Unlike many of my other works, this piece is not about theory or ideology. It does not discuss evidence, or reasoning, or logic, as to the ideas that I believe about society. Rather, it is a confession of the things I have witnessed, as I was a homeless person. There is some discussion of ideology and beliefs in the following pages but it must be understood that the topic of this paper is what I personally witnessed while being homeless. The location of this was in southern Louisiana, in and around New Orleans (other towns include Metairie and Gretna). The time frame of this is December to March, including Mardi Gras ("Fat Tuesday"). And now, I tell my story...
My Time on the Streets
When a person becomes homeless their relation to society changes entirely. Once while sitting on the sidewalk with my friends, who were asking for change, a person came up to us and gave them a plastic compass, remarking, "Here, this is so you can get some direction in your life."
The homeless themselves are a divided class. Among them there are gutter punks, the class I belonged to, who were renowned for their particular taste of violence, sex, and alcohol. Gutter punks tend to be younger but could range in age from 12 to probably much older. Amongst the gutter punks there are even more divisions including street kids, street punks and peace punks. Peace punks are sometimes called "crass kids" after one of the prominent bands of all peace punks. Street kids are just young homeless people. Street punks are street kids who like punk. Peace punks are anti-war, anti-America, Communist and Anarchist. Gutter punks typically have an image which society has portrayed as "violent." Wearing mohawks (often times spiked and dyed), leather jackets with studs in them and boots that went up to our knees. In my experience there was the typical bum, or "home bum," who carried around an amount of property twice his own weight. That is one essential difference between homebums and gutter punks: the first sometimes never made the whole transition from homed to homeless. If you are homeless there must be an understanding that there is no place to put property. Thus, those who have more property must carry it, it becoming a burden to them. Essentially, those who have a limited amount of property will be most comfortable in the homeless lifestyle. If we gutter punks ever carried anything more than the clothes on their back, it was a bag pack that had a sleeping bag attached to the bottom of it.
I was walking down Gov Nicholls Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans when I realized that there is a true rapport among the homeless, typically being stronger among the home bums. I was walking with my friend Humble; almost all homeless people go by a nickname, after successfully shoplifting food from a Walgreens when he told me, "That's what I believe. Steal from the companies. Give to the people." And so that was our routine.
I remember once watching as a truck came up to a restaurant deposited two enormous bags of fresh bread and left them at the door. I remember my friends and I grabbed the bags and took off. Since we had such a great surplus of subsistence we immediately shared. Every homebum and gutter punk we came across received a great amount of bread. As we were walking through the ghettos on the way to our squat we gave bread to everyone we saw. The elderly African folk sitting on their porches, their eyes probably having seen more conflict than I could imagine, seemed old and tired and we hoped that the bread we gave them would help give them strength to dream again. It may seem odd to someone who is not homeless, how this may happen or how these transactions may occur. As we were walking down the street one of us would notice a person living in poverty and we would say, "Hey, you want some bread, brother?" They would smile and obligingly take some. I remember the day that we stole that bread from the restaurant. It was a good day and the food was for the starving masses.
That was one thing about the ghetto though, almost everyone was African in descent and almost everyone there was working a shitty $5.35 job at some tourist store just so that someone could take a plane to New Orleans for Mardi Gras and pay $50 for a piece of stupid tourist product that initially cost $2.50 to make. The luckier ones shared a two bedroom apartment with six individuals. Once I was invited to one of their apartments to spend the night and I was the fifth person sharing a single bed. I have seen 10 to 15 individuals sharing a "sleeping room", a single room which is approximately 10 feet long by 6 feet wide; it has a bed and maybe a cupboard depending on the particular sleeping room. You open the door and there's your bed, hence the term "sleeping room." The occurrence of the 15 people sharing one of these rooms was an exception; the regulation is closer to 4 to 6 people sharing a sleeping room. In numerous cases this includes children as young as 10 years old.
The Africans who lived in the ghetto might not have been working at the local tourist shop convincing foreigners to fork over an unreasonable amount of money for something that has no value. They might not have been in the French Market selling wooden chopsticks for $8 a pair. They might not have been washing dishes for $3 an hour under the table because their employer refused to hire them otherwise. They might not have been holding a frigging sign that said, "Buy Furniture at Joe's!" on the freeway convincing baby boomers to take that next exit to the Furniture Heaven.
