Confessions of a "Homeless" Guy

We played a show at the Viper Room a few nights ago, no not that really cool one in LA, the only clean club in Cincinnati. Now, part of the charm of Cincinnati, as we have discussed before is that there isn't a lot of parking. Well, because there aren't any other clubs around, and there's a huge parking lot across the street, you would think this would be the ideal place to go. I've been told though, the folks at the parking lot love giving tickets. I'm not sure of their system, but my friends have all blacklisted anything related to Central Parking.

So, there's this dude who has figured out that he can help folks find a parking space on the street and have them completely avoid said parking lot. Instead of paying the $5 to the parking lot, or the $20 fine, throw him a couple of bucks for his help. That is very enterprising and since there's no one else doing it, he's cornered the market. Now, the guy could be completely crazy, that would make perfect sense, but I try to treat folks the way I would want to be treated, so I listened to his story. He said that he works on cars during the day and that he plays jazz trombone. For some reason, he can't play trombone on the street, but I didn't really understand that part. He also said that he makes $100-150 per night helping folks park and giving directions. He's there every single night, so at minimum, he's taking home $700 in cash every week. 700 x 4 = 2800 and that's a slow week. There's no way this guy is homeless, he's making $36k per year in cash, just at his night job. He seems like a nice guy, but it's really frustrating. As I saw on Oprah yesterday, I think that the folks who really need the money are too proud to ask for it.