The Long Path (part 3)

  When you're new to any city, regardless of your situation, it can seem over bearing, with a sense of epic awe as you try to learn and navigate your way around.
Dayton was the first city that I really started my journey from. I was now without a doubt officially on my own, without a cause, nowhere to be, completely and utterly homeless.
  It wasn't until the realization hit, for the first time, how completely free I really was. I didn't have to work. I didn't have to make anyone but myself happy. Contentment was attained by a full stomach, shelter from the rain, a cigarette to puff on, and nothing more. Entertainment was people watching, using the library, chess games in the park, conversations with other people, homeless or otherwise. I didn't miss fifty channels of television, nothing was ever really on anyway. I didn't miss working, nor envy those that had to work a 9-5 job, for a boss that stood behind you as you worked, making mental notes of your effiicency, but never really seeming to do any work of thier own, just so you could pay rent for a shitty apartment or a cramped ranch style home in the suburbs. Bills for said dwelling. Gas, maintainence, and insurance for a vehicle to get you to and from that miserable job. Spending what money you managed to save to buy better clothes, fancy electronic gadgets, and flashy jewelry so you could impress someone else with your smart purchases. Having a fridge full of food and nothing to eat. Spending your weekends trimming the grass or your yard, not so much for your satisfaction, but for your neighbor's. I didn't miss alarm clocks, people calling me at all hours, and having to pay taxes. I didn't miss schedules, making sure the trash got to the curb on its appointed day, dealing with nosey neighbors, the tedious work of having to clean the dishes, clean the house, clean anything.
  First, finding food seemed like a daily chore, but after inviting myself into the company of other homeless people, I soon learned of places where free food was for the taking. Homless shelters, church functions,and food pantries. Every now and then some new age hippies would meet at the park behind the library and serve big batches of vegan soups, flavored rice, and homemade breads. One homeless man gave me a home made list of all the places in the city that gave away free food to the homeless. There was even markets that would give food out to the homeless if they were slightly past their due dates, anything from canned foods, cakes and pastries, and day old breads that were baked on site. There were even resturants that gave out food to the homeless, I mean, most places for some corporate reason or another are supposed to toss out all the left over food at the end of the night, but a few places would wrap all the left over burgers and sandwhichs and conviently place the bags just outside the back door. Buckets of chicken that cooked all day under lamps. Even finer dining establishments did the same as well. I was introduced to finer foods like rabbit pate, fried calamari, porterhouse steaks, and lobster bisque.
  There seems to be an unwritten rule somewhere that if you give the homeless your resturants left over food in packages by the backdoor, your less likely to open the business the next day with your outside trash bins rifled through, with bags strewn about, huge holes gashed into the bags allowing the medley of all the bags combined fluids puddling by your back door, which was left to rot over night.
  Shelter was a hassle for the first couple of days, once again, I used the wisdom of the other denizens of the street for help and advice. Sleeping in public places is a no-no. Stay out of parks or places with public foot traffic as it was a sure fire way to get you sent to jail. If basic overhead shelter was all you needed, any over pass, bridge, or car parking garage lot could be used in a pinch. Most of the cities homelss walked a mile to and from a series of abandoned houses or "squats", located just outside the downtown section of the city. A squat was usually visited when the elements like the cold or the snow was too great for sleeping outside, or the police were making sweeps of picking up any homelss in the city. They usually came with thier own order of structure, with everyone that stayed in them respecting everyones private space and personal property. No one vandalized the place, showed up drunk and unruling, but drunk and mellow was just fine, and drunk, mellow and with booze to share even better. No one did anything to draw attention to the place for fear of removal or arrest. Arguements were delt with accordingly within the squat, as were thieves. If you did something in a squat that the people staying their didn't agree with, you had better find a way to make amends. Most squats have a set of laws, just like the "real" world, but the punishments can be swift and harsh, but usually with good reason. I remember some girl got raped in the upstairs part of a house one night, befor the guy could finish the deed, all the other homless people had awoke, catching him in the act. He was tied and bound on the floor, where someone hammered nails through the shaft of his penis into the floor, as someone else gagged his mouth and quited his screams.He was left to stay there all night, while everyone left. Someone might have called the police after everyone left. Maybe. Maybe not. Not all squats fit this mold, but most tried to adhere to it in an unspoken rule. There were squats were you had to know someone that was staying there, you had to be "spoken for" in order to stay the night there. Some squats were just dangerous places to stay the night in, as they may be visited by drug addicts like meth and crack heads on a constant basis. Some were prowled by crazies, who you were never quite sure what they would do. Sometimes squats would be avoided all together, if someone had been raped inside, or had died there.
