adventures with the homeless people outside my house

This one time just after I’d turned 23, I went to a Seattle bar for a philosophy meetup, but there’d been a mixup with the scheduling and the only other person who showed up was a middle-aged man who was clearly too happy to see I was the only other person. He wore a polo shirt, bought me a drink, and asked me with a thick smile if I had a boyfriend.

I hoovered down the gin-and-tonic and, with newfound disinhibition, decided to pretend I knew someone else in the room, because I’d seen someone do that in a movie once. I found a redhead, scruffy-bearded guy with a graphic tee that looked vaguely sci-fi styled, or maybe a video game, I don’t know - he was nerdy, which meant he was my ‘tribe’, which meant he was good enough.

I excused myself to say hi to my ‘friend’ and sidled up to this guy. His name was Dave, and he was as equally happy to have a solitary female land in his lap - but unlike polo man, he seemed younger and his shirt turned out to be Dr. Who, which I thought was an inferior sci-fi but better than a polo. I decided I was going to sleep with him. After he bought me another drink, I invited him back to my place.

We were making out in the Uber when it stopped at a light right in front of a group of lively homeless people partying on the sidewalk. They looked like they’d been living at Burning Man since it began, covered in dreads, patchwork jackets, fingerless gloves, and deeply grooved dirt. Someone was banging a bucket like a drum, someone else was scribbling chalk on the sidewalk, and in the middle of all of them were tarot cards.

I asked the Uber to wait; I stumbled out of the car and asked them all if they wanted some LSD. They said yes, so I dug into my dedicated LSD purse compartment and handed them a few strips. The group was impressively accepting - they didn’t ask me anything about the quality of the LSD or my motivations, just accepted the drug donation like I’d just thrown a few quarters into their jar.

But the Uber and my turgid-penis’d man was waiting, so I continued with my journey.

Dave and I got back to my apartment, and we did oral sex at each other, but both of us were too drunk to even get close to risking creating a new life, which is probably why most religions don’t like alcohol. I finished by jackhammering myself with my hitachi while he masturbated, which was fine I guess.

I told him I wanted to sleep. He was kind of disappointed, but the autism that got me into casual sex was equally as good at getting me out of it, and I was unmovable against his throbbing energy. After he got in his uber I put my sweaty clothes back on and ran down the streets to where I'd seen the homeless people.

“We thought maybe you were a cop, but this acid is real,” said one guy, a lanky black man in his early 40’s, his fine wrinkles streaked with pale dirt and wearing the kind of clothes rich people would have loved to wear to roleplay being poor. His skinny fingers reached out like spider legs through fingerless gloves to roll a joint. He told me his name was Train.

“How do you know it’s real?” I asked

“I ate it,” he said.

“But it’s 3 am,” I said.

“Yeah I know. I haven’t fried this good in years.”

I eyed him. He’d taken acid with a casualness I’d only ever seen in myself the year prior when I’d eaten LSD once a week for nearly a year. He took a puff on the joint and offered me some, which I refused.

I went back to sleep soon after that, but that was the night I'd accidentally managed to gain the trust of the homeless people on my block.

I didn't have many friends, so the homeless group became my primary social group. My sleep schedule rotated to match theirs; I’d join them late at night and we'd dance to music we made on items scavenged from the trash. Sometimes I’d roll down the waistline to my long linen skirt to show my stomach and bellydance to their plastic-bucket drums in the middle of the empty late-night University Ave.

we used to hang out mostly in that little enclave after the stores closed

For being homeless they really did have standards. I would bring them food and blankets for a while until I figured out that they didn’t need them very much. I’d buy them a bunch of groceries and they’d pick through for the good stuff and reject half of it; They mostly wanted alcohol, which I gave them sometimes. I remember bringing them a blanket that they all rejected on the basis of not liking the color.

They were all semi-intentional vagrants, crusty late-young folk who’d rejected normal life for whatever reason. If they were addicted to hard drugs I didn’t see it, and the mental health issues in the group were only a little worse than the homed ones. Jared was the weirdest one; he had a little book about all the healing properties of various stones, and he’d spread out his collection on a tiny piece of velvet on the sidewalk to show anybody who he suspected was interested. He had dark, bumpy open sores on his hand I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be touching, and if you disagreed with him at all (say, for example, on whether or not stones actually have magic powers) he’d talk loudly and wave his hands at you until you agreed.

There was one girl, Rosa, who had frizzy hair and might have been pregnant but I never directly asked. She shared a sleeping bag with Lionel, who told me all about his storage system for his possessions. He kept a trash bag full of his stuff behind this one dumpster in the alley the next block over, a spot that authority people never checked. He used to keep it up on the roof of a building, but one day he came to find someone had emptied the bag out onto the street.

“I trusted that building manager,” he told me one night as we were passing around a probably stolen bottle of wine. “He told me he’d give me time to move it, but he just ruined it all. I lost the best jacket, some asshole stole it, probably the jackoffs up north of NE 45th. I keep watching them, I know they got it.”

The “jackoffs” north of NE 45th were the rival homeless group. My own group was basically a bunch of wild kids trying not to grow up, and I slowly figured out that the ones north of 45th were older, more mentally ill, and generally more stabby.

Ironically, I found Kevin north of 45th. I was trying to venture north to the one pizza shop open late at night and passed him; he was a 23-year old homeless punk with a mohawk and a battered, heavily-stickered electric piano he carried with him everywhere. I stopped him and asked him to walk with me to the pizza shop, and I’d buy him pizza if he did. He told me about his life; he’d only wanted to make music, and he found school awful. He dropped out two years ago and decided to stop working, and his family stopped talking to him.

