Life on the Streets: Richard Gere on Going Homeless
the street; if he’s not able to procure a bed at the chaotic, prison-like local shelter, he’s apt to be sleeping in a cardboard box or, if he’s lucky, the basement of an apartment building he’s snuck into. He spends his days shuffling around the city, occasionally panhandling for change. A winter coat he’s picked up from a church is pawned for money for a bottle. When you pass someone like George on the street, you’re likely to look away. Most people wouldn’t stop to take note of the desperation in his eyes, or the damage done to a once-handsome man whose face has weathered the elements in the worst way.
And, if you’re like a good deal of New Yorkers, you probably wouldn’t have noticed that the homeless man in question was Richard Gere.
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“People actively avoided me,” the 65-year-old actor continues. “It wasn’t that folks didn’t notice me; they could see someone asking for change from two blocks away. It was that they saw the embodiment of failure — and failure is something that people fear will suck them in. If it’s not a fear of the vortex of failure, it’s the overwhelming sense of guilt: ‘Oh, I don’t want to feel bad about not giving this guy money, I don’t want to give him money at all, how much money can I give him where it doesn’t hurt me but I feel like a do-gooder?’ All these conflicting feelings, just because I’m standing in Astor Place going like this.” Gere mimes rattling a cup. ” ‘Spare change, can you help me out?’ That was it. And I had an idea of what that experience might be like intellectually, but from the emotional perspective of being the person that people cross the street from…it’s an entirely different thing.”