January 20th, 2008 is a bad day for camping in Indianapolis, IN. I find a warehouse job in Plainfield, just west of the Indy airport. I have just enough gas to get to the job, but not enough to get back to my friend’s place in Zionsville. After work, I start driving around, looking for a place to camp. Working for a 9 dollars an hour, I hate the idea of renting or staying in a motel. Besides, it would be about two weeks before I would get paid for my first days of work.
There is one day in an Indiana winter on which one cannot make a campfire, but that day is not today. It's wet but not cold enough to freeze. The mist and fog stand on the ground to shoulder height. Everything is soaking wet and cold. The sky is gray and the wind from the south cuts with a withering density. I try to find something dry that will take a flame. I reach far into the spruce and break off some dry twigs, and place them in the small aluminum can that I use for a stove. It has holes poked in the bottom of it. I always start my fires in the can until I have coals. Then I just lay the can down on its side and build the fire over it. Once it's going I fish the can out for later usage.
Now the sun has gone down. I’ve placed several rocks next to the flame which I plan to use to warm myself in the tent. My eyelids are heavy as I am exhausted from the day's work. I stare off into the flame, my mind resting in the low light. Suddenly, one of the rocks explodes with a loud crack. Instant darkness. The explosion has spread glowing coals around the campsite, burning holes in my burlap tarp and jeans. I suddenly realize how lucky I am to be uninjured by the explosion. I retire to my tent to try to get some rest before the next day’s work.
Around midnight a nasty thunderstorm rolls through the area. Lightning approaches and a heavy rain begins to throw its large warm drops of water around. This is the most unlikely of winter weather in Indiana. A warm wind howling out of the south, bringing tons of water with it. Next, I find that my tent location is in the middle of a sometimes creek. And this creek is now flowing through my tent, soaking everything, including my sleeping bag and myself. I’m forced to rise and abandon my campsite. I put my shoes on and run the quarter mile back to my car through the impressive storm.
After a sleepless night, I head back into the job early, before first light. I shave and splash some water on my face. I smell of the fire and its now been several days since I’ve showered. I stare into the small mirror. I barely know myself.
The worst season for camping in Indiana is the spring. The spring of 2008 was the worst imaginable, with ice storms and snow. Rain and flooding. Deadly freezing. This type of shit goes on from Groundhog’s day until Easter. It is impossible to camp then, for me. Perhaps some professional outdoorsman could hack it but not me. On March 1st I found myself thinking of how much easier it had been to camp in January when the world was still, for the most part, frozen and white. Snow is a great insulator, and the freezing cold is comparatively easy to deal with. The endless oppressive cold and wet of the Indiana spring forced me to seek other accommodations.
One day at work I was in the restroom with my shirt off cleaning my armpits, when a black man named Mark asked me if I wanted to move into his place in the third story of an old house in Plainfield. I said I would, and I lived with him from March until the middle of May. We were fast friends but we had a falling out after I unknowingly used his sister’s funeral picture to roll up some joints. He did not appreciate that. I said, “I’m sorry I broke up pot on your dead sister’s picture.” Apologies didn’t matter at that point. He was super pissed off. He was a Christian man and lived a clean life except for his fornication, drinking and crack smoking. We smoked pot regularly together and I came to take his friendship for granted. But come the middle of May, he kicked me out and I went right back to the same campsite where I had lived in January and February.
Homeless Hygiene
after a week of homelessness
the confluence of one's bodily odors
carries a humiliation all its own
the scrotum cries out for salvation
When personal sanity must be sacrificed
for uncleanliness is also of the mind
one realizes that poverty is a spiritual state
not disconnected from a corporeal economy
that there is moral poverty
intellectual vacancy
the culturally disinherited
the people in whose minds history
has not taken root
you've got to get some of that gold bond powder
doesn't matter how you get it just do
and some hand sanitizer
take your socks off
rub your feet down until you feel
the heat from the alcohol
then squirt some gel onto a dirty sock
and now the nuts
that's right
focus through the burn
the pain is temporary but the clean
raw feeling lasts into the afternoon sun
In September 2008 the Indianapolis Airport opened a new terminal on the west side, near my campsite. One day after work when I got back to the tent, my bag of grass was gone. I knew someone had found my nook. I wondered why my handle of Grant’s and other supplies remained untouched, but I didn’t have to wonder long. Around midnight that night, Plainfield’s finest police officers paid me a visit. As I unzipped my tent door I could see in the haze of the cop’s flashlight several roaches from joints, and I thought that I was busted. Marijuana is, of course, a heinous crime in the state of Indiana. It’s the cops bread and butter. They couldn’t be the effective municipal fundraisers that they are without the marijuana prohibition racket. And once they have you in the system, they don’t stop fucking you. The fucking never stops. It's jail. Then probation. Then jail. Then house arrest. You can’t leave their county. It's all very expensive and none of it is moral. It's all just their jobs. Don’t ask them to think about their jobs. If you do, they will say, “I’m just doing my job.” And they are correct. They are just doing their jobs. Never mind that their jobs are to ruin normal people's lives for doing things that normal people do.
