Time Out FeatureOctober 2006
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(c) Time Out 2006 Alan Emmins: homeless in London I had completely forgotten about the boredom. Homelessness, not much fun at the best of times, is a time stopper when you’re without a companion. Since leaving the Time Out offices on Tottenham Court Road I have ambled restlessly. Normally, when in the city alone, I go to a café and eat lunch. I make phone calls. I go shopping. Today I walk up and down Charing Cross Road six times. I queue in a McDonald's on Oxford Street for the use of their toilet. I sit in Soho Square watching students conduct surveys. . It's 3.45 pm; I've normally had lunch by now It's late in the evening, around midnight, maybe later, when I find myself walking down Villiers Street towards the Embankment tube station. There are only a few people about, but when it starts raining heavily they quickly disappear. I take shelter in the doorway of the Pompidou Patisserie, which has been kind enough to leave the sun shade down. The rain, getting heavier and heavier, bombs the pavement creating a wall of sound. Just as the first flashes of lightning fill the sky a man, smartly dressed and carrying a shoulder bag and umbrella, stops in the doorway. “Are you homeless?” he asks I am not into naff plot tricks, but there really is lightning in the sky and when it flashes and turns the man into a dark silhouette, I too think it is ridiculous, a lazy Hollywood film trick. I am slow in answering. I don't want to talk to anybody on my first night. I want to acclimatise first, to be alone. I certainly don't want to explain my project now, late on a stormy night, to a silhouetted man. Being homeless in London scares me enough. In New York, I was always a bit of a novelty, my English accent cut me a lot of slack. Here in London my accent holds no value. So not wanting to explain myself, I lie, I say, “Yes, I'm homeless” thinking this will be his queue to move on and leave me alone. “You lying cunt!” the man screams. “You ain't fucking homeless, I should rip your fucking face off you cunt.” While the level of aggression is shocking, I can't fault him: after all, I am not homeless. It was naïve of me to think that my being slumped in a doorway with a backpack and a sour expression might be worth something in the way of validation. The man starts to walk up the hill, shouting as he goes, “I'm gonna come back here and fucking kill ya while I your sleeping. Y-o-u…” Normally, when in the city alone, I go to a café and eat lunch. I make phone calls. I go shopping. Today I walk up and down Charing Cross Road six times. I queue in a McDonald's on Oxford Street for the use of their toilet. I sit in Soho Square watching students conduct surveys. . It's 3.45 pm; I've normally had lunch by now. It's late in the evening, around midnight, maybe later, when I find myself walking down Villiers Street towards the Embankment tube station. There are only a few people about, but when it starts raining heavily they quickly disappear. I take shelter in the doorway of the Pompidou Patisserie, which has been kind enough to leave the sun shade down. The rain, getting heavier and heavier, bombs the pavement creating a wall of sound. Just as the first flashes of lightning fill the sky a man, smartly dressed and carrying a shoulder bag and umbrella, stops in the doorway. “Are you homeless?” he asks I am not into naff plot tricks, but there really is lightning in the sky and when it flashes and turns the man into a dark silhouette, I too think it is ridiculous, a lazy Hollywood film trick. I am slow in answering. I don't want to talk to anybody on my first night. I want to acclimatise first, to be alone. I certainly don't want to explain my project now, late on a stormy night, to a silhouetted man. Being homeless in London scares me enough. In New York, I was always a bit of a novelty, my English accent cut me a lot of slack. Here in London my accent holds no value. So not wanting to explain myself, I lie, I say, “Yes, I'm homeless” thinking this will be his queue to move on and leave me alone. “You lying cunt!” the man screams. “You ain't fucking homeless, I should rip your fucking face off you cunt.” While the level of aggression is shocking, I can't fault him: after all, I am not homeless. It was naïve of me to think that my being slumped in a doorway with a backpack and a sour expression might be worth something in the way of validation. The man starts to walk up the hill, shouting as he goes, “I'm gonna come back here and fucking kill ya while I your sleeping. Y-o-u…” Thursday 14th