“What happens in the black market is worth examining because of the way fortunes are made there, lives are often ruined there, and the vicissitudes of the law can deem one man a gangster or a chief executive (or both)

“What happens in the black market is worth examining because of the way fortunes are made there, lives are often ruined there, and the vicissitudes of the law can deem one man a gangster or a chief executive (or both). If the market does indeed embody the sum of all human wishes, then the secret ones are just as important as the ones that are openly displayed.” --Eric Schlosser

Call it pot. Call it weed. Call it bud, dope, greenery, or grass. In China, it is referred to as “ma,” in Africa; it is “dagga.” The Europeans politely devour their “hemp,” while Indians breathe the sweet fumes of the twirling “ganja” smoke. Any way you wish to describe it, “marijuana,” the traditional Mexican colloquialism for the cannabis plant, has been throned as the indivisible force of the world that dwells in the hidden caverns and secret places of society (Schlosser 2003). It is the currency of the street, the exchange piece of the societies that thrive upon the night when the rest of the drones lie sleeping in their warm beds. This “green gold” is the way of life for the street mongers that exist on the fringes of society, and it makes those who have it, gods of the gutter. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Freddie is the leader of the ragtag bunch that haunt the left side of Guadelupe, the street bordering the University of Texas campus, that is informally referred to as “the Drag.” He is in fact, a “drag rat,” a homeless vagabond too plagued with malady to work a traditional nine to five job (whether his illness is all in his head is up for debate), yet is far too shrewd for a shelter. Thus, he lives to wreak havoc…especially upon the pitiful university kids he so despises. Freddie is the “street chef” of the Drag, and though he has retired from the chemistry of cooking up methanphetamines, he is the man with which everyone must speak in order to obtain their fix.

Freddie and his merry men encircle me. He has decided to move to the stoop of the Catholic Church up the street. He takes my arm and leads me across the avenue, ignoring the oncoming traffic—he doesn't believe in traffic lights, sidewalks, or jaywalking. To him, none of these things exist.

Freddie possesses an air of nostalgia—he embodies the stereotypical idea of an aging hippie, including the slight smell of stale bread that clings to his form. He dons a small assortment of Woodstock T-shirts; one lasts him for a solid week before he grudgingly treks to the Texaco at the corner to handwash each threadbare article in the station's grimy, gray sink. His baggy pants afford him a makeshift brand of air conditioning, for they have more holes than actual fabric, and consequently offer little shelter from the elements that plague his body in the frigid winter months.

“Man, the only decent thing about these fucking pants is that the pockets are still good. If I couldn't carry my bud with me, I'd just walk around fucking bare-ass naked. Give the pigs one more thing to arrest me for,” he says nonchalantly as he throws his frizzed, shoulder-length hair out of his face to take a drag from his cigarette.

Coinciding with his gruff appearance, embittered sentiment toward government and big business, he also houses the mystique of a night crawler. Due to his propensity to roll himself a joint whenever a cannabis craving takes him and the amount of illegal activities he valiantly participates in, the majority of his time is spent in hiding, awaiting the night. When the day walkers have all retired to their comfortable condos and apartments that more resemble filing cabinets than homes, this is the time during which the drag rats are granted free reign of the streets. Freddie, having paid his way from Illinois to Austin with his pot profits looks the part of gutter god. The only tells on his ragged, stern poker face are his beautiful teeth, a rarity amongst the homeless, for most lack the sufficient funds for proper health and dental care. His teeth are intoxicating—pearly white, perfectly aligned, and malicious under his curling upper lip which reveals something intended to be a smile, but looks eerily like a snarl. They are the last shreds of evidence that Freddie was not born to poverty, but driven there.

“I guess I'm uh…taking a vacation from life,” he ejaculates as he tosses his greasy hair again, this time exposing an amateur tattoo, fixed on his skin with faded black ink just at the nape of his neck. The tiny tattoo, obscured by the mass of filthy blonde curls that ensconce Freddie's stooped shoulders, is of a swastika.

