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Summertime, and the Squatting is Easy. Maybe too easy...
They come by freight train and Chinatown bus and the back seat of beat-up cars whose drivers pulled over for them on the highway. They drink forties in Tompkins Square Park, panhandle when they need to, and sleep in parks, squats or stairwells. They stay for days or months, and then they move on. Their biggest fear is not being stabbed or raped or murdered – it’s getting stuck.
They are the Travelers, Crusties, Pyrate Punks – one has “Pyrate” tattooed on one forearm and “Punk” on the other, Squatter Kids, or just the Kids. If they acquire hardcore drug habits and end up staying through the winter, they risk becoming one of the homebums, crackheads or wingbats who “think it’s all depressing being homeless because they make it that way,” says Midget, 18, who dropped out of high school and left his home in Las Vegas three years ago.
They come by freight train and Chinatown bus and the back seat of beat-up cars whose drivers pulled over for them on the highway. They drink forties in Tompkins Square Park, panhandle when they need to, and sleep in parks, squats or stairwells. They stay for days or months, and then they move on. Their biggest fear is not being stabbed or raped or murdered – it’s getting stuck.
They are the Travelers, Crusties, Pyrate Punks – one has “Pyrate” tattooed on one forearm and “Punk” on the other, Squatter Kids, or just the Kids. If they acquire hardcore drug habits and end up staying through the winter, they risk becoming one of the homebums, crackheads or wingbats who “think it’s all depressing being homeless because they make it that way,” says Midget, 18, who dropped out of high school and left his home in Las Vegas three years ago.
Because of the availability of drugs like heroin and the entertaining, usually riotous squatter scene headquartered at Tompkins Square Park, New York City is for these itinerants like the mythological Land of the Lotus-Eaters.
“It’s so easy to get swallowed up by the city, and you just get apathetic and lethargic and not do anything but sit in the park and drink forties all day, you know?” says Stevo, a 31-year-old Memphis native who has been on and off homeless since 16 and has made New York City one of his east coast destinations for the past six summers.
Stevo, along with Amelia, 21, and her yellow dog Cartman are spanging – panhandling for spare change – on St. Mark’s Place to raise money for Chinatown bus tickets to Philadelphia, and for beer to drink while they spange. Their sign reads “PASSIN’ THRU BROKE ‘N’ UGLY. Please Help!!,” and on the other side, “DON’T MAKE ME SING,” which is not a hollow threat. They have also had success with “Out of work supermodels. Will pose for $1.”
They’ve been in the city for a couple of days, and Amelia, equal parts from Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, is already the worse for wear. She had a beautiful singing voice a few months ago, and she played the harmonica. “Now listen to her,” says Stevo as she croons like a harpie at passersby. “Just all the drinking and drama.”
“This town is rough,” Stevo says. “You been down to fucking Tompkins Square, right? You seen all those kids that are down there? Always fucked up all the time? That’s what this town does to you unless you just get the fuck out of here. You gotta get up and get out of here.”
Their goal is to get out of the city tonight. Amelia plans to claim Cartman is a service animal so that he can ride the bus.
The squatters all seem to share a love-hate relationship with their New York center of operations.
“This park sucks, by the way,” says Brando, a high energy 17-year-old from the West Coast who has spent the better part of the last month doing things like trying to catch the black squirrel that lives in the park and getting drunk with the “rich kids” who shop on St. Mark’s, pitching in a few bucks when he has them. Tim, 18, from Richmond, Virginia, takes out a Gameboy that he “got from some girl in New Jersey” and starts playing Super Mario Bros. 2. A few minutes later he rolls a cigarette.
“Today’s pretty boring,” he says. A fun day, he says, is a day on which they “get drunk, hang out with girls, or something cool happens.”
“[The park] traps people. It becomes a routine,” explains Midget, 18, from Las Vegas, who arrived at the park on August 6 with Brando for a Leftöver Crack concert and is still here on August 22. He takes off his glasses to examine a map of New York State, looking for Amityville, where punk rock bands Cheap Sex, The Scarred, The Frantix, The Skum, and Vexed Youth would be playing the next day.
