with him. A
few blocks later he turned around and
walked back to ask her an awkward
question. “Are you homeless?”
The encounter was striking. Her
appearance wasn’t that of the stereotypical
homeless person and neither was her story.
She was a married hair stylist who once
owned her own salon. Her husband lived in
Queens with their three children in one of
the two homes they bought together. The
other was in the Pocono Mountains of
Pennsylvania. But she left it all behind for
reasons she didn’t say.
Street Roots • March 31 -April 6, 2017
Talese wrote “The Homeless Woman with
Two Homes” in New York Magazine and it
was recently republished in his latest book,
“High Notes: Selected Writings of Gay
Talese.” While her story was unusual, he
also noted at the time that “urban
destitution and despair are now spreading to
the degree that identifying their victims
visually is often impossible. Increasingly, the
victims in our streets are looking like the
rest of us.” It was the first time Talese,
famous for defining literary journalism with
his profiles of Frank Sinatra and Joe
DiMaggio, had spoken to someone
experiencing homelessness so directly. But
it wouldn’t be the last.
Talese has since gotten to know some of
the individuals on the streets near his third-
floor apartment on the East Side of
Manhattan, where he has lived with his wife
Nan for almost 60 years. One such person
panhandles in front of a bakery two blocks
from his house. Another is on Madison
Avenue.
“There are people that have been in my
area who have been here for years,” Talese
said in a recent interview with Street Sense.
“There’s certain streets that I know certain
individuals. You see them there, it’s their
turf.”
He sees them as businesspeople who are
just trying to make a living.
“When you see a business from year to
year still located in the same place, you have
to say they’re doing business,” Talese said.
“Whatever it is they’re selling, it’s selling
enough they’re paying the rent. Well, when
you see the same faces soliciting funds with
their hand out begging for a dollar, or maybe
settling for less, they must be doing enough
to keep themselves from starving to death.
That’s not a comforting thought.”
In 2009, around the height of the great
recession, Talese decided to lend his writing
skills to some of the panhandlers in his
neighborhood by helping them make their
cardboard signs more timely and attention-
grabbing.
He had been on his way to cash a check
on Madison Avenue when he stopped to ask
a panhandler, “How’s the economy affecting
you?” Talese wrote in his column for The
New York Times.
“No different,” the panhandler said.. “It’s
always lousy.”
Later, Talese saw another panhandler,
this time with a sign that read “Homeless.
Please Help.”
“I dropped a dollar into his container, but
at the same time thought that the sign
might benefit from updating — it needed a
touch of stimulus, that word that dominates
the headlines,” Talese wrote in his column.
He pulled out a strip of laundry board and
wrote: “Please Support Pres. Obama’s
Stimulus Plan, and begin right here ... at the
bottom ... Thank you.” The panhandler
promised to copy it to his sign the next day.
“The next day, on Sunday, and during the
Monday holiday as well, I handed out these
boarded messages at random to people who
approached me for money, explaining why I
thought their economy would be stimulated
by my street signs,” Talese wrote in his
column. “I further pointed out that the big
bankers and industrial leaders the
government was bailing out had lobbyists
and public relations companies doing their
bidding; but these wandering men who were
seeking handouts in the street had to tap
into the topicality of their plight, had to link
themselves into the headlines and the top
priority of President Obama. Stimulus,
stimulus!!”
He later went back to see the
panhandlers he had given signs to.
“Some of them said they had a lot of
conversation with people,” Talese said.
“They saw this sign and it was different. And
this prompted conversation. So those
people, seeking whatever kind of financial
help they could get, were not faceless.”
One of the reasons homeless people have
become faceless is because they don’t have
anyone to represent them, according to
Talese.
“The people that are homeless are very
often quiet people,” he said. “They don’t
have lobbyists, they’re not organized in a
union, so they don’t have a spokesperson,
you don’t know about them, and sometimes
they don’t want you to know about them
See TALESE, page 13