When a person becomes homeless, their relation to society is entirely changed.
I had once been siting on the sidewalk, with my friends who themselves were asking for change, and a person comes up and gives 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 tended to be younger, but could range in age from 12 to age 50, and probably much older.
Among the gutter punks, there were even more divisions, including street kids, street punks, and peace punks (sometimes called “Crass Kids,” because that is one of the prominent bands of all peace punks). Street kids are just young homeless people. Street punks are street kids who like punk. And peace punks are anti-war, anti-America, Communist and Anarchist. Gutter punks typically had an image which society has portrayed as “violent.” We had mohawks (often times spiked and dyed), leather jackets with studs in them, and boots that went up to our knees. Then there was the typical bum, or “home bum,” who carried around an amount of property twice his own weight.
That was one essential difference between the homebums and the gutter punks:
the first sometimes never made the whole transition frome homed to homeless. Since we are homeless, there must be an understanding, that there is no place to put your 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 our own back, it was a bagpack that had a sleeping bag attached to the bottom of it.
It was walking down Gov Nicholls street in the French Quarter of New Orleans that I realized there was a true comradery among the homeless, the comradery typically being stronger among the home bums.
I was walking with my friend Humble (and it must be understood, that almost all homeless people go by a nickname). After successfully shoplifting food from a Walgreens, he told me, “That’s what I believe. Steal from the companies. Give to the people.” And so that was our Businessacademy1 routine. I remember once, a truck came up to a restaurant, depositing two enormous bags of fresh bread and leaving it on the door. My friends and I grabbed the bags and took off. Since we had such a great surplus of subsistence, we immediately spread it out. Every homebum and gutter punk we came to, we gave them a great amount of bread. Even when we were walking through the ghettos 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 that I could imagine… they seemed old and tired, and we hoped that the bread we gave them would help give them the strength to dream again. It may seem odd to someone who is not homeless, how this may happen, how these transactions may occur. But, 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 that day that we stole that bread from the restaurant. It was a good day, and food was had for the starving masses.
That was one thing about us in the ghetto though. Almost everyone in the ghetto was African in descent, and almost everyone there was working a shitty $5.35 job at some tourist store, just so that someone can take a plane to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, and pay fucking $50 for a piece of shit tourist product, that initially cost $2.50 to make. And every single one of them shared a two bedroom apartment with six individuals, if they happened to be lucky. Once I was invited to an apartment, to spend the night, and I was the fifth person sharing a single bed. I have seen, on occasion, 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.” Of course, the incident of 15 people sharing one of these rooms is an exception. The rule would be closer to 4 to 6 people sharing this room, as I have seen in numerous cases, including children as young as 10 years old. For the Africans who lived in the ghetto, maybe they weren’t working at the local tourist shop, convincing foreigners to fork over an unreasonable amount of money for something that has no value. Maybe they weren’t in the French Market, selling wooden chopsticks for $8 a pair. Maybe the were washing dishes for $3 an hour under the table, because their employer refused to hire them otherwise. Maybe they were holding a fucking 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 indeed a certain prejudice between the blacks and the whites of the south. The ghetto may have contained one white person for every one hundred blacks. This I can confirm, from the various ghettos that we traveled to and about. Sometimes Africans were hateful towards Caucasions, because they could tell that they were getting a bitter deal. On the other hand, there were many Africans who didn’t care and were brotherly and fair with all they had met. But, to those Africans who were vengeful towards whites, for any past aggressions that may have been 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 were homeless. We were poor, probably a thousand times poorer than any African in the ghetto. We got fucked by the system, 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 may sleep… And 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 arrose. And, I confess, 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. Worse of all, probably their greatest problem may be 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 crackheads 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 crackheads hold crack in their mouth. And, if cops are to obtain them, they swallow it.
Squats… Apply whatever romantic idea to it you want that you got from literature, but there’s nothing enjoyable about sleeping on shards of broken glass, because if you slept on the pavement, you would be arrested. 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, your 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 occassion, laid on the wooden floor of a squat, in a ball, trying to capture that fleeting mystic hope of sleep… and 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. And 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. And 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, how to get into them. There also seemed to be the secret code among all gutter punks, the word “oi!” Upon entering a suspected squat, yell out “oi!” If you hear it back, then it’s a squat with squatters. There are also unspoken rules among squatters. For instance, 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?
Because the streets tend to be a violent place. I am not denying that gutter punks could be violent. On the contrary, many of them indulged in violence, the way a person may indulge in drug use. So, 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 acquianted with, they 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 at most. The reason for this is to keep the noise to an absolute minimum. In the Diary of Anne Frank, for instance, the family that was hiding from the Jews had to keep absolutely quiet during the day. For us, there was another rule: never go to your squat until dark, and leave once the sun rises. Cops and police officers raid squats only during the day time, unless there is too much noise or disturbance at one.