Will Wear Pants For Food

Story and Art by Jarod Von Hindman of www.headinjurytheater.com
I grew up in Jacksonville Florida. In case you don't know anything about Jax, it's the city of bridges. It's one of the largest cities in the world....as defined by city limits. The official city of Jacksonville is huge with multiple interstates passing through it and well, you can drive in a straight line and stay in the city limits for what seems like forever. It's not all that populated, but you could see the city limits from orbit if you wanted to. The point of this is the fact that Jacksonville is a city that revolves around interstate driving. When I went to school there I commuted an hour and half each morning (never leaving the city limits) to get there....the whole way being interstate driving. That's a hell of a lot of off ramps for people to panhandle from. While recent laws have been enforced stopping folks from doing it so much, when I was a kid panhandling folks were everywhere. There was the "mad preacher" (Give $$$ to the Lord" read his sign, no joke) as well as the usual guys thinking they were funny. However it really comes down to one panhandler in Jacksonville....the Pants guy. Near Orange Park there's an offramp that's always backed up. I hear they've fixed it but last I saw you could count on spending a good 45 minutes crawling along at a snails pace as you tried to exit the highway. Completely cashing in on the fact that traffic in Jax sucks balls was the one and only Pants guy. His gimmick? His sign read "Will Wear Pants for Food", "Help me Buy Some Pants", or some variation on that theme. Of course he was standing their in his underwear. By underwear I mean just that. Picture your standard panhandler (Banana-men excluded) in their tighty whiteys. Briefs. White potentially off-white stained Haines briefs. Gah. It boggles the mind. Suffice to say we all started expecting to see him when we drove home...but I don't recall him ever buying those pants. You'd think that being there in his underwear might have hurt business. Then again, who knows? So dear Joe Beggar...when will you start Panhandling in your skippies and test this theory?
-jared

Fact is I'm not wearing pants at the moment, so give me money. The donate keys are standing by. This part of the post had to be altered as I was informed that I'm not allowed to tell people to click on the ads as per Google's policies. If you use google ads on your site, keep this in mind so you don't get in trouble. God bless.