  Back then, you could still buy a cheap pack of cigaretts for a dollar. Most poeple on the street if you asked them nice enough would give you ones for free. There were stores that if you didn't have a dollar would sell individual cigarettes to you. But, even other homeless, if they had it to spare, would share their tobacco with you. Even if this wasn't an option, and you could get your hands on a package of rolling papers, you could fish out all the half smoked cigarettes you find in outside ashtrays near hotel lobby's, banks, anywhere really. Break off the filter and collect enough tobacco in a bag or pouch, and roll your own smokes.
  Booze flowed pretty evenly among the homeless. Someone would beg for enough spare change to get a bottle of whisky and a pack of smokes, and round up their freinds to head to the river for a party to be had. For those that had nothing, the homeless sure shared a lot of what they did have. Drugs were shared as well, marijuana mostly, but not limited to. It was a friendly drug, one that can be consumed and no one has a bad time on. You don't see people robbing and stealing to get a bag of weed out there. Sometimes harder drugs would be made present in certain company. At the time, I never did anything harder than painkillers and weed. If it was given freely, nothing was to be expected in return except for some good company and some quality yarns to tell as everyone mellowed out.
  Money was never really a concern, as anything you need is there for the taking. It was useful for some things you just couldn't get other wise. Like medicine. It was usually a good idea to get some money together and have a little med kit in your backpack. Aspirin usually being favored as priority number one by most I have asked. Bandages and band-aids, fingernail clippers, tweezers, sunscreen, a tube of vasoline for burns. All the little stuff you don't think about having if you were to take a camping trip thats going to last forever. Other things like needle and thread for patching holes in clothing, although I found out that I prefered using dental floss in place of thread, it is thicker and more durable. A flash light if your lucky enough to re-supply it with batteries. A compass. Not all routes are done along a road. A weapon of some kind was usually in your pack, preferably a knife or blade for self defense, or for eating. I would go into resturants that had solid silverware and steal a set of knife,spoon,fork, and curl the end of the handles into a loop with a pair of pliers and keep them all together with a key ring. A can opener was usually a good idea. Canned food is the best I think for transport, and won't spoil on you.
  So, there were some things you needed money for, but you could still have survived with out any of this stuff. Obviously, the easiest way of getting money was to beg for it. The problem with begging for money is it is against the law, everywhere. Unless you go through the proper channels that is. Most cities will let you get an actual licence or permit that will allow you to beg for money, usually you have to pay for it in advance, and it tends to restrict you where you can beg at as well as what times you can beg in public. Most homeless will never go this route because its easier to just ask passerby's on the street. Best if done in a pair, where one does the begging while the other watches for police or security guards. It is not illegal for you to put pennies in a cup and shake it in front of you. That's not considered as the actual act of begging, so if someone happens to drop some spare change in your jingling cup, so be it. The only alternative to begging is working at a day labor facility. Where you have to be there extremely early in the mourning, you get sent out on jobs, usually manual labor of some kind, and get paid for that days work. But sometimes, some places only pay on a weekly basis. You could try to donate blood for some quick cash, but you have to lie about your living lifestyle, and have a valid identification card, or drivers licence. Most wont let you donate if you have tattoo's or peircing for fear of hepatitis.
  This is why I say my jouney began in Dayton. It was a wealth of information to be gained for those wanting to listen. With tried and tested lessons past on from those that knew how to survive, to those who were just learning how to.
  I knew I didn't want to live the rest of my days in Dayton. The winters are cold, the summers are hot. People are generally unfrendly everywhere. I wanted to broaden my horizons, maybe get to see some of the country before my end. I had heard from some of the kitchens and shelters of people being accepted to halfway homes, where you could save up money to be used to get off the streets. My main goal was to be able to save up money to be able to travel on, so I signed up for one of the halfway homes in Dayton, and after about a week I was accepted to one. I can't remember the name of the place to this day. I do remember the man who ran the place, a pastor by the name of "Butch" Johnson. He had supposedly gone to prison for sex with an underage male minor, or so was the speculation among the people living in the halfway home. He did have a wife that lived with him, about 35 years younger than he, so I guess I could see how the rumor got started. They, Butch and his wife, lived on the premises. Basiclly there to run the place.
  The home was somewhere in the North Side of Dayton. A man named Zot, which Im sure is an abbreviation of his last name, had bought and converted the house, as it was just a regular family style home, with the women in the house living upstairs, the men of the house living in the basement. Now here is the nice little secret about this particular halfway house. Basiclly you lived in impromptu bunkbeds in a dank basement, to be awoken at the crack of dawn to eat breakfast and pray to god for about a solid fifteen minutes, and off to work you go. But the halfway house found places for you to work. The places that you worked were also the places owned and operated by our man "Zot" who like "Butch" Johnson were members of an orginization called the Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship International. If you hunt down their website today, you might read something along the lines of this:

"The Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International is an organization sovereignly ordained by God. From its humble beginnings of one small chapter in Los Angeles, California in 1951, it has been moved into a global ministry by prophetic visions. The Fellowship’s story graphically depicts man’s plans falling short of the mark, but God’s plan succeeding. The complete story is in the classic inspirational book, The Happiest People on Earth, by Demos Shakarian, the California dairyman who is the Fellowship’s founder."

