(*This essay was originally written for Street News’ anniversary issue)

There is at least one consolation to be had in “living rough,” as the Brits call being homeless: life on the streets will certainly grow you.

Those who go through it will know things the rest of us don’t even know we don’t know.

I realized this one hairy night, over thirty years ago, when I was living in Detroit and working at the public television station there. I was reeling from the effects of sleep deprivation at the time, having been on a twelve-hour-day work cycle for half the week.

The annual fundraising auction was on. And it was my job as the “director” of the film department—which in its entirety consisted of a single Arriflex BL camera with all the requisite accouterments and me—to go out every morning and film any donated items that couldn’t be brought into the studio, then edit the footage to air once it got back from the lab. It was all very deadline and very high pressure and I had gotten into the habit of winding down with a few drinks at the end of the day.

This was in the early Seventies, not long after the riots, when downtown Detroit would become ghostville at dusk, no-one but predators and adventurers daring to hit the mean streets after dark.

Predators and adventurers, that is, and fools like me.

After all, I was from New York, which bought me a measure of street cred out there in the Midwest. And so long as no one knew it was Mamaroneck, New York I was from—the “sticks” as far as any real New Yorker was concerned—I felt I had license to venture where I pleased. There was a seedy, run down gin mill on the waterfront I sometimes braved my way into. I forget the name of the place, if indeed it had one. But it was always pretty festive; always an unholy concoction of hustlers, pimps, alkies, druggies, drag queens, thugs, con men and so forth, all convened in an uneasy peace. On any given night there would be at least a dozen or so concealed handguns keeping the lid on things in the same way the advent of nuclear age keeps nations in check, no one daring to get too far out of line lest they trigger the syndrome of mutually assured destruction.

I was holding forth with a long-haired type sitting on the next stool over one blurry night in this place, the two of us resolving the world’s ills one by one with the greatest of ease, grasping at the kind of tidy resolutions that begin with “If everyone in the world would just…”

What can I tell you.

I still had my head full of the sixties.

When last call rolled around I was half in the bag and not looking too fondly toward the long trek home. There wasn’t a prayer of finding a cab. Any hack who valued his purse and life kept clear of the waterfront after midnight.

Fortunately my new friend lived nearby and offered me a couch to crash on. We stumbled down the block, deep into the down-on-your-luck end of town, me schlepping a briefcase with an SLR camera and light meter inside. A few minutes later we rounded a corner to a murky, three-block-long row of every-one-exactly-alike eight story tenements each equipped, I noticed, with a TV camera above the front door with which you could, by tuning to a vacant channel on your TV, cast a suspicious eye on whoever was down there ringing your buzzer.

It was a fairly costly and sophisticated bit of technology to have back then. Certainly for poverty row. But it was there for good reason. At the time, the Detroit police pretty much took a leave-well-enough-alone attitude toward street crime in certain parts of town. You couldn’t expect any help from them.

Your only line of defense was the steel-reinforced door separating you and yours from the rest of the ugly world. My new friend—let’s call him Willie—lived five flights up in one of these grime havens. He roomed with a member of the Black Panther Party who in turn shared his room with his live-in girlfriend, Cinnamon. Neither he or she were home when we got there. But on the living room wall there was a picture of her: a butter-colored black woman with reddish hair and a splash of freckles on her cheeks. Ergo the name cinnamon. On a shelf next to this stood a rather large Snoopy piggy bank filled with coins. I hauled out my camera and snapped a picture of this apparition, I don’t know why. Then I snapped a picture of Willie, a picture of the Panther Party poster on the wall after that, a picture of the cinnamon picture, of the kitchen sink, the toilet, the window…

Like I said, I was pretty loaded.

After this brief flurry I felt kind of drained, wanting nothing else but to put a few hours of sleep between what remained of the night and the throbbing head I’d be sure to wake up nursing, so I hit the couch. About ten seconds later I was out like a light. And, what seemed like barely ten seconds after that, it was morning and the clock on the table was giving me the bad news that I had maybe fifteen minutes to get to work if I wanted to be in on time.

I made for the bathroom, splashed cold water on my face, barreled downstairs, still rumpled and dazed and poured myself into the first cab that stopped for me. It wasn’t until I got to the job that I realized I'd forgotten my briefcase. And it wasn’t until well after dark that my day was finished and I could go get the thing.

I don’t know how I found the building in the dark—a distinguishing scrawl of graffiti perhaps. But I did remember the apartment number somehow. When I hit the buzzer for the third time a green light went on in the camera above the door and, five stories above me, a window opened and a woman stuck her head out.

Cinnamon.

I recognized her from the photograph.

She peered down at me, a foreboding look on her face, and slowly shook her head “no.”

Not the response I was looking for.

“I left my stuff up there last night,” I complained back up at her. “I’ve got to get my stuff.”

Just then the buzzer sounded.

I pushed through the door…

Started trudging up the stairs…

Two flights up a guy swung around the corner looking mean enough to bite the face off a three year old child, spit it on his shoe, then go to lunch. In his hands was a nasty, twin-barreled, sawed-off piece of business that could make short work of anyone it might decide to spit at. He cocked the thing, the corner of his lip curling up as he did, and leveled it straight in my face.

“Where’s my old lady’s piggy bank!” he demanded. “I’m not going to ask you twice.”

Piggy bank!!?

I heard the distinct sound of chain locks snapping into place up and down the corridor, felt the dull throb of my pulse kicking in my ears. Just seventeen years on this earth and I’d run smack dab into my worst urban nightmare. Just the thing I’d always feared would reveal me for the spineless, street-stupid, suburban sap I really was, black skin and New York pedigree not withstanding.

