bugs
Of all the problems encountered while living homeless or among them, the most disgusting to me was the bugs. It's a bit amazing i suppose, but really, all the other important things were more or less taken care of. Obviously, many other factors were still decidedly of a shabby and altogether cruddy nature, but the bug problem had absolutely no long term solution. You smash one three-inch cockroach into a smeary mess that makes the object doing the squishing (a shoe, newspaper, stick, cd case, empty can of insect spray, phonebook, plastic dinosaur [stegosaurus], but mostly shoes) completely repulsive to handle until most of the tiny organs have been scraped off (at which point they transform into merely another unidentifiable splotch of crud on the wall) and then a few minutes later, there's another one. Except this one will fly at you. Or there'll be three of four or eight little scurrying ones and you don't even try to hit them; you just flinch as far away from them as possible and hope they'll wander back out of sight. And that's the worst part (to me, at least)- knowing that there're always there. No matter how many you kill or see, you can't let yourself think about how many millions more are scuttling around just out of sight behind the walls and floors and air ducts. (i met a sixteen-year old guy named Drip who had taken too much of some drug [never found out which one, never really cared] and spent most of his time sitting in a corner staring at his feet and twitching. Sometimes he'd mumble stuff and if you got really close you could hear him saying things about flies in his brain and so on. Whenever I thought about all the invisible bugs, I could feel the inclination to become kinda like that.) All the other basic stuff was taken care of in some way or another: when you were cold, you could go get more cheap used clothes, if you got truly motivated, you could find ways to take a shower (renting a motel room being the most common), if you were really hungry, you could find free food in a couple of different places (my friend Troll prided himself on the fact that he never took free food. He only took food with a price tag on it and after years of doing this, he had it down to an art. One night he brought me a cooked lobster and some oranges. [Troll could steal anything- things that were really expensive to sell for money, a lot of other crud just because he could. i honestly think he was a kleptomaniac. {he once explained to me how he had a couple of delivery guy uniforms (with nametags and everything) and he would wear one of these, go back to the storeroom of the department store the uniform matched, and walk out with a couple of vcrs or stereos. He once got four color tvs}. i even watched Troll steal a Mercedes once (we put it back later).]) anyway- there were quite a few abandoned buildings to sleep in, even if some of them were falling apart, but they all had bugs along with a roof. The people who had been on the streets a long time were almost oblivious to insects. When i first mentioned them to my friend Milo, he looked kind of surprised and said he never really noticed it, but he decided to become my Orkin guy and was very nice about killing the creepier things that wandered into my general vicinity (i guess that would include the time he beat up this one pimp who kept annoying me) and seemed almost amused by my consistenly creeped-out reaction to the tiny (or huge) scuttling ones.
