Down And Out

Some of the friends we met along the way. Photos by the author Monday

Tuesday
Feeling great after three hours of sleep, I went to look for some charity pantries my friends had told me about. The first one had only dirty apples (with nowhere to wash them) and some raw pumpkin you could take home. In another room there was bread and people peeling potatoes. I tried to grab some bread but they wouldn’t let me. I was too tired to try to figure out why so I just sat and watched all the beggars playing cards for hours in their mismatched charity outfits. Anyway I was luckier at the church in Wranglerstrasse. A cute black nun sat me down and gave me as much chicken bone soup and old bread as I wanted without asking me anything. We were treated like little kids in kindergarten, which is a lot nicer when you’re really embarrassed and on your last knees than having to figure out who to ask for food and if you need a social security ID or whatever.

The street where the church stands is a very hectic bum hotspot, with a café kind of place where you can hang out and get advice and a shelter. A lot of them just stand in the corner of the Kaiser’s supermarket and spend the whole day going in and out of it for more beers.

I just stayed with them all day in the same corner doing nothing and talking about pensions, football, and how we miss good old communism. The ratio of men to women is always incredibly disproportionate, in all of this area there’s only one chick and she looks and talks like Jabba the Hutt. She rolls her joints with the crappiest looking weed I’ve ever seen, just showing more proof that these people always get the worst of everything. A few of the guys tell me they’re going to a shelter and that I can stay there too. They promise me it has clean sheets and some soup and everything. Sweet. But I notice a certain eagerness in their offer that’s kind of scary. I get it now. My clothes and hair might look as bad as theirs, but my post-teenage skin is mostly smooth and hairless like a woman’s, and free of diseases, burns or scars. I realise they’re sizing me up for a raping. Yikes.

When it starts getting cold and we head for the shelter, I feel like I’m heading for my own doom. Doom in my bum. But there’s no turning back now, I don’t want my editor to call me a coward. The place is a big room with around 10 bunkbeds, a bit like those in army movies. For some reason, when the lights go off the smell of their rotten feet and crusty bodies starts to intensify and of course, I cannot sleep. It’s not only the threat of rape that keeps me on my toes, but also a symphony of disgusting snores, people mumbling quite loudly in their sleep and the creaky sound of those with very, very uneasy sleep. I think I can feel tension between my hosts as they talk among themselves about who is going to give it a try first, and my beliefs are confirmed when the bigger of them, a bearded, ponytailed Ossi humbly asks me if he can sleep in the same bed as me. He’s very cold and can’t sleep he says. He can offer me some Rohypnol or some Xanax in exchange. I’m not freaking out as bad as I thought I would be, and I turn his offer down. I’m alone for the rest of the night.

Wednesday
This is my last day, and, the threat of homosexual rape aside, I’m quite beginning to enjoy it. Of course, it’s not real bum life that I’m living since I know my bed is awaiting me lovingly at home, and my experience is way more adventurous that normal homeless every day. Normal bums have a very fixed routine and territory they rarely drift out of. The Irish brothers, who are the most dynamic I’ve met so far, are always around the same 4 streets. In the corner of Brunnenstrasse with Kastanienallee there’s an old lady with a Sid Vicious tattoo on the back of her hand who sits there without changing her unhealthy pose all day and all night. The crews at supermarkets are always exactly the same people, drinking the same beer. I spend the morning searching for a cheap cup of coffee, and after much exploration I find a crappy bakery that sells a crappy cup for 70 cents, which I still find abusive. It’s no wonder all those people on welfare would rather be drunk all the time than apply themselves to find work, since a cup of coffee is normally 1 euro and you can buy five half-litre beers for the same money at Netto supermarkets.

My last destination was Bahnhof Zoo, which was the mythical heroin addicts meeting point in the 80s immortalised in Christiane F. Apparently the police pretty much cleaned the place in the end of the 80s, but it’s still the scariest outcast meeting point in the whole city. There’s more shelters, social assistance and food pantries around the area than in the rest of Berlin put together. There’s even a cute little syringe and condom vending machine. The Bahnhof mission serves pretty good sandwiches and cake with a minimum of fuss to a very varied clientele—from teenage to elder prostitutes, from crusty punks to hot girls in fancily-dyed Mohawks who were probably just trying to imitate their heroes from the 80s. OK, I have to admit, there was only one teenage whore, but she was so cute and full of life she totally broke my heart. She looked like any other German teenager, with the pastel blue jacket, blonde piggytails and pink makeup, only very thin and unhealthy looking. I was not in the mood to make friends any more, but her and the older hookers with wigs seemed pretty fun to hang out with.

That night I biked half the city under the rain to another shelter only to find the information on the internet was wrong again, and there was only a big Mercedes-Benz building there. Oh well. I wonder how many people freeze to death every year while looking for the damn place. Maybe they need to update the website.

HUMPTON B. DUMPTON