Kevin was new to the gang, and soon his piano music became a part of our trash orchestra.

(This other guy Mike is how I first learned I might be faceblind - I’d just met him and was talking to him for a while, when he asked if I wanted to go spray painting with him. I was nervous but said yes - but wait, let me run home and grab a jacket, and I’ll meet him in the next alley over. I did so, but when I came back I peeked into the alley and saw a bunch of homeless guys and I couldn’t recognize which one was Mike, and I panicked out of social embarrassment and just went home)

Homeless norms - much like all other norms - were not explicit at all, and when I asked questions about how their society worked I got confusing, evasive answers. Over time I managed to figure some things out - the homeless people did all know each other, like a live and interconnected neighborhood. They were very alert to danger; they were vulnerable all the time, and some of the more nefarious street characters would sometimes terrorize them. They stuck together in a group for safety, and ‘claimed’ certain blocks as theirs. They knew which restaurants would give them excess food, where to get shoes, which houses to steal from. They had a rotating network of goods, a little private market, where stolen goods would circulate.

Occasionally a very expensive item would show up among the group, getting passed or traded from person to person, and nobody said it but I knew it'd been stolen.

Once I left my ukulele with them after a night of music; when I came to get it the next day, it was gone. Train said it'd been stolen by the rival homeless group. It was gone for weeks, and I gave up hope of seeing it again, until one day I was walking down the street to get a coffee and Train ran me down and put my ukulele in my hands. “I found it north of 45th, I saw a guy playing it. I went up to him and said, ‘give that to me, that’s not yours.’ And he said no, but then I told him maybe he’d regret it, you know, I let him think about it. Anyway, here it is.”

Train - the black man with fingerless gloves - was my favorite. He was from California, he had a child somewhere he didn't see, and he was smart. I didn't know why he was homeless, but I did see him get into a fistfight once - hollering at someone literally on 45th st - and then disappeared from the street for a week or so into jail.

The homeless made me feel safe. Once I was hanging out with them, and a college guy wandered by and invited me to a party. I didn't know who this person was, but I wanted to see what a college party was like, so I agreed. Train and a few others asked me if I really wanted this, was I sure? I didn’t understand why they seemed hesitant about me leaving, so I brushed them off, and left them to follow the college guy to his party.

The party turned out to be a tiny apartment, with a mattress on the floor and nearly no other furniture. I asked where the people were, and the kid said they would get there soon. In a rare flash of self preservation instinct, I decided that this was maybe too weird and I walked away. The college kid tried really hard to get me to stay, but I said no. He told me he'd walk me home, and along the way I blithely talked about doing nude modeling and sex work, unaware he was interpreting this as an invitation (in my defense, I was homeschooled).

When we got outside my apartment, he said he needed to pee, could he come upstairs? I said no, he could go pee in the alleyway. Then he started pressing - no, he really wanted to come upstairs. Why couldn't he? Why couldn't he use my bedroom? He wanted to come inside. I wasn't scared. I was slightly drunk. 

Eventually I walked inside my apartment building's front doors, and he shoved his shoulder in behind me, blocking the doors from shutting. I tried to push him away, but he just kept forcing his way in. So with both my hands I grabbed the doorknobs for leverage and kicked him square in the chest, hard. He stumbled out, off balance, nearly falling. I slammed the self-locking glass door behind him, waved goodbye and said goodnight, and went upstairs to my apartment. It was a little thrilling; I masturbated to it later. 

I eventually found Train somewhere on the street and told him about the adventure, only to find out that Train had followed me. “I got real bad feelings from that guy,” he said. “I followed you for a while but figured maybe it was weird to secretly follow you, and ended up turning back.” He never said it directly, but it seemed clear that Train cared about me.

The homeless occasionally escorted me places; I would often walk around alone in the middle of the night in Seattle, and if I wanted to go to a more sketchy location I'd just accost a nearby homeless man and offer him pizza in exchange for walking with me. I made a lot of friends that way. Train would sometimes actively point out scary people to avoid, and would sit with me until they went away. 

I liked Train a lot. I sometimes hung out with him inside my house, I’d occasionally drive him around, and once I took him blues dancing and paid for his ticket. The dancing took place at Om Studios - a beautiful yoga studio with images of meditating women with chakras, and the people who danced were well-showered college kids, tech workers, parents.

om studio

I hadn't seen Train so out-of-place before; suddenly I noticed how dirty he was when among this well-employed group of fashionable young Seattlites. He’d ask people to dance, offering a hand wrapped in rags. I imagine he knew people could tell he was homeless; it was like a brand etched across his face, screaming I am not one of you. Here, he wasn’t Train anymore, he was simply homeless. He was quieter, more hunched, more uncertain. I’d never seen him like that before. I gave him a ride back to his street corner afterwards, and he never came dancing again.

In all my time knowing him, Train never hit on me, never stole from me, and not once asked me for money or food. He was straightforward, self assured, and deeply chill. The last time I saw him was from the window of an Uber as I drove to the airport; he was bundled up in a bean bag under the overhang of the UW university book store, his belongings neatly stacked around him, and he was reading a torn copy of the Selfish Gene. I don’t know where he ended up; he said he wanted to go back to California. I hope he made it and is doing okay.