Throughout the nineteen eighties, Reaganomics attempted to tackle the issue of homelessness in America in conjunction with the initiation of the War on Drugs. Taking from the government pockets that had already been stretched with the federal funding of a slew of national programs such as the Star Wars project and the assault against “terrorists” such as Ayatollah Komeini, Reagan managed to pull the nation's attention to purging the cities of their dregs. By relocating groups of homeless people, Reagan's plan induced the creation of a new manifestation of the “poorhouse”…public shelters. To motivate the relocation of certain undesirables that tainted the sidewalks of the yuppie taxpayers, zoning regulations and city ordinances were passed, succeeding in a coerced migration of the poor from beneath towering overpasses, off city streets, and into shelters. In the end, even with the menial assistance of the “Hands Across America” event, the under-funded and often unfinished shelters only offered 50% of their facilities to roughly 10% of the homeless population. The migration had failed, and as the nineties were heralded in, the movement of the Reagan era was written off as merely “a Band-Aid precariously placed on a sucking chest wound” (Crittle 2003).

Clad in a worn black T-shirt and jeans freckled with mismatched patches of foreign fabric, Scott exudes a tenderness that betrays his position as professional beggar. He is a parishioner of the great and triumphant Freddie, a drag rat that seems as though he does not truly fit the occupation. Tattoos punctuate his ivory skin, and make him appear dirtier than he actually is. Scott is the most socially acceptable version of the homeless image. Instead, he resembles a down-on-his-luck starving artist with his terribly trendy blond dreads that are the envy of the under-appreciated geniuses of the university just across the road. He stands out against the backdrop of bums like Freddie, for although Scott may approach you to plead for spare change, he gives the passerby a sense that his boyish charm is not squandered in the streets, but returns to a home each night. He radiates a brand of sensitivity that is usually associated with a tortured soul, when in fact, his face is simply cemented in a constant state of mourning that no amount of your pocket change can remove.

“Both my parents died in an accident when I was thirteen. I didn't have anywhere else to go, so I started sleeping in doorways downtown; you know, stealing to get some fast cash. I am really good at surviving the streets. The state tried to take me, but fuck that. I wasn't going to let them program me, especially since the best they could do is hook me up with some shitty-ass job cleaning puke and emptying trash for the rest of my life. Screw them. They stopped looking for me after about a year, and I've been here ever since.”

Scott again fixes his eyes on the cement that embodies more of a mother to him than any other human does. Living so precariously for such a long period of time has taken its toll on this man who is just barely twenty-one years old. His body is scrawny; his limbs sinewy, making each vein beneath the tough outer layer of skin disgustingly visible. He eats when he is able, sometimes taking the usually stale rations from the local shelters, sometimes utilizing the hard-earned money from going in with Freddie on a pot deal. Most of the time, however, he does without food, opting for black coffee, some cigarettes, and fine bowl of “smoke.”

Scott acts as the atlas to Freddie's eccentric corporation, reciting the divisions of the Austin that require “extra manpower,” and those that are best visited sans any personal possessions for the locals will “rob you blind,” snatching whatever they can before the owner even realizes it.

“For Chrissakes, don't go to Second Street. That's where all of the cokeheads live, and they are scary as fuck. You can walk into that neighborhood with stuff superglued to you, and those bastards would still find a way to steal it. And don't ever put anything down,” he warns. “I brought my bag with me one time and the cokies swooped down on it like it was made of gold, or something.”

“Yeah, we don't conduct our business there too much…no money there for mellow motherfuckers like us,” Freddie chimes in, lurching forward as a possible customer walks by. “One of the reasons I got out of chefing was that I couldn't take trying to sell my shit to crazies like you got down on Second.”

“Fourth Street is for “the fags,” Scott interjects “And sixth is where all of the touristy people go. Cops are everywhere down there-- protecting and serving the rich little punks that only come to get wasted and rape college girls.”

“Man, forget Sixth. Fourth street creeps me out, but that's where we take Wink and pimp him out…we just tell him it's a girl,” declares Scratch, the intimidation factor of the group who is obviously frustrated by his lack of contribution to the conversation.