Waking up is a big surprise. In New York I hadn’t slept at all on the first night, or for many nights thereafter. Even then it was never sleep, sleep. So while I feel relieved and a little excited to have survived my first night in London, to have slept even, I wake up exhausted and already sore. I sit dozing in and out of sleep on Trafalgar Square at 7am. I watch as two people feed pigeons from big sacks. It seems like madness to me, this pigeon feeding. Going by the behaviour of the pigeons it seems like madness to them too. They swoop and dive and swirl in great packs, like something from Patrick Neate’s London Pigeon Wars. A man approaches the pigeon feeders and says something. One feeder turns to the other, “I don’t understand what he’s saying, do you speak any Russian?” I don’t speak any Russian either, but going by the young man’s incredulous expression at the sight of two people feeding pigeons on a mass scale, I am pretty sure I could, with some accuracy, translate his meaning, if not his actual words. In fear of being shat on I get up and walk towards Soho Square. I while away most of the day dozing on a bench. Down on the Strand at 11pm a homeless crowd stands waiting for a scheduled food drop. One homeless man looks at me as I shuffle on my feet. “It will be here,” he says. “They’re just running late.” The man, I am guessing mid-forties wearing a lumberjack shirt over a grey T-shirt, seems friendly and talkative. His name is Michael. He doesn’t flinch when I tell him about my project. Instead he asks where I slept last night. “Look,” he says. “I am sleeping near hear in a theatre doorway, there’s a few of us there, but the guy who has the middle doorway is away, he’s gone to Basingstoke for three weeks, you can take his space if you like?” Friday 15th The Strand has food drops most nights of the week. Tonight the crowd is well over one hundred people. When the food arrives I am surprised by the neat and orderly queue that forms. Any shouting, pushing or shoving tends to come from people after they have collected their steaming polystyrene parcel. I start talking to a homeless man called James who, in his late twenties, peers out from under a fishing hat. James and I walk back along the Strand to find a doorway where we can sit and eat. James asks me for the names of other publications I have written for; I mention the New York Post. “Is that the same as the Washington Post?” he asks. “Not quite,” I tell him. “The Washington Post is more credible.” “Would Noam Chomsky think it was credible?” “Would Noam Chomsky think any newspaper was credible?” James laughs. I sit wondering, are we really discussing Noam Chomsky? If we are it’s going to be a short lived conversation, my knowledge of the bugger is very limited. At this point a youngish guy, over weight with cropped hair and dark sunken eyes, who was also involved in the fight on Trafalgar Square, stops in front of me. He points a finger at my face and screams as loud as he can, “YOU! What’s you’re fucking name?” “Alan,” I tell him as he stands staring angrily down at me. “What’s yours?” I ask, trying to keep things chatty. I watch as pure rage spreads across his face. “I was only going to say hello,” I tell him, offering him my hand. He stares angrily for a while and then very daintily shakes my hand, or really just the finger tips and says, quite calmly, “Danny.” Relief washes over me as Danny says, again calmly, “Give me a light.” “Sorry,” I tell him. “I don’t smoke.” “GIVE ME A FUCKING LIGHT!” he screams, bending into the shout. Two of his friends come over. One, a girl I realise now and who I also (but thinking it was a boy) saw fighting earlier, turns and kicks the metal grill right next to James’ head. A nasty metallic crash fills the night. The girl keeps kicking. James looks up between kicks and says, “Do you mind, I’m leaning against that.” The girl bends into James’ face screaming, “I don’t fucking give a shit!” and goes back to kicking. Danny is still shouting at me, though all I can hear is the crash of the metal grill. James turns to me and with a slight grin asks rather loudly, “So have you read much Chomsky?” I stare at him half frozen with fear; expecting any second to feel the full wrath of junky rage. But then I have another thought, James told me he’s been homeless for nine years, he must know better than me. “I’ve read one of his books,” I tell him. “I’ve read a few,” he tells me. “There’s a good web site you should look into, where you can read all his articles. I’ll give you the url.” For the first minute of the conversation Danny continues to shout at me