But in this particular case, I wasn’t fucked for marijuana possession. Of the five cops present, none of them discovered the roaches from my joints. They didn’t mention the pot. They mentioned that the sheriff had been through my campsite earlier in the day. They said they had me on loitering and littering. They could tell that I had been shitting outside (in a hole) and that was illegal (littering). I quickly plead the fifth which made them all laugh. And because I am a white man with short hair and no visible tattoos—because I look like I could be a cop myself and because I don’t treat the police with disrespect—I did not get arrested that night. They told me to clear out of town and if they ever ran my tags again they could site me for loitering and littering, which are punishable by fines and imprisonment. And while I was packing up all my things under the glare of the cops flashlights, a full nine months after I had arrived, all I could think about was how that sheriff stole my bag of pot. He was probably smoking it right then. Enjoying the fruits of my labor.
Nutting
You can go there
To that place in the bower
Under the canopy of vines creating
An awning for the sun. Where
No one else has been.
Where the walnuts hang in clusters
Where the wind cannot penetrate
But only whispers and sighs
And the slight swaying of the branches
Break the stillness.
And when you are in that place undisturbed
Of serenity and calm, you can do
What Wordsworth did:
Wreck it in juvenile abandon.
Go crazy kicking puff balls.
Pulling down branches.
Scattering nuts about you.
You can experience that under appreciated
Aspect of Romance. The destructive frenzy,
The decadence of destructive masculinity.
Tearing away what was there before.
Leaving your own egotistical markings
Like Bear claw markings, on the trees.
Ripping up the fertile ground beneath.
Unearthing much that is bad.
Who is to say what you might not do
In that situation of solitude?
What think you I take my cock in hand
To perform? Penning there my singular
Testicular expression.
The morning of November 4, 2008, I wake before dawn in my tent on W. Washington St., Indianapolis, IN, to a certain chill and two inches of snow. It has been a beautiful, long and mild autumn, but now it's turned to winter overnight. Too cold to stay in the tent. I get up and pace the couple of hundred feet from my tent to where my car is hidden, adjacent to a used car lot in the parking lot of a Rent-a-Center. The next few weeks will be bitterly cold, but I stay outside until the first of the year. I am living on 45$ a week that I get from donating plasma at a place on E. Washington St. I am very limited on gasoline, using only enough to drive to the plasma center on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I am a hard stick. My folder has a little red sticker that means only the old nurse can stick me. After a couple of months, they tell me not to come back. I have little veins. I spend the next few minutes knocking the snow and ice from my car. I have to leave the Rent-a-Center parking lot before the manager arrives.
I eat dinner at the Baptist men's shelter downtown but I can't sleep there. If you want dinner you have to come an hour early and listen to an illiterate man talk about the importance of reading the Bible. I found this to be a funny theme because of the 120 or so men present, I was probably among the four or five who could recite the English alphabet, let alone make heads or tails of the King James Bible. Next, they give you dinner. After dinner there is more bible talk time, then lights out. If you want to, you can leave after dinner but if you do, you can't come back until the next evening. It’s cold out but if you stay, you deal with the sounds of gay homeless men enjoying sucking each other's dicks. I’m not gay, but I did have a queer feeling when the pastor gave an extended hellfire sermon against sodomy right before lights out. It was a “Wo, what is this shit here,” kind of moment. A perfectly useless speech during which I was transported to the opening scene of The African Queen, which depicted an equally futile exercise in traditional Christianity. And then the lights flip off… Some people are born gay. These were truly evangelical homosexuals. They were actively recruiting for the team. One might say they were real fishers of men.
You don't have to get too many dinners at the shelter before you hear the whole story: The downfall of America happened in 1904 when the American Standard Bible was adopted. The Baptists, however, still read the real King James Bible. That's why they are the only real Christians.
My last meal at the shelter was in early December when I picked up a bad germ from the corned beef hash. It was a clear, cold night. I spent most of it leaned against a tree blowing it out both ends. My barf freezes in my hair. Every time I get out of my sleeping bag I risk hypothermia but the alternative is worse. So cold I peed in a tall boy beer can, then, in a rush to get out of the tent, I kicked my pee can over. By the time I got back to the tent I had a frozen disk of urine that I picked up and tossed outside.
The Conflagration
I knew that it was going bad
When the leaves fell from the trees.
My tent that had once been concealed
Can now be seen from the street.
Have you ever seen all your stuff on fire?
I knew that it was going bad
The duck tape covering the bullet holes
Doesn’t stick when it freezes
Exposes me to the freezing breezes.
Have you ever seen all your stuff on fire?