The travelers’ interest – in music, sometimes politics or ethics, in seeing the sights and meeting new people – is what puts them on the top of the homeless hierarchy.
“Some of the traveling kids don’t do anything,” says Tim. They hang out only with other traveling kids, don’t go to shows or listen to music.
“They’re just bums,” says Midget.
“They’re one step behind” the homebums, and well on their way, Tim agrees.
“It’s so easy to get swallowed up by the city, and you just get apathetic and lethargic and not do anything but sit in the park and drink forties all day, you know?” says Stevo, a 31-year-old Memphis native who has been on and off homeless since 16 and has made New York City one of his east coast destinations for the past six summers.
Stevo, along with Amelia, 21, and her yellow dog Cartman are spanging – panhandling for spare change – on St. Mark’s Place to raise money for Chinatown bus tickets to Philadelphia, and for beer to drink while they spange. Their sign reads “PASSIN’ THRU BROKE ‘N’ UGLY. Please Help!!,” and on the other side, “DON’T MAKE ME SING,” which is not a hollow threat. They have also had success with “Out of work supermodels. Will pose for $1.”
They’ve been in the city for a couple of days, and Amelia, equal parts from Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, is already the worse for wear. She had a beautiful singing voice a few months ago, and she played the harmonica. “Now listen to her,” says Stevo as she croons like a harpie at passersby. “Just all the drinking and drama.”
“This town is rough,” Stevo says. “You been down to fucking Tompkins Square, right? You seen all those kids that are down there? Always fucked up all the time? That’s what this town does to you unless you just get the fuck out of here. You gotta get up and get out of here.”
Their goal is to get out of the city tonight. Amelia plans to claim Cartman is a service animal so that he can ride the bus.
The squatters all seem to share a love-hate relationship with their New York center of operations.
“This park sucks, by the way,” says Brando, a high energy 17-year-old from the West Coast who has spent the better part of the last month doing things like trying to catch the black squirrel that lives in the park and getting drunk with the “rich kids” who shop on St. Mark’s, pitching in a few bucks when he has them. Tim, 18, from Richmond, Virginia, takes out a Gameboy that he “got from some girl in New Jersey” and starts playing Super Mario Bros. 2. A few minutes later he rolls a cigarette.
“Today’s pretty boring,” he says. A fun day, he says, is a day on which they “get drunk, hang out with girls, or something cool happens.”
“[The park] traps people. It becomes a routine,” explains Midget, 18, from Las Vegas, who arrived at the park on August 6 with Brando for a Leftöver Crack concert and is still here on August 22. He takes off his glasses to examine a map of New York State, looking for Amityville, where punk rock bands Cheap Sex, The Scarred, The Frantix, The Skum, and Vexed Youth would be playing the next day.
The travelers’ interest – in music, sometimes politics or ethics, in seeing the sights and meeting new people – is what puts them on the top of the homeless hierarchy.
“Some of the traveling kids don’t do anything,” says Tim. They hang out only with other traveling kids, don’t go to shows or listen to music.
“They’re just bums,” says Midget.
“They’re one step behind” the homebums, and well on their way, Tim agrees.
Midget plans to start a band when he returns to Vegas. Tim’s long-term goals are less fully formed, but the basic idea is “not to end up like some of these retards,” he says, gesturing to a cluster of middle-aged, strung out homebums a few benches down.
The group includes L.E.S. Jewels, who calls himself the king of the park. He is sitting on the ground, yelling. During the “bad heroin” scare last summer, he got a lot of media coverage and became the face of the East Village heroin addict. I had heard from many travelers that he would be worth interviewing, although he did sometimes punch people in the face, unprovoked. I thought I would wait until the next day to interview him thinking I could catch him in a more tranquil mood; the next day, he was in jail, having been arrested by two undercover cops.
The travelers shake their heads and laugh about L.E.S. Jewels, but his presence in the park is a constant reminder of what can happen if you stay too long and do too many drugs.
Although travelers tend not to be hardcore addicts, most have dabbled in hard drugs, and many find it harder in New York to resist the occasional bump.