Yeah. Makes sense to me too. Anyway, off you would go to work at the one of many of Zot's or one of Zots friends companies. Now the money that you would make daily or weekly, would then be subtracted from your paycheck to pay for "room & board" at the half way house. So in a sense, you and all the other people that worked for these businesses, were just free labor for Zot and his buddies. How very christian-like indeed. I think I worked for six days a week and my spending money after taxes and paying for this bogus rent was somewhere around the ball park of about sixty dollars a week. That was when I decided that I had to work with as many hours as i could for a week and get my check, pack my bags, and get the hell out of Dayton. The plan was going pretty well too.
  One day though, about the end of the week, I awoke late, and had a serious cold, so I just layed in bed. Everyone else that lived in the basement had gone off to their jobs. I could hear Butch Johnson upstairs, moving about, floorboards creeking over head. As Butch was a a pretty big guy. Not muscle big mind you, just fat, stocky big. After a time he came bounding down the stairs, as I hadn't reported to work, sick as I was. Accusations of drug use, laziness, what ever he could think of. I tried to get up out of bed, but before I could Butch ran over and slammed me back on the bed. Confused I tried to get my bearings, and that's when I noticed his hands trying to get into my pants! What the hell is this I can remember thinking. Bound to the bed with my head full of sickness with this mountain of a man fondling my penis wasn't the outcome I was expecting. Eventually summoning what strength I could muster, I manage to fight him off me enough to get out of bed and away from him. I kept yelling and screaming at him. He told me that it wouldn't take much to get me kicked out of the house, or he could fabricate a story, call the police and get me arrested. Besides who was going to believe me? A down on his luck homeless kid, or a church going , god loving, pastor of the people. I felt sick to my gut knowing that he was right. He told me if I wasn't going to pay for rent with money, that I could pay to stay "through other means". I got dressed, grabbed my stuff as fast as I could and left the halfway house behind as soon as I could. I thought I would be done with the halfway house, Butch's homo-erotic fantasies, and Zot's slave labor.
  I traveled north of the city. I knew if i could get to the place that my checks came in at, if I could get the money, I could just get away. I got there early, and had to wait across the street at a Denny's resturant, waiting for the check place to open. I remember I ventured back across the street about an hour and a half later, only to my suprise had found out that the business had been open for the last hour. Now, when I tried to collect my check, the lady behind the counter looked confused, checked her files, and called for the manager to come over to the service window. It looked like my sister came to pick up my paycheck. Confused, I stated that not one of my family knew where I was, where I worked, or let alone knew where to collect my paychecks at. Thats weird, but at least they had the woman on a secruity feed that videotaped all the service windows. Turns out Butch Johnson convinced his young wife to pretend to by my sister to pick up my paycheck. Soon after, the supervisor and I were bounding down the highway back to the halfway house to see what was going on. As we pulled up to the half way house, I stopped the supervisor and explained to him the events of the morning. The being late for work, the weird molestation, me running off to get my check, everything.
  He said we should call the police, but I wanted him to confront them with me, help me get my check, and just be done with it all. Sadly, after the confrontation, Butch and his wife forged my name to the check and had cashed it, stating the money was for rent owed. Now I know this is a crime, but as well, I just wanted to go, to be done with it. The police were called and after everything was said and done, all I could expect was a small claims court date to get my money back. Where was I to live till then ? I had everything riding on that paycheck, but I had survived before with out money, and I suppose I could do it again. The supervisor was extremly upset about the whole deal, and gave me $200 out of his own pocket out of pity or embarrasment that he had played a part in allowing this to happen.
  I eventually made my way back downtown, back to the streets. I made my way back to the small park behind the library and came apon I site I had never seen In Dayton before. Groups of homeless kids, all within ranges of my own age. Punk rock kids, more commonly referred to as Gutterpunks. Sitting together in groups, some sitting alone. Mohawks, body peircings, tattoo's. They were all sitting there eating the free hippy vegan food that was sometimes served to the homeless on certain days. After finally getting the nerve to talk to one of them, as I found out they were there for a punk rock music fest that was located just outside of dayton, where they were planning on getting drunk , listening to music, and having a blast for three days. Eventually I was invited to go with some kids I was allready making fast friends with. Although the whole subculture at the time was completely alien to me, what else did I have to do?
So off I went.