AMERICAN IDEAS, Page 16Gloves for the NeedyOne Heart Warms Many Chilly FingersOn the Bowery, a Samaritan of the streets ministers to the old,the reticent and the shy
The old man sits on a bench off the Bowery, glazed eyes staring
into a void, sipping on a tall can of Bud enclosed in a brown paper
bag. "Twelve dollars and 50 cents," he mutters. "Twelve dollars and
50 cents." It is the sum total of one man's life -- the amount he
says he has been trying to borrow from his family in Detroit to
ensure his burial in potter's field, and to escape from the death
beyond death: "They send you to medical school and cut you up into
little pieces -- that's not for me. No sir."
This observation on oblivion was prompted by something as
mundane as a pair of gloves, which had been proffered tentatively
by a short man wearing a cap and an aging leather jacket, with a
faded green cotton bag slung over his shoulder like an Irish
peddler. For the past 24 years, between Thanksgiving and Christmas,
Michael Greenberg, 60, has been taking his bag of gloves to
Manhattan's Bowery, long the haunt of the down-and-outs and the
lost-weekenders, and wandering the gritty neighborhood looking for
"the old, the reticent and the shy." When he finds one, like the
old man on the bench, he dangles a pair of gray or maroon woolen
gloves and says, "Take them, please. They're free. They're a gift.
No strings attached." Then he shakes a trembling hand. This simple
act of communion, says Greenberg, "will almost invariably bring a
smile of acknowledgment. You can tell the handshake is in earnest
because they press your fingers."
It is hard work for this retired advertising account executive,
handing out 300 pairs of gloves every year on New York's infamous
skid row, which runs from Chinatown a dozen or so blocks north to
Cooper Square. "Oh, if I just wanted to stand here and give them
away, I could get rid of 1,000 in an hour. Easy. But I prefer to
go looking for the people I want. The ones who avoid eye contact.
It is not so much the gloves, but telling people they count."
Greenberg was shaped for his role of Samaritan of the streets
by his memories of Depression hard times and by the charity of his
father, Pinchus Joseph, who owned a Brooklyn bakery. "My father
would often include a coffee cake or a sandwich in the bag without
his customer's knowing," he says. "He would always tell us, `Don't
deprive yourself of the joy of giving.'" Money was short, and
Michael has a searing recollection of losing a glove while helping
bring supplies into the store on a bitterly cold morning. "I was
never able to find it, and for years I went around without gloves.
I never asked my father to replace them because I felt so guilty."
When his father died in November 1963, he searched for an
appropriate memorial. "I remembered the incident of the lost glove,
and it occurred to me that gloves are a powerful symbol because
being warm is being well-off and being cold is being poor. At that
time there weren't as many homeless people on the streets, and so
I immediately thought of the Bowery, and I decided to put a pair
of gloves on some poor fellow's hands just as my father had slipped
free Danish rolls into customers' bags." Greenberg was then
teaching sixth grade in a Brooklyn public school, and the following
year, despite his modest salary, he bought 72 pairs of woolen
gloves, took them to the Bowery, and handed them out (very timidly,
he admits) to the destitute and the derelict. Why 72? Because 18
is the Hebrew symbol for life, and "four times life is 72."
In 1966 Greenberg left teaching for the advertising business,
and with a higher salary he could afford to buy gloves regularly;
if they were on sale, he bought in bulk. For the next ten years the
Bowery became his route every November and December. In 1976 he was
in the subway, taking two bags containing $220 worth of newly
purchased gloves back to his office, when someone grabbed the
gloves and ran. He reported the theft to the police, the New York
Times heard of the incident, and for the first time the world read
about the "glove man."
As a result of that and many other television and newspaper
stories, Greenberg has been inundated with gloves. A Girl Scout
troop held a glove drive for him. A Colorado ski resort sent him
its entire lost-and-found department. And when a story about him
appeared in the International Herald Tribune four years ago, gloves
flowed in, from Europe to India: leather gloves, driving gloves,
fleece-lined gloves, children's gloves, even work gloves. Some
people send pairs, but most often they send only rights or lefts
(the rights outnumber the lefts by four to one, for some curious
reason). Some also send cash, which is quickly returned "because
I am not an organized charity."
Greenberg's tiny apartment in Greenwich Village is piled high
with 1,600 mismatched gloves, and he regularly has friends in for
a glove-matching party because, "I would never give out mismatched
gloves. That's denigrating." The group sits around, drinking beer
and matching gloves, "and the next day we discover there are not
as many matched as we thought."
Greenberg has witnessed a parade of defeated humanity in his
quarter-century of giving on skid row. He has offered gloves to his
former professor at Brooklyn College and to a once famous baritone
at the Metropolitan Opera, recognized by Greenberg from his days
as a youthful walk-on at the Met. Most of the people he meets are
confused, seemingly uncertain of where they are or what they are
doing. The more frightened refuse the gloves, and he will follow
them for several blocks, insisting, "They're a gift. I really want
you to have them." One elderly man finally stopped, took the
gloves, then asked, "Do you have them in blue?"
Major changes have swept down the Bowery since Greenberg first
ventured out. Sad, abandoned men can still be found in the few
remaining missions, and in hotels with names like the Prince and
the Sunshine. But most of the 82 bars and dozens of flophouses that
once served a floating population of aging, mostly white, casual
laborers and alcoholics, have gone. Instead the area now boasts
expensive apartments and chic restaurants. The newer homeless
inhabitants of skid row are more likely to be young, unemployed men
who clean car windows at intersections or mill in groups on street
corners. Drugs have become a perennial problem on the Bowery. "It's
a fearful place," says Greenberg. "The men are a lot younger, a lot
tougher and a lot meaner."
But the man with the faded green bag continues to stalk the
Bowery and its tributaries, staying clear of "the tough people, who
have gloves anyway," and seeking out "the little old guy who is
frightened of people." Sometimes he hands gloves to men who are
muttering aimlessly over the rubble of their lives, barely aware
of what they are clutching; some quickly trade them in for a pint
of cheap wine. "It doesn't make any difference. When you give a
gift, you let it go."
Occasionally, a star of hope radiates through all this gloom.
Recently he was waiting for a train at Penn Station, when a
well-dressed man asked him if he was "the glove guy." Says
Greenberg: "He said that I had given him a pair of gloves on the
Bowery five years previously and that now he was married with two
children, and he wanted to give me $20 to buy more gloves. I told
him the same as I tell others who want to write me a check: no
thank you. You spend the money on gloves, and you give them out."
