Out on His Own

AT THREE A.M., Mass. Ave. held only the spill of streetlights, the occasional cab, and me, walking home. Outside the Montrose Sps I spotted a pile of trash, mostly packing materials and empty coffee cups. I stopped and began rummaging through a bag for food, thinking suddenly that it would have been opened long ago had it contained food. Only later, walking home, did I remember the well-stocked refrigerator awaiting me there.

To many of my friends in Berkeley, Calif, rummaging through trash for food comes naturally. I was one of the few who had a job and a place to stay--in a residential hotel which was cheap compared to tourist hotels, but expensive compared to an apartment. You pay by the week and share your room with an interesting variety of insects, and you can leave any time without losing a deposit.

On weeknights a local organization, the Berkeley. Food Project, cooks a hearty meal and serves it for 25 cents. For most of the people who eat there, dinner is the only meal. Sometimes, running short of money, I ate there--along with my friends. But one of them, Joseph (not his real name) refused to come to the food project meals.

Joseph is in his early twenties. Although he is very smart, Joseph has no source of income, no home, and few friends. He doesn't like to eat in front of other people, and although he was hungry, he never allowed me to buy him food. He also makes it a rule never to bum cigarettes from his friends--he gets them from strangers or finds them, half-smoked, on the sidewalk. His heroes are Jack Kerouac, Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan, and his favorite joke is "Could you spare a quarter? I have to get my mother out of the pawnshop."

BERKELEY HAS A more extensive support network for the homeless than do most other American cities. Besides the food project, Berkeley boasts a free clinic. Both are funded for the most part by donations collected on the street, and anyone who shakes a donations box earns a commission in cash. In People's Park, the site of the famous 1969 demonstrations, people leave clothing, books, and anything else they don't want in a wooden "free bin," Berkeley has a shelter for the homeless; in addition, one can get away easily with sleeping on a living room sofa in one of the student residential co-ops at the University of California.

But Joseph takes advantage of none of these benefits, with the exception of the free bin. He sleeps in an abandoned house or in the Berkeley hills, and he doesn't get sick. And, of course, Joseph has to eat. One night I asked him where he ate if he didn't eat at the food project meal. Some of the more genteel street people prefer "scarfing" or "vulching" (an invented verb form of "vulture"), which consists of waiting inconspicuously in a restaurant until a customer finishes and then beating the busboy to the plates of leftovers. But this method doesn't work for Joseph, who looks too hungry to go by unnoticed. Instead, he spends his evening scavenging Berkeley's dumpsters for food.

We started our rounds by walking down a long, narrow alley that led to the dumpster behind a cookie shop, Joseph hoisted himself so he could see over the receptacle's rim. "Looks like they didn't throw anything out today," he said. "You've got more guts than I have," he added admiringly as I clambered into the dumpster to make sure.

The remainder of the tour covered everything from a fancy Hungarian restaurant to a pizza parlor, where we were joined by others. It culminated outside a donut shop where Joseph tossed out donuts onto the pavement in case I was hungry, dryly calling out the flavors: "Coconut...cinnamon...jelly..." Over the next few weeks I often went along on Joseph's lonely hunts. I never ate anything, but Joseph appreciated the company.

Joseph spends most of his life unobtrusively trying to survive on turf that is also occupied by the society that has forgotten him. He spends his evenings trying to talk to women, walking them home "in case anyone tries to mess with you" and melting away at the door. After his five- or six-hour meal, he looks for a place to read, which he does until the morning, and then sleeps until the early evening. How did he get this way? The other folks on the street shrug and say, "Loser."

IN CASUAL conversations, Joseph certainly does not seem like a loser. He is extremely well-read and intelligent; he hasn't lost his mind or his health--only his chance to be a part of mainstream society. Joseph's hardworking mother brought him up in Albuquerque, N.M. Had his high school offered him an education that measured up to his abilities, Joseph might have gone to college. Instead, he began reading on his own, skimping on his studies.

After high school graduation, Joseph discovered that most jobs in academic fields were closed to him without a college degree. No one encouraged him to try college, and he couldn't afford it on his own. When Joseph lost his first job as an unskilled laborer, he discovered that he could survive on the streets. He's been there ever since, partly because he lacks initiative and partly because he's never been offered another chance to work.

Joseph and other are on the streets because they have slipped through the tenuous safety nets of society; they stay there because, after a few years, they cannot imagine how to get anywhere else. Yet despite the growling numbers of drifters, the public at large still treats them as though they don't exist. Certainly the magnitude of the problem is overwhelming; one can't give a quarter to everyone on the street, and a quarter doesn't go all that far.

Unfortunately, the difficulty of helping hungry people on an individual level all too often leads to a callous unwillingness to deal with them at all. Like this country's president, most of the public seems to hope that the homeless will simply go away, taking their plight with them. At the pizza place in Berkeley, the student clientele greeted the crowd around the trashcan with derisive yells of "Eeeeeuw, gross," and the employees often threw sawdust on the pizza before disposing of it--as if the crowd was trying to save money by waiting for the food to come out for free. But the same employees probably laugh at presidential advisor Edwin Meese's suggestion that people sleep in shelters for the homeless because it's cheaper. The hungry people scraped the sawdust off the pizza and ate what could be salvaged.

Many people in Joseph's situation cannot return to the society they have left. If they are not crazy now, a few years of street living might change them. Any prospect of a future in the job market or in a house seems ludicrous after they've been outside for long enough. The hungry will not go away; all the same, they have somehow been disenfranchised. Their straits will be eased by small, local organizations such as those in Berkeley, but without major policy changes--or perhaps even structural changes--in state governments and in Washington, their numbers will continue to grow.

I asked Joseph once if he foresaw getting a "straight job" or voting in the next election or living in a place of his own. The answer to each of these questions was "No." What would he do instead? "Well, I'll probably smoke a lot of cigarettes."