Encounterculture

Bums, Bums, Bums

(Author's note: I have decided to say Fuck All This Content-Related Shit, I'm Just Going To Write About Stuff Which Seems Worth Writing About For A While. As a result you may or may not be getting some very odd posts. This will be one of them.)

Bums. I guess that's not the "correct" term for them, but there's a difference between a homeless person and a bum. It's a pretty complicated difference, and it's not even necessarily a negative one; I just tend to think of homeless people as having a little bit more dignity about their proceedings than bums.

It's entirely possible, of course, that that's a difference that's only apparent to me because I live in Los Angeles where (by my definition, anyway) bums outnumber the homeless by like a kajillion to one. My friend Kevin once came over to my place pissed as fuck because while he'd been standing there talking on a cell phone, he'd nearly had to get in a fistfight with a bum who came up and started trying to get some money out of him. Fuck, I was walking to my car a week ago and got accosted by some guy who literally crossed the street to ask me for money and play the Veteran card, by which I mean he actually dropped the "I fought for this country and you can't even spare some change?" line (the proper response, incidentally, is "Well, you probably should have died for it", although God only knows that I'm too much of a pussy to use it).

These incidents are far from isolated, nor are they necessarily the worst of the lot - merely the most recent. The fact of the matter is that I have near-daily interactions with all kinds of bums, and it's very obvious why: I am what you'd call a Soft Touch, AKA a Big Fat Sucker. Thus, I get harangued with stories about sick daughters, lost bus fares, and a whole host of high-school fiction conventions which manage to sound even less credible when they're all crammed together in one two-minute Howitzer burst. And two minutes is just a prorated guess; usually I'm reaching for my wallet by thirty seconds. I used to have this altruistic veneer where I'd shrug off a few bucks by saying that I didn't care what the guy spent it on as long as it made them that much less miserable, but at this point it's useless to try and keep that up. This isn't to say that I now care if they spend my two bucks on crack or heroin or paint thinner or whatever; I am not a moralist, and even if it's very, very far from my main concern, I do take some measure of satisfaction in knowing that I can do a little bit to help someone's life suck less. But two years and hundreds (and inching towards thousands) of dollars spent thusly in Los Angeles do one hell of a number on your ideals (and don't get all preachy on me. The last time you gave a bum some money because he said he was hungry, why didn't you take him to McDonalds instead? I thought so).

I'm willing to admit two very unflattering things: one, that much of my natural reflex comes from what you might call some very strong avoidant tendencies in my personality, and two, that yes, at the end of the day this is a very curious form of personal interaction. I went to film school and tried to minor in English, but if you're willing to be really sabermetrical about it, these bums are probably more artistically gifted than most of the trained boredom-bags that basically sat around me during class. Bums' raps are... well, for lack of a better term, a form of entertainment - in the same way that a massive car accident is entertaining, mind you, but a form of entertainment nonetheless. What's remarkable about it isn't that it's entertaining like a story or a painting or anything like that; it has nothing to do with the safety of your own expectations or aesthetic criteria. Rather, it's shocking on a more meta-level.

Which brings me to Slim, also known as the perfect example. There were plenty of bums back in Durham, North Carolina, but ask any of my friends from high school who they thought of first and Slim's just going to be the name that comes up. For one, of course, Slim was the guy who would buy you liquor if you let him keep the change, so all us deviants eventually had some interaction with him. For another, Slim stank like you wouldn't believe, I mean seriously. Slim stank in a way that doesn't really translate to words. I guess the best way to imagine it is to stick your middle finger all the way up your ass, pull it out, pick your nose with it, and then eat your boogers: the level of disgust you glean from that fun little activity is a pretty reasonable correlative for how disgustingly significant Slim's rank-ass funk was. It wasn't even necessarily even a bad thing; much like our collective (non-bum) acquaintance Wesley was known for telling these stupendously outrageous lies (example: for three years, he was "just about" to buy a used Acura which had been baked out so many times that if you turned on the heater, the car would hotbox itself), Slim was just known for possessing this furious stench. It was just something which came to the front of your mind whenever you dealt with the guy.

