The Gutter Boss Rises.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars" Part 4.
A similar bean bag that was to become my refuge.
Fleeing from the outer suburb twisted group house of Greenie the tricksy Leprechaun, me and the heavy metal guy trekked down the hill through the suburbs toward the city of Wellington.
The ground was wet from the perpetual rain in this part of New Zealand but luckily not raining now.
We hiked in for miles, while I pumped the tall heavy metal guy for street survival tips.
These were:
You can go into supermarkets and eat food inside there from the shelves. Wandering the aisles like a shopper, but secretly eating chips and deli meat, quickly pounding down a yogurt or filling your pockets with nuts, and eating them one at a time. You stash the empty packets or tubs of anything you eat, in behind other products on the shelves and then you just roll out, free of any incriminating evidence.
You can spend all day in the warm library on a cushion educating yourself.
There are toilets there and you can kind of wash yourself in the sinks. There is a good drinking fountain in the library too, so you can stay healthy and hydrated.You can watch all the new release movies. Once a movie has started the ticket takers leave… so you can sneak into the movies. Then stay in the inner movie theatre area, hiding in the toilets between shows. This way you can watch movies all day.
You can get free cigarettes. Outside of expensive hotels, there are these small golden pillars with a little sandbox on top of them. This is a special ashtray.
The rich old ladies come outside to smoke but they only take a couple of puffs and then put the cigarette out, leaving 80% of it unsmoked. This is called an MB. Or a “Millionaire Butt”. You get a cigarette packet and do the rounds of the high-end hotels and load up. Never again with you have to reach down shamefaced for a tiny GB. Or a “Gutter Butt” as it’s called on the streets.
Of course, there is also food court leftover feasts and the dumpster diving, fruit from people’s trees if in season, or sneaking into people’s backyard gardens at night, to silently dig up carrots and wash them even more silently with their garden hose.
Note that there is no begging in this street survival system.
Two reasons for this.
One: No New Zealander would give anyone any money, as they know full well that there is a rigid social welfare system. You could just hand yourself into the social welfare office and they would set you up in a halfway house, and within 24 hours you would be in a hi-viz vest, sweeping up gutter butts or scraping chewing gum off the sidewalks, for minimum wage with a nice cut taken out for your room and board.
Two: No New Zealander would give anyone any money. It’s just not done.
It wasn't even an idea that a person would think of doing even if they were on the streets because a huge percentage of NZers are descendants of the Scotts which genetically prevents giving anything at all away.
So yes, being on the streets was totally unneeded. I could have fallen on social welfare or I could have just called a parent and explained that I didn’t know what I was doing, the job was a total scam and now Im broke, alone, and on the streets.
But Fuck that. I tend to push things as far as they will go… then a bit more…
Yo ho ho. It’s the hobo life for me.
So we trekked on until we came to a freeway overpass near the city and went up the embankment and under where there was a space to put our sleeping bags on the hard concrete, in the dark.
Of course, it was freezing and there was no light as it was 1994 and we had no cellphones with lights on them. But we hunkered down.
Exhausted… on the damp hard cold ground.
Within about 5 minutes of lying down, I heard the tall heavy metal guy muttering in discomfort… and then he got up and started packing his sleeping back.
“Fuck this shit! I have a friend here, I’m going to bang on his window and see If I can stay with him”
Me: “ Do you think I could stay too?”
Him: “Nup”.
And he just rolled on out like a fucking traitor.
Leaving me to become a legit hobo.
The feeling of suddenly becoming a totally alone legit hobo made me actually shift mental gears. I felt an instant change blossom in my new hobo brain.
I was better and tougher than the older heavy metal guy. This was obvious… as I was here, lying on the concrete being a legit hobo and he had folded up like a cheap plastic deck chair, and gone scurrying, like the lap dog he was.
One thing the world did not know, was that I had an edge because I had been training for this day for years.
When I was 15 ( two years prior ) I had started peeking behind the curtain of my possible future.
I was reading a lot of Beatnik books from the 50s and 60s and this, coupled with the beginnings of a number of small bad life decisions I had started to make, culminated in a moment of clarity, while mid out window stare, mid-science class.
The insight was that If I continued along this bad boy path, I was 100% going to wind up living on the streets.
So what I did was take my bed apart and put it upstairs in the loft and practice sleeping on the floor of my bedroom with no pillow or duvet but in all my clothes and only my big blue trench coat for warmth.
It was cold in my room. There was only a thin worn layer of carpet between me and the concrete.
But I pushed on through. And soon I found that I could sleep on any flat surface.
This came in handy in the next few years when I was at parties and everyone was crashing and all the beds and couches were taken. I would just lie flat on the carpet and off to Nod it was.
--
( Not but a few years back, in my early 40s I found myself stuck at Miami airport and the passengers were being shuttled to a hotel an hour away for about 3 hours of sleep – then a shuttle back in the morning to re-check in for the new flight.
I had never seen such a bunch of miserable pampered suburbanites…
I thought “That’s not me… I'm a ragamuffin from the streets!”
I found a quiet space over in a corner of the airport lay down flat on my back, pulled my hoodie over my eyes, and slept a straight six hours. Right till it was time to board.
I had not become soft. I still fuckin had it.)
--
So the weak fake hobo had fled leaving me to my fate. It was time to survive on the streets.
For three weeks I put all his advice to use. I found a bean bag to chill and read on in the library, the sneaking into movies, the millionaire butts, the straight-up shoplifting.
I found an even better place to live in a fallen-down chimney up in an overgrown inner city section, , which I lined with cardboard and slept in. My Chimney house.
I washed in bathroom basins, and I brushed my teeth… but without a place to wash clothes and scrub myself fully, I started to really stink.
I started to get frowns from the library people, for farting up that beanbag… so I moved it round a corner into a section where no one could see me or smell me.
While sitting on the street smoking MBs I would get concerned looks from the New Zealanders.
In the first week, I would strike up a few conversations with other teens on the streets…but these were teens that were going home to soft beds and warm meals…so there was always some kind of disconnect.
I failed to impress them with the MB system … or advice on how you can get free food by eating food court leftovers.
“What if you ate some food with spit all over it and someone had some brutal disease?”
One guy suggested….
I hadn’t even thought of that… now I started to think there was a diseased spit all over the food...which led me to shoplift more… which started to cause me panic attacks at the sight of stores.
In the second week, I stopped talking to people.
On the third I felt like I was a ghost, walking through the streets, invisible.
Stinking and looking rough. Ignored… I had become the Gutter Boss.
It was cold and rainy in this town and It was time to flee north.
Still not willing to make a collect call to a parent and admit defeat and failure… I went to the train station and snuck on-board the early morning train – to Auckland.
8 hours north.
And that my friends is how to turn a dream of becoming a cool hipster badass, into living on the streets of a rainy city, alone and numb, in three easy steps.
From warm bed, hot meals, and good friends… to living in a fallen-down chimney, reeking of ass and 73% twisted, within 25 days.
And it gets worse of course.
More to come.
END
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