Houselessness
Categories: Travel , Outdoors & Nature , Nonfiction
I'm still weirded out by finding an apparently homeless guy sleeping on my futon. Not so much that, but my reaction, which was, when he asked me for a drink, to say I had milk and grape juice and feel guilty that I didn't have more juice varieties. (His response was, "No, man, I mean something to drink.") Am I just a compassionate person, or foolish and insane?
Two of the books I read suggest the term "houselessness" rather than "homelessness" because of the connotations of "home." Under the Overpass, by college student Michael Yankoski, tells the story of the five months he and his friend Sam spent on the streets of five large cities, as a religiously inspired experiment. In format, the book is a lot like Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed. Michael and Sam sleep in shelters, eat in soup kitchens, and make small amounts of money playing "worship songs" on their guitars.
Although they do not behave eccentrically or use drugs or alcohol and spend most of their free time (and homeless people often have little free time because of the logistics of finding food and a sleeping place) reading the Bible and writing in their journals, only one person asks, "Who are you really?" Everyone else judges them completely by their unwashed appearance. One of the joys of the book is the glee with which Yankoski describes how badly he and Sam smell after five weeks without bathing. They are not nearly as enterprising about making themselves clean and comfortable as Lars Eighner.
Sadly, each admits that he had hoped to improve his guitar playing during the months on the streets, and now neither wants ever to see a guitar again. Indeed, twice, actual homeless people borrow their guitars, play far better than Michael and Sam, and earn a decent amount of change for their work. Like Eighner, Michael believes that if he were to be homeless for a long period of time, he too would find comfort in alcohol or drugs.
Looking at the online catalog, I see that my reading about homelessness so far has been pretty haphazard. I also recommend The Tunnel: the Underground Homeless of New York City, by Margaret Morton, which is mostly photographs of homes--some quite elaborate and comfortable looking--made by people in a certain part of a subway tunnel, along with their transcribed words about themselves and their houses. A similarly engrossing and revealing book is The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City, by Jennifer Toth, although rail fans have somewhat successfully discredited Toth's description of the tunnels' geography.