I just knew what would happen next. I’d embarrass myself beyond all shame. Dissolve into a terrorized, whimpering mass of Jello, right there on the down and dirty tenement steps of Motown USA.

Only that’s not the way it went down, exactly.

For the first few seconds, maybe, my mind denied everything, pretending, This isn’t happening …It’s a dream …That’s it! I’m dreaming. I’m gonna’ wake up any minute now. Then screaming, when I didn’t wake up, Oh my God. This is real! I’m gonna’ die! This guy’s gonna’ blow me away right here in this filthy stinkin’ shit hole!

But now here’s the thing: Once I accepted this—that it was all really happening—my fear evaporated almost at once. And I realized, only much later, when I had the luxury of reflecting on the whole thing, that fear never exists inside the moment, that we never actually fear what is, we only ever fear when we peer ahead, when we start thinking about what might happen. Once it actually goes down, you can’t help but start to deal with it. “Think for minute,” I heard myself say, suddenly aware that I was not, after all, dead yet; thinking Maybe there’s a way to get out of this, “why would I steal your wife’s piggy bank? It’s not like I’m hard up or anything. Hell, I got a good eighty bucks cash in my pocket and over four hundred dollars’ worth of equipment upstairs.”

It dawned on me as soon as I got this out of my mouth that I had just all but promised this pissed-off, gun toting, Black Panther dude that he could be near half a grand richer with a simple pull of the trigger.

“Ask Willie” I quickly blurted. “He’ll tell ya’. That bank was still there when I left this morning.”

“Willie ain’t here,” he told me back.

I mulled this for tick.

Where had Willie gone off to?

“Well I didn’t take your piggy bank, man,” I said, not that there was a prayer he’d believe me on my word alone. “If you want,” I added, finally finding my normal voice, “keep the gun on me, we’ll go upstairs, wait for Willie, straighten this all out when he gets here.”

He stood staring at me for a long minute. A galaxy of seconds, each clear and separate and distinct from the other. The chatter from a too-loud TV spilled down the stairs, standing in for the sound of wheels churning in his head as he chewed on my proposal. I wondered if he was thinking about Cinnamon up there, weighing whether or not he wanted to have her involved. This was man stuff after all. It was upon this thought that I suddenly understood—with the kind of precise and heightened clarity that terror can bring—what this whole deadly exercise was really all about.

He hasn’t come down here to rob me, I told myself. He hasn’t come down here to kill me either. He’s come down here to defend his woman’s honor. He’s come down here, shotgun in hand, to be The Man.

I didn’t just think this either.

I knew it.

I knew it as only knowing can know.

This was all about being The Man.

Finally, he motioned me forward with a flick of the gun.

Just like you see them do in the movies.

I squeezed myself by him on the narrow stairwell and, two barrels of sloppy death aimed at my back, we went up to his apartment. Cinnamon was standing at the corner of the bedroom door in night clothes when we got there. She worried us into the room, her creamy, feline loveliness making the place feel more like a cozy little hideaway than the dingy hovel it was.

Staring me down all the way, her old man motioned me to the same couch which, just that morning, had served as my bed, then plopped down in the easy chair opposite it and laid the gun across his lap in a classic Protector of Home and Hearth pose.

“Cinnamon,” he said after a second or two, “fetch me a beer.” His jaw muscles flexed as he said it. And as she hustled to the kitchen his eyes betrayed a slight, self-satisfied glint. No doubt who was the man in this scenario.

Cinnamon side-eyed me when she returned with the beer, a long-neck Bud. But she kept her silence.

No doubt who was the woman on this set either.

We sat there, me hunched forward on the couch, Cinnamon now on the arm of his chair, him still staring me down, one hand on the trigger, the other wrapped around the beer. Every minute or so he took another pull. About ten minutes of this, no one saying anything, and the bottle was empty.

“Bring me another one, baby,” he ordered Cinnamon again, only a bit more softly this time. When he had drained the last of the second long-neck, he let off a contented sigh and nestled his shoulders deeper into the chair. Then he swept the room with his dark brown eyes, surveyed all that of which he was master, before settling them once again on me.

“Yo. You want a beer, man?” he said.

I knew it was all done after that, knew that I was going to get out of there with all my wits and limbs in tact. I knew this without question as we each raised a bottle to our lips and a ritual old and coveted as beer itself began taking place.

“So what do you do anyway?” he asked.

As he did, his trigger finger at last went slack.

We were male bonding now.

We shot the bull a little longer. Cinnamon allowed herself a piece of a smile. A smile which would cause even the Pope to conjure up a few not so pure thoughts. I told the two of them a little about working in TV. He told me a little about what being in the Panthers was like.

“Shoot,” he said at last, “I know you didn’t steal my shit, any ole half a fool can see that. Go on, get outta' here.”

I was halfway sorry to go.

Almost.

This wasn’t the last time something like this would happen. And though I would never in a million years have wished upon myself what went down on the stairwell that night in Detroit, I have to say that each and every time I’ve found myself in hot and deadly waters since, I’ve had the hard-won street lesson it taught on my side and it is this: There is the thing that’s going on and then there is the other thing going on. And if you can see past one to the other you just might have half a chance of holding on to your skin.

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Lee Stringer lived on the streets from the early eighties until the mid-nineties. He is a former editor and columnist of Street News. His essays and articles have appeared in a variety of other publications, including The Nation, The New York Times, and Newsday. He is the critically-acclaimed author of Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street, Like Shaking Hands With God: A Conversation About Writing (with Kurt Vonnegut), and Sleepaway School, a memoir. He lives in Mamaroneck, New York.

Meet Lee at http://www.leestringer.net.

Listen to Lee’s radio show at http://stringer.progressiveradionetwork.org.

Elsewhere on the web: A Miracle on 14th Street, Lee’s first essay for thesecondroad.org

 

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