Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
The Beggar
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
Dear Ben, I hope you are doing well, enjoying school. How are your classes? When is your big paper due? Can’t wait to read it. Did you make the team?
My trip has been super. Great archaeological ruins. Great beaches. You and your sister would love Greece.
All the same, I want to tell you about something upsetting for me. An isolated encounter. A moment of moral numbness.
Since yesterday, I’ve been a rowboat on a turbulent Mediterranean Sea. Tossing and turning things over in my mind. An emotional amputee.
After a sunny morning poking around the embattlements and a flotilla of white yachts in Rhodes harbor, I ate at a seaport taverna. Battered flounder, a basket of freshly baked rustic bread, kalamata olives, cold beer. I wish this were a father-son trip. We could have overeaten together.
As I stepped out of the restaurant, a disheveled man about my age blocked my path. Using the crude sign language of panhandlers everywhere, he extended his hand. Ambushing me right after a meal when I was in a state of fattened contentment struck me as a well-practiced gambit.
He had concentrating brown eyes and disobedient brown hair. My height, about six feet. He was wrapped in thick layers of grimy clothes as if his wardrobe doubled as a bed. He gave off a repulsive stench.
The undigested food in my stomach started churning. When I travel, my time is my most precious commodity—and mine was being ransomed.
Think of when I have interrupted someone’s life to ask for help—traffic directions, career advice, travel tips. Time is money, and I presumed to take theirs. So why was this any different?
Give him money or not, the damage was done, my time irretrievably stolen. As you learned in Econ 101, a sunk cost. I felt so damn powerless. Impotent.
Instinctively, I thought about street scams. Maybe his partner was lurking, waiting to pickpocket me. Don’t I owe it to other tourists not to reward disagreeable street hustles?
Of course, he could just be another unlucky victim of circumstance reduced to poverty, vagrancy, humiliation. I thought, there but for the grace of God, go I. What right did I have to treat him as a pariah, a non-person?
This beggar had bullied me into his dreary, drab reality. He destroyed the postcard myth that everything here is scenic, clean, well-groomed. He cracked my pampered dream-state—a place of nice hotels, good food, care-free sightseeing.
A stinging bile of angry resentment gagged the back of my throat. With a dismissive, backhand wave, I took my revenge. Rejected, he scuttled away like a cockroach, making me feel even worse.
Do you think I should have paid his toll? I’m doling out big chunks of cash on this trip, so why not a pay small tax for pushing past a detour in my itinerary? A service fee to reclaim my peace of mind, right?
Ben, it’s two in the morning here. Back to punching my sweat-soaked pillow.
Love, Dad
