New street person showed up tonight.

He stood on the sidewalk right outside our patio.

This guy was clearly unhinged. He screamed at cars driving by.

He was there when I showed up for my dinner shift. I asked Marie, the GM, if she had seen it.

There's a weird secret thing I found out about a while ago. If a restaurant calls the police because of an aggressive panhandler, there's not actually a lot that the police will do.

I've heard a lot of different explanations for why that is. Some people blame activist groups that say panhandling is a freedom of speech issue.

I heard somebody else say the police won't do anything unless businesses pay bribery donations to the police unions.

I have no idea what's true. One thing I know for sure though is that there's a nearly infinite stream of people that get ground up and broken by this system.

A few weeks ago, I found out our GM Marie has her own solution. She makes food for them. They're getting rice, bread from the previous night, leftover soup, etc. Mostly stuff we might throw out.

And then they work for her. They sweeping the back parking lot. They change the outside ash trays. They pick up litter.

But that's just the cover story. Really, she's not paying paying them to do any of that that.

She'd still pay them if none of that work had to be done because she really pays them to do something else, but it isn't something that she wants to get around.

When Marie tells these guys "keep the area around the restaurant clean" we see them doing stuff like picking up cigarette butts and litter, and tearing down fliers stapled to telephone poles, cleaning sidewalk gutters, etc.

But more important than that, she wants them to make sure that no street people show up during business hours.

I've got mixed feelings about it.

Tonight, the new guy must not have gotten the memo, because I watched him shuffling back and forth, up and down the sidewalk for a while, lost in his thoughts. Then he'd look up and around, watch the cars, and start screaming again.

Later, I saw Oscar the line cook walk out with Marie. She had a a plastic bag takeout container. I had tables and so I couldn't watch that closely but it seemed like she was buying him off with food.

Funny how the power structures in society aren't as absolute as we think.

This guy on thie street tonight, because he was so filthy, so willing to act like a crazy person. He has no hope so he can't be threatened really.

They had to entice him to get him to go away. For a minute, this guy wearing three layers of pants got to feel important.

I saw Marie talking and then I saw Oscar giving him the food.

Oscar is a big scary Mexican guy and he usually carries a fish knife on his belt that looks like a fucking medieval dagger. He uses it to cut up the swordfish into smaller filets.

The subtext was Marie was offering a choice between taking this food and walking away or perhaps a more unpleasant outcome.