There was definitely a certain prejudice between the blacks and the whites of the south. I would say that the ghetto contained around one white person for every one hundred blacks. This I can confirm from the various ghettos that we spent time in. Sometimes Africans were hateful towards Caucasians because they could tell who was getting a better deal. On the other hand there were many Africans who didn't care and were brotherly and fair with all they had met. To those Africans who were vengeful towards whites for any past aggressions that may have incurred among 100 of them, fewer than 5 would still hold aggressions towards the gutter punks. The reasons for this are easy to decipher...gutter punks are homeless. We are poor, probably a thousand times poorer than any African in the ghetto. The system screwed them over too. They didn't look to us suspiciously because they knew who we were, what we wanted and what we were looking for.
Why were we in the ghetto? For the most part we went to the ghetto to get in a squat -- an abandoned building which we would retire to sleep in once we had become tired and drunk enough. I remember those cold nights, the wind whipping at my back as I clenched my trench coat over my body, marching to get to that abandoned building where I could sleep. I remember what everyone had said about walking in the ghetto at night. "You'll get robbed, raped and killed, and not in that order." It didn't matter to a gutter punk, ever because violence to us was its own reward. I never held this personal view but it was something I had to deal with if it arose. I confess that there were some instances where I would have engaged in violence, but I refused to, on account of my rationalization of Pacifism and peace. When walking through these ghettos I could not help but remember pictures of the Warsaw Ghetto. These people have no means to leave except to become homeless. Worst of their greatest problem might be their drug addiction. Walking down the street one is liable to see at least one syringe on the ground for every block. Crack users/dealers typically hold their $10, 2-minute piece of heaven in their mouth. There is also a tactic among crack-heads on obtaining items that involves smacking someone in the hand and capturing what they drop -- this works typically with money or drugs. That is why crack-heads hold crack in their mouth and if cops are to obtain them, they swallow it.
Squats... Apply whatever romantic idea to it that you want, there's nothing enjoyable about sleeping on shards of broken glass. There's nothing appealing about the idea of climbing onto the roof of a building and smashing the window so that you can gain access to a roof over your head, heart pumping a thousand miles an hour, listening intently for sirens so that you can know when to run, so you can know that you failed. There's no happiness when the temperature goes down to 17 degrees and all you have is the clothes on your back and walls to stop the wind. I have, on occasion, lay on the wooden floor of a squat in a ball trying to capture that fleeting mystic hope of sleep. I would reach to pull on my clothes and as I touched my skin I would feel the damp coldness of my own flesh. I would ignore it because it didn't matter. Not to anyone else, anyway. That is one aspect that is completely destroyed from the psychology of a street person -- you never get depressed. No matter how shitty things get, unless you have a reason to be depressed, homelessness is certainly no reason.
There seemed to be a semi-friendly atmosphere among gutter punks. They would share among each other the location of squats and how to get into them. There also seemed to be a secret code among all gutter punks. Upon entering a suspected squat yell out "oi!", if you hear it back then it's a squat with squatters. There are many unspoken rules among squatters. If you find an abandoned building and someone is squatting there and they don't want you there you have to leave. Why is this? The streets tend to be a violent place. I am not denying that gutter punks aren’t violent. On the contrary, many of them indulge in violence the way a person may indulge in drug use. There is an understanding between gutter punks, without knowing anything about another gutter punk, you know this one fact: they could pull out a knife or a baton, and hurt you physically in a matter of 15 seconds so to those who one is not acquainted with usually prefer a distance -- at least, when you're in the place that your sleeping. Plus, squat sizes are preferred to be small, no more than six people. The reason for this is to keep the noise to an absolute minimum. In the Diary of Anne Frank, for instance, the Jewish family that was hiding had to keep absolutely quiet during the day. For us there was another rule that you never enter your squat until dark and leave before sunrise. Cops and police officers raid squats only during the day time, unless there is too much noise or disturbance at one.
That brings us to the greatest conflict of every homeless person: the law. It may have been ably stated by every writer of the past millennium that the law exists not to end crime but to persecute the poor and elevate the rich. There are laws; on the law books of this date that which a person can be arrested for. These include: Obstruction of a Public Passage, Intent to Impersonate a Sidewalk, Leaning with Intent to Fall, Obstruction of the Flight Path of a Pigeon, Begging, Vagrancy (not having photo identification on you), Transience (not having a home), Disrespecting a Police Officer, Disorderly Conduct, Disturbing the Peace, Obstruction of the Due Process of Law, the list goes on, with a law existing that prohibits almost every erroneous activity.