while his female doppelganger continues to kick the metal grill as hard as she can. She turns and says something to Danny, who screams back at her a torrent of expletives. She does the same back to Danny and very quickly they are in their own shouting match. A minute later they walk down the road, towards Trafalgar Square, not arm in arm, but peaceful at least. I giggle nervously at James, “I thought that was going to turn into a fight then.” “Nah, as long as you don’t say anything to them they soon get bored and move away. That’s the important thing, don’t say anything, But I said something, I couldn’t believe I was opening my mouth, I was so annoyed with myself when I heard my voice. Because these fuckers will stick a screwdriver in you without hesitation.” “Really?” I ask. “I’ve seen it happen!” James assures me. Back in the doorway of the Theatre Royal, (currently showing the Producers) I wake up at 4am. I watch as a young skinny guy with a can of beer peers into the doorways. He comes up close and stares, first to the un-named man in the furthest door, then Richy (who has returned from Basingstoke but said it is okay for me to stay) then me (as I pretend to be asleep) and then on to Marijona and Michael. He then scurries off down the road suspiciously. That’s one of them, I think in a moment of paranoia. Now they know where I’m sleeping. I lie awake and scared, until the sky starts to lighten. Saturday 16th One homeless guy tells me Hyde Park is a safe place to sleep. He says, “You have to hide inside at midnight, when the wardens come to lock the gates,” Fair do’s. I stop off at Marble Arch first, thinking I will sit and catch up with some notes. When I get there I am greeted by a large yellow sign. It says ‘MURDER’. We are looking for witnesses, can you help? MURDER On the 30th of August at about 00.30am a male was assaulted near to the subway entrance to Marble Arch. He died from his injuries. In strictest confidence, please phone 0207 321 7228 I walk back through the subway tunnel and ask a young homeless guy with long hair, a beard and a smattering of low denomination coins at his feet if he knows anything about this murder. Specifically, I ask him if it was a homeless man that was murdered? “Yeah, I think it was,” he tells me. The murder is two weeks old. It could be the only murder in this area in the last ten years, but still I don’t like the odds. I tell myself in one breath that I am being silly, it’ll be okay to sleep here. Then I slap myself on the side of the head: think wife, think daughter, and I start walking, quickly, back towards the Strand and another night treading the boards, or the steps should I say, of the Theatre Royal. On the theatre steps Michael is teasing Marijona about the likelihood of him getting an apartment. Marijona holds a piece of paper with apartment listings, he asks, “What does it mean, this 280 points?” “It’s like this,” Michael begins. “You need a lot of points to get a welfare apartment. If you’re a young girl and have nowhere to live, you get points. If you are an old lady without a home you get even more points. If you are a young girl and pregnant or with a child, you get even more points.” “What about me?” Marijona asks. “What is my points?” “You,” Michael laughs. “A single working foreign male? You have no points.” As we sit there laughing, with our cardboard beds set out for the evening, a group of young boys turn the corner and walk towards us. They are smartly dressed, like Ben Sherman adverts and though out in the big city haven’t quite mastered the art of hair gel. As they pass, the lad at the back, while keeping his legs and hips in a forward motion, turns his upper body and his spiky little head towards us and says, thumbs raised, “Alright boys?” To signify that this is not a rhetorical question he arches his eyebrows, he says, “Sweet as a nut?” Some time passes before the four of us have control of our laughter. 