What It's Like to Live on the Street

When you're downtown in a larger city for whatever reason, chances are you'll see at least a few raggedy-looking people with tousled hair and vacant expressions on most of their faces. Some are unshaven men, but there are women among them as well. Instinctively, you stay as far away from them as possible; they might try to bum money from or, at worst, assault you. Either way, you know they're "street people," homeless and most likely alcoholics.

But what's it like to be in their shoes? Suppose, just for one day, you were to trade places with one of them; you absorb their look, their clothing, their actions - and their tenure:

To begin with, it doesn't matter how you became that way; you're not happy with it either. With wrinkled, dirty clothes that smell of sweat and dirt, you've been beaten by life. Whatever events caused this is passé; you've been on the streets for so long that you don't even remember what they were.

You may awaken in the morning from a spot beneath an overpass, where you've made your "bed" in an old water-heater box. Already, the sticky heat is making your soiled clothes stick to oil-clogged pores of your skin. After getting up and brushing off your clothes, you look for cigarette remnants that others have thrown out of their cars. For all intents and purposes, that's your "breakfast."

Slowly emerging from your little "camping spot", you begin the trek downtown. You shuffle slowly; your feet feel like lead, and you're weakened by the lack of desire as well as food. When you finally arrive at the busy streets, you try to stop someone who looks friendly and ask them for some spare change. To hide the fact that you're a "bum" (although your clothes obviously show it) and to, hopefully, gain their approval, you explain that you need it for food, a phone call, or some other apparently-innocent purpose. More often than not, though, you become discouraged as the person walks past quickly without giving you a cent.