City Safari: Deep In My Own Head On The Streets Of Philadelphia
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Wed, Dec 18, 2019
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The homeless landscape, since the bottom fell out of the Johnny S. Bobbitt, Jr. Go Fund Me scam, has changed considerably. Many of Bobbitt’s street friends, who used to hang out with him, have disappeared. One of Bobbitt’s closest friends, RW, who I wrote about in Learn to Do a Bad Thing Well, is now drug free, employed and living with a girlfriend in Bucks County. I ran into RW not long ago on Aramingo Avenue. RW used to walk the neighborhood here, with a pale of water and Windex and a squiggly brush so he could wash the windows of Dunkin Donuts and a pizza shop for tips.
RW’s reinvention of himself—an almost impossible feat after the years he spent on these streets---is tantamount to a miracle. RW, of course was really the first opioid addicted, homeless guy to frequent this area. He was here when the sight of homeless tribes in knapsacks was nearly nonexistent. His presence soon attracted many others, which in turn led to an influx of opioid homeless because they saw my neighborhood as a much more relaxed space to panhandle than the mayhem associated with K and A.
The influx of homeless into the Riverward neighborhoods has diminished somewhat, but it’s still significant. Mini-homeless camps will sometimes pop up behind Dunkin Donuts and Arby’s, but they don’t last long. Security in the area has “quad tripled” since RW dubbed this area as the Promised Land. The WAWA on Aramingo Avenue, which used to provide the homeless with spare change when they held doors for customers, is now a barbed wire camp. Security guards patrol the store and property as if the store were on Israel’s West Bank. It can get a bit heavy handed at times with guards mistaking customers for panhandling homeless or treating all customers as soon as they walk in the door as potential shoplifters.
RW’s reinvention of himself—an almost impossible feat after the years he spent on these streets---is tantamount to a miracle. RW, of course was really the first opioid addicted, homeless guy to frequent this area. He was here when the sight of homeless tribes in knapsacks was nearly nonexistent. His presence soon attracted many others, which in turn led to an influx of opioid homeless because they saw my neighborhood as a much more relaxed space to panhandle than the mayhem associated with K and A.
!9th Century Homeless Men
The influx of homeless into the Riverward neighborhoods has diminished somewhat, but it’s still significant. Mini-homeless camps will sometimes pop up behind Dunkin Donuts and Arby’s, but they don’t last long. Security in the area has “quad tripled” since RW dubbed this area as the Promised Land. The WAWA on Aramingo Avenue, which used to provide the homeless with spare change when they held doors for customers, is now a barbed wire camp. Security guards patrol the store and property as if the store were on Israel’s West Bank. It can get a bit heavy handed at times with guards mistaking customers for panhandling homeless or treating all customers as soon as they walk in the door as potential shoplifters.
It’s tiresome shopping in a barbed wire camp, that’s why I try to avoid this WAWA. One night, dressed in a coat and tie, I had to visit to the store for a quart of milk. As I reached into the store refrigerator in search of a bottle of 2% non-fat, I noticed a security guard peering at me from behind the aisle displaying Lay’s Potato chips. Something about me had caught his attention, but what? I was obviously not homeless but when security guards are bored and when there’s no “illegal” action happening they often slip outside civilized boundaries.
Sometimes when you’re deep into your own head in public this acts as a magnet or an inducement for others to come clamoring towards you. Recently while riding the 32 bus back from Germantown a man sitting in the front of the crowded bus caught my reflection in the window, turned around, pointed at me and screamed, “Andy Warhol!”
“Anybody tell you look like Andy Warhol?” he said, after which many passengers turned around to get a look at me. I smiled and looked away hoping that he would be distracted by someone else, but that was not to be.
“Yes, Andy Warhol,” he said. He kept pointing and saying the name Andy Warhol. I smiled and nodded again, not sure if this was the best response. Finally, I acknowledged his commentary with an ‘okay,’ but this only caused him to move to the seat in front of me. “I just got out of the penitentiary,” he said, showing me the thousand-dollar watch on his left wrist.
“Andy Warhol, yes,” he said for the fifth time. “Studio 54! Sodom and Gomorrah!”
These types of encounters, of course, happen quite frequently in the city.
Another change in my neighborhood is the increase of black homeless. Just over a decade ago, my section of the Riverwards was a ‘no go’ zone for black men. Black men were often chased out of the neighborhood by thuggish white teen gangs. That’s no longer the case, especially since Irish girls here took to hooking up with black men and having their babies.
The construction around the reconfiguration of I-95 has made history of the homeless camps that were once located here. My thoughts drift to Jared, the Main Line-born and bred 29-year-old Italian guy who made his home in a large construction pipe. From an affluent family, this Temple grad and UCLA post grad film student was not allowed to return home until he cleaned up his act. Going from shelters to recovery houses and finally to sleeping on the streets, his mainstay was Front and Girard. Adept in this dog-eat-dog homeless world, where friend steal from friends, he’d tell me how just taking a nap outdoors in the summer often leads to someone taking your sneakers right off your feet. “You hook up with a buddy thinking there’s trust all around when, before you know it, you’re missing your knapsack.” Bottom Line” You can’t trust anyone on the streets.
Jared didn’t dress up his pipe but he talked about it so much that one day I had him take me there. He had a few coats lining the base of the immense tube, some towels, a bar of soap and some chocolate wrappers. Jared’s penchant was stealing candy and cakes from WAWA. He would go in there in his XL coat with big pockets and fill up. He had a sweet tooth. Once he showed me his stash. There were nutrition and candy bars, cookies, Red Bull and multiple small pies.
“WAWA just writes the losses off,” he told me. “It’s not like I’m stealing from a person and causing harm. Stealing from a corporation is not stealing.”
I’ve heard this line of logic from time to time. “I would never steal from a person, but WAWA is rich so who cares.”
Once I stepped into the McDonald’s at Front and Girard for a coffee when I spotted Jared and his people: buxom blond girls with heavy features and eyes half shut in a methadone trance; young men with gaunt faces. Their language was disconnected; some talked in short spasms but then their words would fade out like the air going out of a balloon; they’d wind up with their head in their heads on the McDonald’s table. High interpersonal drama marked these groups: “Some bitch stole my SEPTA Key card,” “If I see her I’m gonna kill her.”
Jared always kept a distance from this tribe, no doubt the result of his upbringing and the fact that his affluent family said he was welcome to return home if he cleaned up his act. Then they would send him to a rehab of his choice. Jared kept putting this off. He knew he had plenty of time. Occasionally his father would seek him out, take him to lunch and then buy him a phone and some clothes for the road. Jared was always loaded down in new stuff.
“My dad bought me this phone,” he’d say, placing it among his bag of stolen candy and cakes. A week later the phone would be gone, stolen or broken because it fell from his hands during a drug-induced stumble. No worries, though. He’d get another phone in time but soon even the replacement wound up cracked or stolen.