4am. The streets of London, or at least Covent Garden… no, let narrow that down further, Catherine-Bloody-Street should be clean enough to eat off. Is it really possible that those little road-sweeping buggies, with their awful racket, are passing by my head every thirty minutes? Or am I at this point just going mad? Is it a bad dream? I grab my camera from my backpack and without sitting up take a quick picture as yet another one scrapes its way by. I must be sure its real. Sunday 17th After a quick wash in the 24 hour toilets opposite the Punch & Judy in Covent Garden, Michael, Richy and myself head off for a number 25 bus. We wait for one of the ‘Bendy Buses’ or the ‘Homeless Express’ as Michael likes to call them on account of being able to step on and off without a ticket. We take the bus to Bank. From there we walk, with the intention of catching another bus, to London Bridge. But a lack of Homeless Express’s forces us to cross the bridge by foot. We cut through the main station and enter a maze of back roads, (passing through one of the worst urine smelling stairwells in the world) weaving our way to Mellor Street and the Manna Centre, which is a day centre that is open five mornings a week, including weekends. As we enter we are handed a bowl of porridge. Richy and I (Michael goes off to shower) collect a cup of tea and sit at a table along the right hand wall. Our eating is fast and sloppy. After which Richy sits reading the Racing Post, scribbling his picks on the front cover. I sit and watch the room, which is deep, tatty and packed with around 100 people. Somebody brings out boxes and places them in the middle of the floor. There’s a rush as people go through them, searching for things they need like quilts, shoes etc. Exhausted already I start drifting, am about to nod off, when… “Sorry, what was that?” I hear myself asking to the man opposite. He sits with a shaved head and a black T-shirt tucked into his jeans, listening to an old walkman that he has clipped to his belt. “What?” he says back to me. “Oh, sorry, I thought you said something,” I say feeling stupid. Very quickly, I feel stupider. It’s Richy’s giggling that gives it away. The man had been talking to himself, and I tried to answer him. “Oh,” the man says. “I was… it was… I was just saying… you know,” and with that he too has a little giggle and goes back to his music. A minute later he leans forward and points at me, “Have you heard Madonna’s new album?” he asks. “No,” I tell him, “I haven’t.” Now, with what I believe to be a trace of Scottish, he says, “Yooo should get ya’self a copy, it’s fucking greeeeeaat!” Michael appears with little pieces of tissue stuck all over his face. The three of us move to the back of the room where a group of men sit around a bright yellow-topped table playing chess. While I sit falling in and out of sleep, Michael and Richy manage to play several games while we wait for lunch. The standard of chess seems pretty high. I am offered a game but decline, knowing it will be no fun for my opponent. The smell of food fills the air and I look up to see plates of pasta with meat sauce and sausage bobbing in different directions around the room. There’s a lot of pasta and rice in this business, carbs a plenty. We eat quick and take our leave. Richy is keen to get to Ladbrokes on Trafalgar Square, he doesn’t want to miss the first races. Monday 18th Monday to Saturday we have to wait for the theatre crowd to leave before we can make our beds. (If I were truly homeless it would be safe to say I have well and truly moved in moved into this space for good.) Then we have to wait for the crowd from the pub opposite to go home before we can get any sleep. Tonight we kill an hour or so playing chess with a small travel chess set. After getting a thrashing from Michael and then beating Richy by making all the moves Michael calls out over my shoulder, I find myself in an architectural quandary. I am trying to build a little card wall, for privacy. But I am having problems: the card I have selected is too long and falls down easily. Michael and Richy offer advice. “No, no, no, not like that,” Michael says as I take an un-flattened wine box and make a split half way down one of the long sides. I then feed the length of card I want to use as my wall into the torn slot. The box works as a stabiliser and my wall holds firm. “Oh, that’s pretty smart,” Michael says and we all laugh at my little camp. Richy sets his alarm for 5:30am. He says, “I am off to Woking in the morning to sell the Big Issue.” “Why do you always go out of town?” I ask. “It’s easier,” he tells me. “There are too many Big Issue sellers and beggars in Central London, it makes it too hard. It’s not worth it. I go all over, Basingstoke, Romford.” Richy and I bid each other farewell and get down to the business of sleeping. When a group of Japanese men, wearing suits and ties, come and take over the steps between the doorways where Michael, Richy and I are trying to sleep, I am a little pissed to say the least. I am exhausted. In fact having not got close to a normal night's sleep since coming out to the streets all I do now is doze in and out of reality. Every time I stop moving I fall asleep. Whether I sit on the floor, on a bench or lean against the wall, my