Last time Stevo was here was a few months ago, when fentanyl-laced heroin was landing hundreds of users in the emergency room. “It was really really bad,” he recalls. “I went into the McDonald’s with my buddy, he gave me half a bag [of heroin]. I was done… I don’t have a habit. I don’t really do drugs, you know, it’s just one of those things. Somebody’s like hey, you want to do some dope? Next thing you know you’re in fucking Cabrini Hospital.”
Stevo is trying to stick to drinking, although even that dependence is becoming an issue. He was hurting for a drink when I encountered him around noon. “Sucks to be such a fucking drunk,” he said on the way back from the store to buy forties.
Josh, 18, from Portland, Oregon, “had a huge [heroin] habit,” but went through bupernorphine treatment and kicked it. Now he just drinks and smokes weed.
Josh has been riding freight trains since his grandfather kicked him out of his family’s house three years ago. He speaks like a much older man about the “boxcars, gondalas, grainers, piggybacks, 48’s and 53’s” that take him across the country, an experience he says can be spiritual when he’s by himself.
“I didn’t choose to be homeless, I got kicked out,” Josh explains, but when he left home, he realized there was “absolutely nothing” he missed about having a roof over his head. “I’m sure if I wanted to get a job I could,” he says. He has worked in carpentry and as a janitor at a law firm. But, he says, “I like traveling. I don’t want to have to get a job, be in the workforce for 60 years, buy an RV and then travel. I want to travel now.”
He and his sometime girlfriend Lauren, 17, who also got kicked out of her home in Portland, have a measured way of speaking and hold themselves to standards of behavior one would not expect from vagrants. They are vegan when they can be, but lapse into vegetarianism while on the road. Josh has an aversion to spanging, but does it mostly for his four-month-old puppy, Tron, whom he feeds before he feeds himself. He has trained Tron not to eat anything, including still-warm McDonald’s French Fries, from the ground.
Josh shrugs when asked about his politics; to be free to live them is enough for him. But many travelers, looking into the workaday world from the outside, are vociferous about the flaws they see.
“I think I’m better than a lot of the people that shop at Pier 1 Import. That’s my whole purpose in life: not to shop there,” says Tim, drawing laughs.
“There’s a bunch of cool people [in the city],” says Amelia after two days here, “but there’s a bunch of fucking apathetic, ignorant fucking people who think they’re so fucking cool cause they’re from NYC.”
“They’re from the LES,” Stevo interjects mockingly.
Amelia recently spent time in San Francisco and New Orleans. “Honestly it’s apathy that bothers me the most” about New York, she says. “People are rude, I don’t give a shit about that. I’d rather someone be rude to me than walk by ignoring me. Maybe I’m cursing myself by saying that.”
The word “work” comes from the Old English “werk,” Midget explains, crossing his arms and leaning back sagely on a bench in Tompkins Square Park. “Werk” means suffer. Why work, he posits, when everyone throws away half their food, and pizza shops let you have leftovers free at the end of a night?
Tim, Brando and Midget, who’ve been traveling together for the past month, have never been on the road through the winter. Many travelers work through the winter as construction workers, migrant farmers, waitresses, dishwashers, autobody repairmen, professional dominatrixes, whatever, saving whatever doesn’t go toward food and rent for when the warm weather rolls around again. Otherwise, they usually migrate south and continue traveling.
The teenage trio is planning to head north to Montreal from here. “It’s going to be pretty cold there, so hopefully someone will give me a sleeping bag,” says Tim. That’s as far as any of them have thought through the plan.
“We’ve heard so many stories from out there,” Midget says, grinning. “The drug of choice is PCP.”
“I’m not gonna touch that shit,” says Tim. He’s determined to live the life while he can, and get out before it’s too late – by your “early thirties, you’re just stuck. Maybe 35,” he says. He worries, sometimes, about “what I’m gonna do once people don’t give a shit. Once you get to a certain age, people don’t have any sympathy anymore.”
“Fuck sympathy,” says Midget.
“Yeah, but it’s nice to get people’s money somehow,” Tim says, without glancing up from Super Mario Bros. 2.
You know it’s time to get out, he says thoughtfully, when you get “to the point where 15-year-old girls won’t buy you beer anymore.”
This piece won second place in the features category from the New York Press Association.