At the height of this police state we find the crime of Vagrancy, that it is illegal to not have either money (which will be quickly appropriated by any investigating officer) or photo ID, which shows shades of 1984 and F451. The police do not arrest people on violating these crimes. That is the popular misconception of the rule. If you walk on the sidewalk you are fulfilling the requirements for the crime of "Obstruction of a Public Passage." I have personally seen people arrested for this crime. I have been told from a friend that when he was walking down the street in Oklahoma City the police stopped him and asked him if he had any sharp objects on him before arresting him. As you can tell any person who uses the sidewalk is effectively breaking the law. It would be too obvious if the law was to make it illegal to breathe air but I feel that that is essentially what it is implying: that they may arrest you and imprison you for terms of years of the aforementioned crimes. What is it then that the police do? They make "sweeps," going from street to street, sometimes with vans, arresting as many homeless people as they can. Those who are committing the same crimes but are not homeless are not questioned. The prerequisite of being homeless or homed tends to be the clothes you wear.
When I was arrested, it was perhaps the most horrific experience of my entire life. I can compare it with nothing else. They took me, fingerprinted me, booked me and threw me in a holding cell. I was standing with about thirty others at least 95% of them black and 20% of them enduring through a psychotic episode (those who are diagnosed by a psychiatrist for mental disorders are often withheld their medication for a period of time up to months). The room itself was about twice the size of a sleeping room and proportionately to the amount of people, it was smaller. There was not enough room for everyone to sit down -- which reminded me of the descriptions of conditions on slave ships. I was in this room for a total of 13 hours straight of which we were only once fed soggy, tuna fish sandwiches. I was accustomed to, at this point in my life, eating dumpster food, and this prison food was comparatively inedible. Finally we were thrown in our cells and waited to see the judge. In prison we waited under the greatest hypocrisy known to us, NNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY! Tell that to my face. In jail I did not personally see anyone beaten by a cop. I had seen, however, a cop do an inspection of the Holding Cell and a suspect started cussing him out. He said, "Get the bleep out of here, you bleeping pig!" The cop responded, "You wait until night time comes and you're behind those prison bars," waving his baton. The cop would leave, a minute would pass and another cop would call out that same inmate. Thirty minutes would pass till we see him again. He was limping, nobody else seemed to really notice. It wasn't just that. It was just so common, so obvious and typical of every cop that it's not even a shock anymore. The cops don't exist to protect and serve. They are the American Gestapo, persecuting, beating, arresting, beating, raping. They spend years learning to attack and kill people and then they are given free reign over the life and liberty of every person in society.
Why do they arrest us? The answer is obvious to any homeless person. We are arrested because we make the city ugly, especially in such a tourist trap town as New Orleans. We are put in jail by police officers because we make the city ugly. I can easily prove this. Around Christmas (when I was arrested), New Years or Mardi Gras or really any other tourist time the number of arrests jumps by at least 10 times. I have seen in jail up to four or five people sharing a single cell that was built for only two. There have also been homeless people to freeze to death in jail. Since the walls are made of stone, there's a typical coldness to it all. Since you are never given a blanket it can be easy to see how someone would freeze to death in prison. So, this one goes out to a downed comrade: RIP "Cornbread." It was too cold that night and he was in HOD (House of Detention) on the top floor where it was the coldest and they found him stiff the next morning.