eyes start fluttering. What sleep I do get at night, I look forward to. But the Japanese are loud and drunk and partying right next to my head. One second they kick over their half-full wine bottle, the next they are dropping and smashing glasses. One of them even goes as far to try and take a piece of my card. “Hey!” I say. “What do you think you’re doing?” He speaks English now, “Oh, sorry mate, sorry.” The Japanese, known for their manners, don’t appear perturbed by the fact that there are three people trying to sleep. In fact I find it hard to believe, given their shouting, that they are not being purposely loud. After about thirty minutes I hear Michael fidgeting. I am expecting him to say something, but he doesn’t, he is soon still again. Whatever hint he dropped worked. A few minutes later the drunken Japanese men move on. Tuesday 19th Michael and I sit on the steps of the theatre at 7am. “Did you notice I got rid of the Japanese last night?” he asks. “Yeah, I did. How did you manage that?” “I took my socks off.” We sit there laughing. My main thought though, is with the fact that I am done. Today, day number 7, I am going home, or at least to my sister's house so I can get cleaned up and sleep. I think it’s a good thing I am stopping now. My feet really hurt. My underpants are the things of experiments and the delicate skin tissue between my testicles and my thighs is very sore, I guess my greasy under-crackers have been sticking while I walk (I am so glad I am married and don’t have to worry about any potential lovers reading this). I have a stiff neck. I have tummy troubles too. Dietary issues. Meaning I haven’t had a shit in four days. Sure, I could go to the Berwick Street Market tomorrow at closing time and get free fruit. I could go to the Manna Centre and get showered, pick up a pair of fresh under garments. But really… The two occasions I have lived homeless have been by my own choice, part of a journalistic endeavour. They have not been stress-free, rather fear-ridden. For those of you that question the morality of these projects, of my eating food from soup kitchens, food meant for the homeless, I can assure you my activities had zero effect on the survival of the homeless. My doing this without money was not out of a sense of challenge, but simply because I don’t believe a true recording of homeless life can be made any other way. If I had money in my pocket I would have eaten in Pret A Manger, instead of from their garbage bags. When the fear got really bad I would have hidden in a cinema. The truth is, I couldn’t do it with money in my pocket, I am too weak. One defining area, during my short experience on the streets, where London differs from New York, is the level of aggression. London is plainly more aggressive. I am not talking about the homeless but the average man on the street. The Englishman, when you have the time to sit and look, is a bit of a Neanderthal. He walks around in a permanent state of alert. Part of a ‘who you looking at’ culture that doesn’t really exist anywhere else. I remember watching one man leave a McDonalds with his wife and two children. He walked stiff-limbed and tight-faced, swinging his arms and legs while surveying the area for potential enemies. A Chas ‘n' Dave song sprang to mind: Gertcha! New York is aggressive, don’t get me wrong, but the aggression has become part of the city's personality. It never really goes beyond the verbal, beyond the ‘hey asshole!’. The Gertcha Englishman will punch you in the face for little more than smirking at his shell suit. It is with this realisation that I bid Michael farewell and go and wait on the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street where my brother is coming to collect me, to take me back to my normal life. I am hoping to never find myself sleeping on the streets ever again. |
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MetroOctober 2006 |
(c) Metro By Siobhan Murphy The arresting sight of a homeless French ballerina, dancing on a plywood stage in a Manhattan subway tunnel, was what inspired British journalist Alan Emmins to live on New York's streets for a month. 31 Days: A New York Street Diary chronicles the highs and lows of roughing it in one of the world's richest cities: the dirt, the hunger, the disdain of passers-by and the companionship offered by the homeless people he encounters. Emmins is naturally drawn to talk to the more exotic and/or voluble characters he finds on the streets but his portraits are tender and, by suffering the same indignities as those he has chosen to write about, he is able to offer an often wince-inducingly detailed account of the physical hardships and casual cruelties he experiences and explain how they shake his self-confidence to its core. |
