I've never been homeless, but I've been poor, lived in shitesque neighborhoods, and over the years I've known several homeless folks well enough to say good morning and have a conversation. In my experience, they're ordinary folks with one rotten turn of luck, or a weakness for the bottle, or the needle. There but for the grace of God, as the cliché goes… But I don't believe in God, and we never give the homeless any grace.
Over the past couple of years, I sorta got to know one homeless guy, who hung around near my favorite diner. His name was Bucky, though I never knew it until after he'd died. They found him in the bushes. Natural causes, the cops said.
I've been thinking about Bucky, about the hellish lives of people who have nowhere to sleep, no fridge, no chair. America has millions of homeless people, ignored by most folks and despised by the rest.
Me, I've got empathy coming out the blowhole. Sometimes I write about homelessness, worry about it, or hand a homeless guy some cash. But I don't know jack crap about actually being homeless, so a crazy thought occurred to me: Give homelessness a very, very slight try.
That's what I did, and I'm going to tell you about it. But first, a major disclaimer: It was nothing like the real thing. It was homeless tourism. If something had gone wrong, there's an address I could've returned to — a huge advantage over anyone who's on the street by circumstance, not by choice.
And unlike the real thing, it was humiliation-free, because I wouldn't need to beg, wouldn't have to eat at a shelter, and endure a sermon. My wallet was with me, and inside it, my bus pass, and debit card.
One night seemed too easy, and three nights without a shower would be sticky, so my plan was to spend two nights without a bed. But unlike genuine homelessness, I got to choose when it would start and stop, so I selected a few late-summer days when the forecast was free from rain but also not too hot: Wednesday and Thursday, September 11th and 12th, 2024.
As the sun came up on Wednesday morning, I shoved a blanket into my backpack, along with a light jacket, my mace of course, and a few beef jerky bars. I left my laptop and cellphone at home — you don't often seen homeless people scrolling and surfing.
I rode a bus to West Seattle's Lincoln Park, a green space so huge that even when it's crowded it's easy to find an area that's not. Nobody bothered me there, and I read a book until it bored me, then read another book to the end. I'm a reader.
When hunger said hello, I bused to Walgreen’s for the same poor man's menu I’d eaten when I was desperate, decades ago — the cheapest generic bread, and fake margarine in a tub. At a tiny park, I ate half a loaf of my bread-and-spread, which was perfectly bearable, because I knew it wasn't what I'd be eating again and again and again. A hot meal was at most two days away.
Then I bused to the West Seattle Library, and spent the afternoon reading magazines. (Yeah, there are still magazines!) The library has internet access, but it felt like that would be cheating, so I stayed with the printed page.
As sunset approached, it brought my biggest worry in all this — nightfall. I've heard too many accounts of bums attacked, beaten, even killed while they were sleeping, so in planning this stupidity, I’d explored the park closest to my home. At its western corner, I’d found a way under and then behind some shrubbery, where my hope was, I'd be invisible to “normal people,” and especially to the police.
I bused there from the library, walked across the small park, and when nobody was looking I hunched myself down, and crawled to my pre-selected hiding spot. I laid on the dirt and wrapped my blanket around me, put my head on my backpack as a pillow, and waited a long, uncomfortable time for sleep to come.
The earth was hard on my hips and butt, and I slept shitty and intermittently, waking up every few hours to pee in the bushes, and worry.
About what? Well, I'm basically a boring man. Except for some camping trips long ago, every night of my life I've slept safely behind locked doors. But you can't lock a bush.
The sound of voices woke me, but it was only a young couple with a flashlight, walking and occasionally kissing. From the inanity of their conversation, I'm guessing they were teenagers. No friskiness, though. It was as wholesome as a Jimmy Stewart movie.
I was at that park for about nine hours overnight, and may have gotten two hours of sleep. That’s just a guess, since I don't wear a watch and checking the time on my phone would’ve lit up my hiding space.
Midway through the night, I put on my jacket for warmth.
Some time later, something large crawled across my neck. Instantly, instinctively, even before waking up, I slapped at it, but it was moving at about 30 mph and got away. There was almost enough light to see, and I think it was the largest spider in recorded history, not counting sci-fi movies. I hate spiders like Indiana Jones hates snakes, so I was awake for a long while after that, and a nightmare of spiders was waiting when I fell asleep.
Much later, at the height of blackness in the darkened park, men’s voices woke me, from a trail about 20 feet away. They were probably harmless, likely drunk, but still I froze like a snapshot.
Even after their sounds faded, I couldn't stop thinking how dumb it was, what I was doing. I don't know if I've ever felt as vulnerable. Sure, I had my mace within quick reach, but mace ain't a gun, and anything could’ve happened.
Walls are a safety you never think about, until the walls aren't there.
When the sun began rising on my second day of fake homelessness, I packed my blanket back in my pack, and crawled out of the bushes, wiping dirt and bugs off me.
And cripes, I was achy. I’m 20 years older than the last time I’d been camping, and this time there’d been no tent, and no soft sleeping bag. Only dirt and rocks had been under me, and apparently a billion bugs.
All day, I walked slower and more painfully than the first day, as the aches from the night hung on stubbornly. Some of my morning was at Lincoln Park again, where I squished a few bugs from the night that were still crawling up my back and inside my pant-legs.
The book I'd borrowed from the library wasn't good enough to keep my mind off the ouches and itches, and I was tired. And when I wasn't thinking of bugs and aches and sleep, I was still thinking about the night before. I'd been really quite scared for a few minutes, wishing for walls.
Of course, people on the street never have walls to retreat behind. To anyone actually homeless, not play-acting like me, five minutes frozen in fear would’ve been five minutes of ordinary.
Then I bused to the library in the International District, where I returned the lousy book I'd checked out in West Seattle the day before, and read another book for long enough to be sure it didn't suck, then checked it out.
Also went online for a while. Hey, real bums use the library computers to go online, so an artificial bum can do it too.
I fell asleep on the internet, and a security guard tapped my shoulder. He didn't order me to leave, and even smiled politely, but leave I did.
After that I took a few long bus rides, each time falling into and out of sleep until Metro’s electronic voice announced, “This is the last stop. All passengers should deboard at this time.”
In the back of a mostly-empty bus to Bellevue, I ate the second half of my loaf of bread-and-spread, and fell again into a shallow sleep — exponentially better and less painful than sleeping under the shrubs, but not a fraction as nice as sleeping at home.
I was awakened by yet another tiny bug that had probably been riding me since the bushes the night before. The bugs were bugging me, and my back was still hurting, so I said to myself, Fuck this whole idea, and headed home.
Turning my key and walking in, I was no longer “homeless,” and it was great.
I swallowed six aspirin to beat the aches, ran a load of laundry to get the chiggers out of my clothes, took a long, warm shower, and settled into my recliner. The cat was happy to see me, and I was happy to be back. And I slept.
Grand total, I'd spent about 35 hours pretending to be homeless, not the two full days I'd intended. In that time, nobody hassled me, no cops threatened me, because even after a night rolling in dirt, I wasn't disheveled and stinky enough to look like a bum. And I'm overweight, which helped — in a security guard's eyes, a fat man probably can't be homeless.
I'd been curious, so what the hell, I did this crazy thing. My back still hurts, and something ate me real bad up around my neck, but nothing disastrous happened. Yet still, I wasn't tough enough to last even two nights.
(www.itsdougholland.com)
That sounds a little like a long trip I took through the US and Mexico almost 60 years ago.
Vietnam had taught me about sleeping on the ground and I had money in my pocket.
I am very glad I never HAD to do it and your story helps clinch that feeling.