My friend Bear was arrested by the police for Aggravated Assault because he attacked someone with a knife. I called the police department and asked about him. He had to serve 45 to 60 days before he would see a judge, two months with nothing but an accusation. Only two weeks would pass and I would see him on the street again, they had released him early, because the prison was too packed with people who had committed crimes like, "Obstruction of a Public Passage," and the "The First Amendment Doesn't Really Exist/Disrespecting a Police Officer." When I was arrested I was not read my rights, all I heard was, "If you try to run, I will shoot and kill you." All I saw was a gun pointed in my face. Nobody saw a lawyer. In fact, the idea that you get to see a lawyer is absolute bull. If you plead not guilty to any crime you must automatically serve 21 days in prison so that a trial can be set up. The crime of "Criminal Trespassing," carries with it only 10 days, if you plead guilty, you serve 10 days. If you plead not guilty, you serve 21 days. If you can make bail you don't have to serve 21 days but what does this reconfirm? The law exists for the rich and not for the poor. If you think that a homeless person can make a $5000, think again. Even after those 21 days if you fail to prove you're innocent and if you ask for "Time Served" -- which means those 21 days of waiting for trial will be deducted from your sentence -- there's a good chance you'll be denied it. So, those days you spent in prison, not convicted of anything, outweigh however long you'll spend in prison for the actual sentence. It is the job of the police to snatch up as many people as they can on the streets. When I was waiting to see the judge so I could give a plea, a seven day waiting period, I had seen people leave and reenter the prison system. "You were here when I was released, and you still haven't talked to the judge?" one home bum would ask me as I saw him again on the inside. I saw one person say to the judge "but I was never read my rights" and the judge responded "when you had cuffs put on you should have been able to tell you were being arrested." And finally, when before the judge, he asks you two questions, "Do you have a job or are you in school? Do you have a home?" That is all he needs to know before he gives you a sentence.
I remember after my trial we had all been lined up and one of the guards decided it was her duty to lecture us. "You're all garbage" she said. "You all need to get a job and learn to respect yourselves. I can't even stand to look at you. You all need to start paying taxes and stop stealing. You're just making it harder on everyone else." I didn't say anything. I ‘knew my place’ as they might say but this only translates to: if you voice your opinion you won't be breathing after five minutes of their reaction. An Anarchy-Communist doesn't last long in jail when he makes his opinions prevalent. If I said "maybe we wouldn't be stealing if we were paid a living wage" I could guarantee you that I would have more scars to show you than I do now. Aside from all that the most disappointing fact about prison was that when I asked if there was a prison library I was given some Christian propaganda. I was hoping for some Thomas Paine at least. I remember my friend Humble getting arrested. He saw his two friends arrested, so he gave each of them a cigarette while they were in cuffs. As he was walking away, he was grabbed by a cop and arrested. What crime did he commit? Simple: Obstruction of a Public Passage, Begging, and Vagrancy. After all, giving cigarettes to your friend ought to be a felony offense. If you can't see the obvious nature of that try telling that to the next cop you see and then spend the next 6,000 hours in jail wishing that the First Amendment actually meant something. I had seen friends driving the most beat up pickup truck with the words "F*** THE POLICE" spray-painted on the side. They had been stopped three times in as many miles, until they were arrested.
Shoplifting became my trade. I acquired the name "Robin Hood." It seemed to be rather romantic, if everything else was wretched. Every day, I would go to a Walgreens or a grocery store and steal, rip-off, five finger discount, shoplift, whatever you want to call it. Then I would go throughout the city distributing food to the poor families. My attitude was, "I did it yesterday, I did it today and I can know when I wake up tomorrow I'll be doing it again." Sometimes it was too hard. I remember walking out of the door of a store, hearing the alarm and then just bolting down the street, running as fast as I possibly could. I remember running from the cops with my street brother Pockets. It was me, him and his dog. We ran zigzagging blocks, the only way that you can possibly escape from the police, and we got away. I remember having to run from mounted police. The only thing I could do was run into a crowd; disappear as best as I possibly could. I remember my friend Johnny, he ran from cops when some squatters in their tents were busted. As the cops moved in, all of the squatters ran. Never in your life had you seen so many people running from cops, struggling to be free and often times being beaten in the face with a baton as I had seen. That is what it's like no the streets of America. Screaming "stop hitting me!" to the police officer who is smashing your face and then getting a Disturbing the Peace charge because of it. Maybe it was because in Maine, thousands of dairy farmers dumped milk into the ground, just to raise the price of all dairy products, of which we still couldn't afford at the moment. Not to mention that my friend Pockets or Humble or Twitch may have been working at $5 a day (the going rate for a homeless person) delivering or producing that milk only so that they can starve to the point where they have to steal food to feed themselves and their family. Then they can go to jail and serve two months in prison, the way my friend George served for stealing two cans of soda, and you can't show the judge any records of employment because you won't be hired unless you will be paid under the table. The police really don’t care about any of this because they're making a bonus on EVERY ARREST -- legal and illegal -- that they get. To them it's a matter of spotting someone who has no financial means of defending themselves in court so the homeless are the primary target. Meanwhile, my other friends are paid minimum wage so they can build a statue of the mayor on the waterfront so that they can go home at night to an overcrowded apartment with maybe rice or peanut butter as their only food.