Scratch has been weathered by prison. At thirty-two, he has sojourned a slew of jail cells… and dominated them all. He is stocky and solidly muscular, moving brusquely, appearing to lack the elegance of Scott and the suaveness of Freddie. Scratch is the human incarnation of a bulldog, and acts as the “muscle” of the cohort. He is the element in this mix that forces passersby to do one of two things: either they ignore the menace of this man by quickening their pace and dodging his searching glare, or they hurriedly toss him their menial change to prevent the unspoken threat of violence from overtaking them upon the drag that he guards so ferociously.

“Dude, I'll be walking down the street and I pass like this guy and his woman—I don't have to do nothing, man, and the guy gets all nervous and paranoid that I'm gonna jump his chick. I've seen guys pick their girlfriends up and put them on their other side just so the girl isn't walking on the same side of the sidewalk as I am. It's crazy,” the convicted rapist proudly vomits as he attempts to laugh and inhale all at once.

As I sit, engulfed by these men, these people whom everyone else maintains a strict distance from, I begin to feel a churning in the pit of my stomach. After absorbing the poetic waxing of each “rat,” and the leering of the grizzled Scratch, I know that I have reached the point in which the realization comes-- their world does not welcome outsiders. I am breaching a boundary, and I am afraid.

Winning the “rats” over had been simple—a carton of cigarettes and the promise to simply sit back and allow them to voice their respective stories. Each one housed a distinct threat, and each was quite high, so the outcome of the interview remained unforeseen. Wink, the quiet observer of the gang, had yet to raise his head, but as I offered the final pack of smokes to each man, he pulled his focus off of the church stoop and thanked me for the righteous gift of nicotine.

Scratch continued to exercise his command of the interview, during which Wink searched frantically for a flame of some sort to ignite his cigarette. The group ignored his silent pleadings for a lighter, match, bolt of lightning…anything to get the damn smoke lit. I grabbed my lighter from my bag and raised the flame to Wink's cigarette. Startled, the mouse of a man cupped his trembling hands around the tiny spark and inhaled painfully. Scratch, realizing that my attention had been diverted from his tale, elbowed the quiescent Wink causing a shockwave to crash through poor Wink's arm. The result of this uncalled for attack? His hand ever so lightly grazed mine.

A gust of wind might prove to be a worthy adversary for Wink—he is rail thin, and on sight conjures an image of an Auschewitz victim. The surface of his face clings to his skull, almost as though his cheekbones are inhaling his skin. He wears his greasy, shoulder-length brown hair in a ponytail, accentuating his frail facial structure and his mangled mouth filled with shriveled scraps of what used to be teeth. Upon first glance, an onlooker can tell that something about his face does not fit. Wink's left eye is lazy, and slightly discolored, the iris reflecting a watery off-white shade similar to soggy bread.

Wink had died on the way to the hospital, and had been declared legally deceased thirty minutes prior to awakening. The doctors were stunned, and immediately rushed him from the morgue to the emergency room. Due to the force of the gunshot, the optical nerve of his left eye was severed; the eye itself had actually exploded in his skull. The damage was irreparable, and following two weeks of hospital care, Wink was released into foster care, a Cyclops.

As his hand skimmed mine, Wink immediately retreated, coiling up as though my skin had been the surface of a blazing stove. I apologized profusely, (apparently I had broken some understood agreement…touch is not allowed here), and he shivered in response.

From that point forward, throughout the following interviews, Wink was my loyal protector. The “rats” were no longer equipped with barbarous slander, for the slightest deviation from gentlemanly behavior received an automatic rebuttal, “Shut the fuck up or I'll kill you in your sleep.” The others' giggles, a muttered apology, and Freddie's unflagging suggestion typically followed this aggression that we all “just smoke a blunt and be friends.”