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Words of YouOctober 2006 |
(c) www.wordsofyou.com Robert D. Waller Five questions answered by alan emmins Where did you get the idea to live on the streets of New York from, were you trying to write a modern day "Down and out in Paris and London"? I certainly wasn't trying to write a modern day Down and Out in Paris and London. In fact had I have made that comparison from the outset I probably would have been scared off. Basically, several years ago while working on an unrelated article in New York I met a French dancer who was living in a train tunnel. She had built herself a dance floor from discarded plywood and spent several hours a day training. As you can imagine I was blown away by this girl. I spent some time with her, met her boyfriend and barbequed with them in the tunnel. I had already published one article on homelessness, but along with the photographer Michael Sofronski I planned to do a story on this couple living in the tunnel. Then my wife became pregnant and we returned to Europe. Although I always intended to get back and finish that story, other commissions landed on my desk, time kept slipping away from me. But over the years, as I read many media accounts about homeless life, along with a shockingly awful book about ‘Mole People' where the author dedicated most of the print to commenting on her own daring even though she went home everyday, I found myself becoming indignant. None of these accounts rang true to what I had experienced with the homeless. The stories were all so caught up in myth, the kind of stories any homeless person will tell you if you buy them lunch, or give them cigarettes or booze. They read like a walking tour guides. I just don't believe you can buy a homeless person lunch, extract an interview, knock off at six and feel like you are documenting anything accept the perceptibility of homeless people to tell you exactly what they think you want to hear in order to get a free meal. It's no good being indignant from your sofa., and so I had to put my money where my mouth was. I decided to live homeless on the streets of New York City, without any money or contact with friends, for 31 Days. The idea was to document life and survival, without the myth and drama, on the streets of New York. What was the most important thing you learnt about life when writing 31 Days, a New York street diary? That there's a lot of humility at the bottom. Never in my life have I experienced such warmth and kindness from total strangers. Your books seem to deal with the darker, seedier parts of western society, why is this? Bad luck? I don't know really. It certainly is not intentional: meaning that I am not fascinated with the darker, seedier side of western society. Though saying that my next book, once again, will focus on this element. Ultimately though, I'd like to write a book about life on a bee farm, passed through the generations of a sweet, hard-working family, surrounded by beautiful sweeping landscapes and the hum of honey production. Hopefully one day I will. With the homeless book I simply had to do it; there were too many questions I wanted answered. Also, 31 Days is not as dark as you may think. Darkness exists, but there is also a lot of lightness, a lot of humor and beauty that because it comes from a dark place is at times totally breathtaking. My next project has attracted me in much the same way. I guess I get drawn into stories that already exist in an over documented and dramatized fashion and find myself wanting to strip them down to basics and hopefully, if I scratch hard enough, finding a truer picture beneath. What do you hope the reader takes from your work? Enlightenment? Sorry, I couldn't help myself. I am very much into self-reflection and being able to acknowledge when I am wrong. I try to show this in my writing. I don't try to hide any misconceptions that I may have been carrying through the project, rather I try to use them. I think I push for a sense of honesty and sharing my mistakes and misconceptions with my readers helps achieve this. It also stops me coming across like an ass. If you could give one piece of advice to an aspiring writer, what would it be, and why? Forget any notions of being a writer; if you do not love the process of story building and writing, do something else with your time. If you do love the process do it, or something related to it, every day.