Earlier when I talked about myself and Pockets running from the cops he told me later that he considered letting the dog loose. Apparently police are notorious for killing pets and dogs that belong to homeless people. There is, in actuality, no real penalty incurred upon them for doing this. Since it's not a human being they reason that it has no rights. I have seen dogs shot by cops. It is an old pastime of police officers to burn down or shoot up squats. I remember seeing one dog that had been shot by a police officer. There was an entry wound in the chest and an exit wound on the side. It had never seen anything so tragic, so terrible. Fortunately, there was a veterinarian in New Orleans who took care of the animals of homeless people free of charge mostly. His name was Dr. Mike, he set up shop on North Rampart. How is it that the poorest of the poor can obtain and sustain animals? Mostly, these dogs are better fed than their masters. I remember Pockets describing the two dogs that he had owned. "It's gonna be 20 degrees man, but I'll have one dog on my chest and one dog on my legs, and we'll keep each other warm," he told me. Pockets was a Humanitarian. Both of his dogs he had found running loose in the ghetto, without a collar or a leash. He had taken them to the vet and registered them. He had paid for shots and vaccinations-- all with money that he had obtained through spanging, or asking people for spare change. I remember a middle class man threatening us to get out of the dog park, because he didn't like homeless people. He threatened to tell the police that Pockets knowingly had a dog on Rabies and that the dog had to be killed. Of course, Pockets carried the vaccination proof on him at all times. Though he seemed to lose everything else, he never lost that. The cop would have no problem with shooting the dogs. I wouldn't be surprised if that was part of the job description: "Must aid in the liquidation of all animals, human and non-human." My friend Humble had a kitten, who was adoringly named "squat," who he had found homeless in a junk yard, much like another friend had obtained a gerbil, still in its cage, in the dumpster.
Many gutter punks and homeless people, including the home bums, are all politically minded. I had heard one of them talking to another, "Yeah, I was arrested with my girlfriend for sleeping in the park," -- "Yeah, that's because it's tourist season, and you look bad for the industry," -- "And the f****** part is that I f****** live here. They throw me in jail so that someone from two thousand miles away can spend their money." They may have lacked the language that had been used by every poet and writer of the past centuries, but what they had was what no philosopher or statesmen could possibly have discovered. Everywhere I went, I saw the words, "FIGHT WAR NOT WARS" and "DESTROY POWER NOT PEOPLE." These were slogans inscribed by peace punks. The last thing I remember writing on a wall with a sharpie in New Orleans was, "They drop fire on people but they won't let them write 'fuck' on their airplanes, because it is obscene!" A classic quote from "Apocalypse Now," and rather fitting. I remember seeing a newspaper machine, and in thick sharpie was written the word, "PROPAGANDA!!!" I remember seeing a poster that said, "It's a bigger problem than you think," and at the bottom reading, "Premature birth." But that had been scratched out, and the word "GOVERNMENT" had been placed there. Pockets was particularly fond of poetry that dealt with meaning and purpose, and was an avid reader of Kahlil Gabrahm. My friend Beast went to the free poetry slams and read his material. He had a backpack and the only thing he kept in it was notebooks of poetry. I remember leaving a homeless hang out and reading on the wall, "I made a god, out of blood, not superiority, I killed the king, of deceit, raise me up, in anarchy." And they were but lyrics to the song "Anarchy," by KMFDM.
Those were my days among the "wretched refuse" that we may be called. I wish we didn't have to face the dangers that we did but I'm glad that at least we had each other. So, maybe we did find something that was worth eternity, even though we're the poorest class. I tried to explain it to a friend of mine. I told her... Because we had to face the danger of street life together, our bonds were stronger. We did not develop a unity by some imaginary foe, the way a government may use propaganda in a war. We created a family through working together with the constraints that we have under the present regime. We could survive through anything together because we were as one. Take the greatest draught, the worst famine, the most horrific plague and you will find a squatter shivering, skin tightly wrapped around bone and lack of nourishment and a diseased body but you will find him surviving because if there is one thing we can do, that is it. But maybe that's not entirely true, it wasn't so much that we could survive but with what we had found with each other it didn't matter if we did or not... because we had something that made each day an eternity. We refused to bargain with society. We made no compromises. Even if it kills us, we will be free, so it has killed some of us. They are not the martyrs of freedom so much as they are the casualties in the battle for liberty.
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