Degenerate

”YOU FUCKING DEGENERATE!”

It echoed, hovering in the air like a cloud of dust.

I knew the voice.

I knew the car it came from.

What I didn’t know was who.

Hi, I’m a degenerate. Nice to meet you.

*******************

So this is the story of how I became a misfit.

Not how I was assigned the title—this is the day I was born.

After such an oppressive and restrictive upbringing, followed by the spectacular failure that was my academic career, it was time to accept that I hadn’t grown into the person my family, friends and teachers thought I’d be.

The story of how I dropped out of college is boring—well, at least in comparison. While the inception is a story for another day, the aftermath is where things start to really go off the rails.

Over the consequential next 5 years I would go on to be a carnie, a farmer, a ghost hunter, a house painter, a professional psychic, a straight-up signholder, and just about anything else I stumbled across that could fund my next 24 hours. But busking (the act of performing for tips in public, generally unlicensed) was the only constant.

Homelessness is very difficult to describe to those who haven’t experienced it.

On the one hand, it’s horrible. The verbal abuse people hurl at you just for existing within their line of sight. The sparse, under-funded resources—the same ones which you had considered your absolution for not giving spare change in the past.

The cold.

The phrase “chilled to the bone” describes the sensation so aptly; you feel as though your very core has been removed, frozen and replaced. Warmth is as distant a memory as the color of my math folder in the seventh grade. Any place where you could seek shelter doesn’t welcome people like you.

Yet after a while, you start to see the world you knew fade away, like the illusion it is and has always been. You start to realize what you were taught to see is all you look for, and that if you step out of “analyze” mode and into “observation” mode, you’ll see people, places and perspectives in ways you never would have, had you never been liberated from every last fuck you could have possibly given.

This is the story of that last fuck.

This is the moment it flew away.

***************************

Which brings us back to that ass in the black beemer.

He had been screaming obscenities ever since I hit the streets of Minneapolis.

“QUIT SMOKING CRACK!” had been his refrain prior.

“YOU’RE A FUCKING DRUNK!” Preceded the crack comment.

I will never know why, and I am very okay with that.

The day in question was glorious. I had been playing The Carpenters’ “Top Of The World” periodically; it was the perfect song for such a perfect day.

“Not a cloud in the sky, got the sun in my eyes, and I won’t be surprised if it’s a dream…”

Minneapolis in the summer is beautiful. My stomping grounds was within a mile of a popular swimming hole, and smack in the middle of a prominent shopping area. You couldn’t have dreamed for a better day to busk.

My fellow indigent and destitute (or The Residentially Challenged, as I like to call us) were all just beginning to shed our springtime clothing in favor of the first “new” clothing any of us had acquired in months. One of my fellow buskers had mysteriously acquired a large amount of Grain Belt beer, and I had a 6-pack stashed in my backpack. Another young lady had gifted me the biggest, bitchiest pair of sunglasses I have ever owned; I still remember them frequently and fondly.

To top it all off, I had found three packs of fresh rosemary on top of a garbage can behind the local grocery store. Rosemary, it so happens, is a pretty effective insect repellant when thrown into a campfire; it just so happened that I was illegally camping near the lake at the time, and this find was going to save me at least another few weeks’ worth of citronella candles and patchouli oil.

With my garbage rosemary spread out around me on the sidewalk (in order to sun-dry) and my free sunglasses obscuring half of my face, I stretched out across the sidewalk with my head leaning against my backpack, my beloved baritone ukulele (affectionately named “Barry”) laid on top of my torso. It was about 2:30 pm; exactly when foot traffic between lunch time and dinner generally dries up. I liked to spend this time napping on a friends’ porch (“siesta time” as my fellow Residentially Challenged and I called this panhandling lul), and was just entertaining the idea of taking my leave when the mystery man in the fancy car took that fateful jab at me.

“YOU FUCKING DEGENERATE!”

I lazily picked up my head to verify that it was indeed the same black BMW which had been the source of my degradation for a while now. A cloud had passed over the sun, and I moved my gigantic shades up to my forehead. I swear I just saw him flip a U-turn.

Sure enough, my unsought nemesis flies by a second time and word-vomits “YOU’RE A DEGENERATE!” in my direction again, as though the line was so clever that it bore repeating.

Something snapped inside of me and I started laughing.

Laughing.

I really wish I could come up with a more creative analogy, but the visual of a rubber band snapping is so apt here. The pressure, tension and stress of being homeless had been filling me, stretching me to my own limits, and that final comment was the snapping point.

Check it out, though:

it is 2:30 PM on a Thursday. I am sitting in the shade, two beers deep and a cigarette in one hand, playing music with my friends.

I’m lounging on the sidewalk like an aristocrat on her chaise lounge; the fact that I retire to a sleeping bag every night is a distant thought that has long since ceased to feel like a crisis.

Mean while there is a man. A man in a BMW. A man with a luxury car, a closed mind, and so much misery in him, which he lets out by harassing a 20-year-old homeless woman.

Who gives a fuck what he thinks?

I’m smiling as I type. It’s still so surreal to me.

I haven’t been homeless since 2019, yet I will always proudly consider myself a degenerate. Nobody who looks at me can tell, but the time I spent on the street taught me things I never would have learned in college. I gained a degree of understanding about good and bad, greed and generosity, cruelty and kindness, wealth and poverty, drugs, madness, and sheer desperation that many artists ruin their own lives in pursuit of.

I do not care why BMW man considers me a degenerate. But I know why I consider myself one.

Because at the end of the day, if you strip away everything—wealth, status, power, ego; everything down to the basic human desire to persist and survive—we’re all nothing but a bunch of degenerates.