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The Sun OnlineOctober 2006 |
(c) The Sun Online I spent a month on NY streets Most people would not choose to live on the streets. But writer Alan Emmins, 31, spent a month living as a homeless person in New York for a book. Here Alan, a Brit now based in Copenhagen, Denmark, tells the Sun Online about his experiences. As I crouched in the subway under Madison Square Gardens with
a half-naked man standing over me staring for what seemed like hours,
I wondered what on earth I'd got myself into. I'd always been interested in the issue and suspected articles I'd read on the subject were not representative of what it was like to be on the streets. So the only real solution was to take myself off and try it out. I'd allowed myself to take a backpack filled with a t-shirt, water bottle, couple of clean pairs of socks and few pairs of boxer shorts. I also had $20, and a phone card so that I could call my wife Christine once a week, as promised. It was on that first night I realised I had underestimated how scary being homeless would be. I quickly encountered some of the worst stereotypes of the streets. There was drug-taking, physical illness, and prostitution. There were only half a dozen people in the subway under Madison Square Gardens but they represented such disaster in life. I was terrified and thought there was no way I could spend a whole month feeling so scared. I desperately wanted to go home but the main thing that kept me out there that night was my ego. I kept thinking about having to go back home and tell everyone I knew that I could not last more than one night on the streets. And I was convinced there was another side to homelessness. So I pulled myself together and made my way out of the subway and soon discovered how to live as a homeless person. I made friends with people in the parks and squares of New York, including a 23-year-old called JV who acted as my advisor and protector for the month. During the day, I would try to sleep in a park, hunt for food, make notes in my scrapbook, or even try begging. At night I'd find some other homeless people to hang around with or a safe doorway to stay. I never got to grips with begging and didn't make any money out of it. I felt so guilty because I knew I was not really in need. Sometimes I would run away before anyone could even give me change! Before I realised how easy it was to get food from outside restaurants, in bins or at soup kitchens I really panicked about not having any money for food. The only way I got through the first few days was through the generosity of other homeless people. One night a homeless man even woke me up with a hot dog because he thought I was on a crack come down. He took some convincing that I wasn’t. I would tell people I met that I was on the streets because I was writing a book – a lot of them didn’t believe me and thought I was making excuses. Meanwhile, commuters and other people on the street definitely saw me as homeless. I know there were times when I must have looked very depressed. I noticed that people did seem to see me but they tried to avoid my gaze. Another challenge was getting used to not being able to wash. I take pride in staying clean and even wash behind my ears in the shower, which my wife finds strange. I found out from other homeless people that one of the best places to wash was Starbucks toilets. That is because they have the sink and the toilet all in one cubicle and you can wash in private. There were other places where you could drop in your clothes, wash and get a fresh set, but I never used it because I knew I only had to survive 31 days. I used to rotate my dirty t-shirt and underwear, which was a bit futile. I was almost constantly frightened on the streets. I had read stories about the way homeless people have been treated in New York, beaten up, set on fire or even murdered. In the evenings, I felt really vulnerable. I was not scared of the homeless people, it was attacks from other passers by I feared. One day a gang of youths threw huge cups of soft drinks over me outside a fast food restaurant. Another time I made the mistake of asking a man who was smoking a crack pipe how he had made $700 that day. He squared up to me, shouting ‘Why should I tell you?’ I thought I was finished, but thankfully, the crack pipe distracted him before he could attack. There were other times I saw people in really desperate situations. There was one man I met outside a church who was clearly mentally ill. He was having an argument with another person in his head. I found that extremely upsetting – he should not have been on the streets. A few homeless people I met were on the streets through choice. One guy spent every spring to autumn on the streets of New York and would get a room and a job as soon as the weather turned. He told me he just loved the city and wanted to be part of it. Another man lived in a train tunnel with a room wired into the electricity supply from the street above. He was in his 50s and I am convinced he will end his days there. After I finished the project I was unable to talk about my experiences for several weeks. It was only when I started writing the book that I let it all out. My time on the streets changed the way I think about homeless people in a way I didn’t expect. I started to think that the charities and people who give people on the streets food and money are keeping them there, taking the responsibility away from the government. Now I rarely give money to homeless people and strangely, I don't get approached as much. When I tell people the story about my experience, people say I am brave, but the truth is I was hideously scared for the whole thing. I went back to New York and tried to find some of the people I
met – but couldn’t track down a single one of them. |
Updated 19th March 2009 |
