(November 12, 2002)
Today was a typical day for Ace Backwords: Professional Homeless Person. My morning started walking down Shattuck: spotted half of a fancy fruit-filled croissant sitting on an unoccupied table at an outdoor cafe; grabbed it ($1.50 value) and scarfed it down as I walked down the street. Up the street I spotted a to-go cup of coffee sitting on a ledge by the BART station.
"Is that yours?" I said to the black guy sitting about 10 feet from it (just to be on the safe side).
"Hell no," he said.
"Great!" I said, grabbing it.
"Are you actually gonna drink that?" said the black guy with disgust. "You don't know WHO drank from that!"
"Hell yeah I'm gonna drink it," I said, happily.
I heard the guy and the black chick he was sitting with laugh derisively as I left. I turned around and gave the chick a happy thumbs up and she smiled back like she's thinking: "Them crazy-ass white folk!"
The coffee was two-thirds full, still warm, and mixed with chocolate ($1.75 value).
I went to the Med, found today's Chronicle in the bin below the dirty dish hamper (50-cent value), and I also spotted an untouched thick sausage on the top plate in the hamper, the remnants of a just-eaten eggs breakfast. I quickly stashed the sausage ($2.50 value) in between the pages of my newspaper so the grouchy guy that works at the front counter who hates me (and hates just about everybody else on the planet) doesn't see me. I take a seat in the back at a table with a full cup of coffee on it ($1.20 value), which is one of my regular gigs -- the guy comes in like clockwork twice a day, orders a cup of coffee to claim a table while he reads his paper, and then leaves without taking a sip out of his coffee. I sit there, read my paper, eat my sausage, and drink my coffee. A typical Ace Backwords breakfast.
I scrounge around a bit on Telegraph, find a box of cheap paperbacks that have been discarded at the Library Annex Bookstore -- I'll sell them at my 25-cent vending table on Saturday ($10 value). Up the street at the Campus Textbook Store, I find 20 expensive hardcover books in the recycling bin -- I'll sell them later at Moe's Used Bookstore ($15 in cash, and $25 in trade-slip value).
Later around noon, on the steps of the campus I find a barely-touched discarded container of chili-beef cheese fries, still warm; they're curly-fries, my favorite!, with melted cheddar cheese mixed in ($3.25 value). Up ahead, I find a to-go salad that a student has left, for somebody like me, on the side of the top of the garbage can. I'm not interested in the salad, but I pick out the delicious strips of monteray jack and cheddar cheese as well as the hardboiled egg and avocado half ($1.50 value).
As I'm walking along I pick up about 10 crumpled cigarette packs that I spot on the sidewalk, and peel off the coupons on the side -- I'll trade those with HateMan later for 2 cigarettes (50-cent value).
Walking by the Innermezzo I don't spot much in the way of discarded food on the table, but I see a slice of bakery-fresh bread on one unoccupied table. I dart in and grab it (50-cent value) before anyone sees me, and feed it to the pigeon's around the corner. (I've developed a strange identification with the pigeon's, and the other city-critters, who are likewise walking around the city streets, ground-scoring and table-diving. The other day, shortly after a fierce rainstorm, I was walking across Sproul Plaza and I spotted an untouched fahita sandwhich sitting ontop of a garbage can. Just as I was about to grab it, this huge white seagull came soaring down like a bomber-pilot right in front of me and grabbed the fahita in his beak just as I was reaching for it. The gull u-turned back up towards the heavens making his getaway without even skipping a beat, the fahita hanging out of his mouth, until another seagull dive-bombed him, swooping alongside him and grabbing the food out of the first gull's mouth in mid-air. It was an awesome dispay of aerodynamics and ground-score theivery!)
I know some people are really squeamish about the whole idea of eating other people's leftovers. "Germs" and all that stuff. And I don't necessarily reccomend this. But in my defense, I'm very careful what I eat; if its not 100% fresh I won't. In fact, my cardinal rule is: If you're not sure, DON'T.
And this too: I may be a bum, but at least I'm not bumming off of anybody else: I don't get a welfare check, and I don't eat at the charity food kitchens.
But the weirdest thing is: I'm actually eating BETTER than when I used to have an apartment and buy my food. Nowadays, virtually everything I eat is restaurant fresh, bought and cooked that day; as well as being more expensive than anything I could afford to pay for myself, even at the peak of my earnings. Weird.
Sure, people give me weird looks sometimes, like I might get germs or cooties. Some people have funny attitudes about the germ stuff. I often think of Jim Carroll's story in "Basketball Diaries." The junkies are all sitting around in a shooting gallery, sharing a rusty old spike thats probably been used by every case of hepatitus in lower Manhatten. After they all shot up the smack, Carroll offers his junkie friend a hit off the bottle of Coke he's drinking. The junkie takes the Coke and wipes off the top of the bottle with his hand before he takes a drink from it. Germs.
Around 2p.m. I sat on a park bench smoking a cigarette, and, for kicks, I tallied up the total of today's ground-scores so far: $63.20. And the day was still young. Before, I used to work at a job, to get money, to pay for the stuff I wanted. Nowadays, I just go directly to the source. I guess its kind of like a river flowing by: you stick your hands into the flowing river and see what kind of fish you can pull out.