As I stood to leave for the final time, something in me wanted to take the “rats” from the street…perhaps even take them home, especially Wink. My resounding call back to my world came when my cell phone, which I had forgotten to switch off rang insistently, rupturing the faÁade of oneness with the dreg world. The “rats” seemed just as disconcerted as I, their collective demeanor shifting, recalling that I was not one of them. I felt a sharp pang of guilt for having initiated this convergence of the drastically separate existences. I belonged in the sect of civilization that balanced checkbooks, paid taxes, watched television, discussed the meaning of life over five dollar lattes, relied upon cell phones, and had a home to return to each night. I felt responsible for these men who lived moment to moment, praying for another drag from their cigarettes, a second hit, and a doorway in which to sleep. They could not live in my society, just as I could not dwell in theirs.

As I rose to depart, Freddie reached into his pocket and pulled out his stash of weed. He lovingly trickled the loot into a thin smoking paper, licked the end, and carefully rolled the paper into a joint, his commercial exchange. Taking the first hit, unabashedly on the stoop of the church, he shrugged a goodbye, and immediately resumed his life. I could not save him, and he did not wish to follow me. The “rats” held fast to the world that is defined as the underbelly of “respectable” society where scars are testaments of existence, squalor is inescapable, and we “day walkers” are something to be pitied….at a distance.

**Due to the fact that my interviewees are homeless and tend to drift from place to place, locating them serves as quite a dilemma. However, all of the subjects expressed that they can usually be found rather easily when one visits the Drag after 9pm on any given night.

Researching for this piece proved to be one of the most trying yet most educational experiences of my life. Sitting on the street with this cohort seemed more like a test of wills than scholarly work. People have asked me how the entire process of interviewing began, how did I persuade these men to open up to me? The truth? The absolute truth is exactly what I have depicted in the paper. I walked up to the guys, and attempting mask my fear (they can smell it you know), sat down in front of them on the sidewalk like I was one with their world. The look of absolute shock on each of the hard-boiled faces was worth every ounce of trepidation I held inside, for who would have thought that I, the person that hides their eyes in the most mundane of horror flicks could muster the balls to enter this “underground” society?

The cigarettes definitely helped the transition and opened the guys up a bit. Strangely, after I switched on my mini recorder, the rats flew into ceaseless revelation. These boys could have told their stories for hours; it was so completely unheard of that an interest in their lives existed. Hell, I could have just left the recorder there and they would have rambled on until the tape ran out. These narratives simply could not be contained any longer; they needed to be told. Scratch was by far the most verbose. He spouted tall tales and dirty jokes like a vibrant child, and in that I saw that all this man truly longed for was a voice and a patient ear. He got me thinking about the “if onlys” and “what ifs,” and I actually caught myself thinking that the catalyst to this mangled life before was an unloved child. I even thought about just reaching over and taking his hand when he began to speak about his first experience in that hands of the law. I resisted, remembering suddenly that this man, who made a conscious choice to sit as close to me as possible each time I met with the group, was a brutal being. He was a force of rage, and violence, malice, and perversion…he WAS a rapist. No amount of hugs or rainbows could erase that fact. He was the source of my unspoken fear, and that was not something to be disregarded in the name of sympathy.

I feel as though I did the best I could with what these men gave of themselves, and am surprisingly proud of the piece. The only factor of the paper that I feel did not fulfill my expectations was my writing of Wink. I don't feel as though I could ever realistically capture the gentle nature of this man, who, psychically is very much a child. I wish there were something more that I could give him, but unfortunately, he is a self-declared “homebum.” He expressed repeatedly throughout our slew of encounters that he had excepted the fact that, in ten years, he would be forcing a shopping cart up and down the drag. He already knew that his death would not be mourned, and that his corpse would act as just another piece of litter on the cold, gritty pavement.

As I rose to leave the troop for the last time, “crazy Maude” was making her way down the street. Trudging heavily towards us, she purposely slowed in passing us. Maude arched her crooked back to the sky, placed her cupped hands to her face and bellowed melodically, “YOU DON”T HAVE TO LIVE LIKE A REFUGEE!!!”

Without another word, she walked on, leaving the group in a fit of hysterics. I don't know for certain whether Maude's outcry was directed at the rats or myself, but it did aid in the painful exit I made from the rats' world, into my own. Everyone has a choice.