But above and beyond anything else, Slim was motherfucking Out Going. In all the times Slim hit me up, I don't think he ever fed me a pre-fab rap or anything; he'd sit there and shoot the shit with you for a little bit, then say he needed some money to go get a burrito, or to go get some crack (Slim being, on occasion, a very forthright fellow), or on one infamous occasion, asking my friend Anna if he could have five dollars to go get some Preparation H for his hemarrhoids. (Anna, duly horrified by the mere hint that Slim had an ass, coughed up the dough.) It wasn't like he ever took a personal interest in any of us beyond our wallets, of course, but at the same time he wasn't just going straight for them and guilt-tripping us into digging deep. Slim became part of my friends' collective lore, a mythical rank-ass Marco Polo venturing out of the crackhouses of East Durham to genuinely interact with the locals. My friends have all kinds of Slim stories: my friend Jared, for instance, remembers him talking to Slim about how awful Vietnam was, and what it was like to get exposed to Agent Orange (although Jared also has the story about giving Slim a ride to a shelter and Slim cut the Worst Fart Ever in Jared's front seat). Even my mom, who owned a children's bookstore off the main path of Slim's beat, had a few. He was just inescapable and irrepressible, for better or worse.

Slim is the reason why I don't want to say that the difference between being a "bum" and being a "homeless person" is necssarily perjorative. Up at the top, I said it had to do with dignity, which it does - it takes a certain amount of sacrificing one's dignity to depend on other people to give you the money necessary to survive - but that's not the only sense in which dignity applies. Dignity is, above and beyond anything else, a social term; it's like a catch-all phrase that encompasses any sentiment of pride which you attach to your social existence. I live in a pretty beat-up neighborhood in LA (which I affectionately refer to as "Crackton Heights") and there are a lot of homeless people out here, but for the most part they leave me alone; they've got their own hierarchies which have nothing to do with the society I live in, and as such they tend to do their own thing. They've actually got some pretty intricate set-ups going - you wouldn't believe how extensive some of their arrangements are. Bums don't even give a shit about that; they don't even try to make their own existence, just hope that yours is comfortable enough to allow a little leeway (which mine is). But that doesn't mean that they necessarily play by our rules, which is why I end up talking to stank-ass Slim, or the schizophrenic Paul (with whom I had a very disjointed forty-five minute conversation in a laundromat which veered wildly betwen why I should box Mike Tyson and how his epilepsy led to his very odd haircut), or, yes, the addicts who hound me for money either by guilt ("BUT I WAS A VET"), by talent (the guy who had a full three-verse original rap ready at the drive-in) or by pure outrageous stream-of-consciousness emotional expression (the guy who, when I told him I didn't have any money, started screaming about my penis).

I don't really like calling these little self-contained events "entertaining" because yes, they're people too, and yes their lives do suck, and etc. I also don't necessarily like comparing them to artists, although bum's raps certainly do fit the bill of pulling something out of nothing, be it a fictional daughter or a Bus of Lore or whatever. And yet I can't escape those contexts, because they fit the events themselves so perfectly. What bothers me, I think, is that my ideals aren't life, but "entertainment" and "art", that those two things have become the ultimate frames for life experiences. The truth, and I say this with the full force of someone who just watched Sullivan's Travels last night, is that art doesn't necessarily have a goddamn thing to do with real life. They could make seven movies about Slim's life and he'd still be a crack addict; the truth is that the movies themselves don't address the issues, only present them, much like how bums' antisocial idiosyncracies and outrageous stories basically only present the issue of You having money and Them wanting it. There's a great line near the beginning of It's A Wonderful Life that I only just recently noticed: "How can you want to help a guy if you don't know anything about him?"

So much useless, stupid art is being made these days with a social purpose, and worse, a lot of it isn't even being posited at art. I guarantee you that in three hundred years, if in three hundred years they unearth a tape of one of the kajillion specials MTV made last year about Oxycontin or crystal meth or whatever poor minorities' drug had begun threatening comfortable white teenagers - and I'm sure you know exactly what kind of relentlessly formalist, Serena-Altschul hosted, rehash-the-same-stats-that-A-Very-Special-Boston-Public-already-brought-out minded tripe I'm talking about - they'll be using the same hushed tones that they use for John Winthrop's Citty On A Hill sermon. Culture has a funny way of surviving like that. And you know what? That sermon got exactly as many people closer to heaven as the MTV special got kids off of OCs - namely, none.

I dunno. I have a massive storehouse of enmity these days for people who run around thinking that they're making a difference in the world because they bought a ticket to go see Capturing the Friedmans (as well as my fair share of embarassment at acting in exactly such a way for the majority of my life). It's not that I'm outraged because these stuck-up ponces are living high on the hog while there's real suffering going on the world; everyone's got their own life, and not everyone's life is going to rule. It's just that if hearing a million similar stories, most of which smack equally of desperation and fraud, have taught me anything, it's that what art supposedly is - that can, on some level, drive a person to improve someone else's life, even if that improvement doesn't go past the point of you getting them a rock. God only knows what a camera and millions of dollars could lead us to.

Incidentally, two years ago, when I went home for Christmas break, there was a gigantic snowstorm, one of the biggest in recent North Carolina history. Nobody's seen Slim since.