Bumfights to Survive

Steve buying vodka with his Lizzie McGuire card. Photo by Tim Barber

Hey, did you ever see Bumfights? It's fucking funny, man. They get all these bums to do funny shit for money and they get all gnarly and wasted and shit. One piece of human garbage even got "Bumfights" tattooed across his forehead. Ha ha. I love that shit. So when the people at Visa offered me these Hillary Duff credit cards (in my capacity as a writer) and told me to go shopping, I was like, "Let's go fuck up some bums." The possibilities were huge. What wouldn't a wasted piece of shit do for a hundred bucks?

I for sure wanted to get a guy who would piss in his own mouth. I also thought it would be good to get a drunk old woman to flash her tits. I started to hope that one of them would be clever enough to buy some CDs with the card, then sell them to another place for cash, then spend the cash on crack or heroin (you can't buy drugs with a credit card, dude). The first guy I approached, right on Union Square, had about five teeth and a dreadlocked beard. He was perfect! Turned out that not only did he speak just Spanish but he was also totally bonkers. The only English words I heard him say were "You gay? You gay?" Well, sorry Mr. Piece of Shit, but no, I am not. The next guy looked equally destroyed but he must have been wise to me because he said, "I'm not a fucking toy!" So me and the photographer walked up to another guy. And another. And another. Before I knew it, we'd walked all the way over to Tompkins Square. I knew bums were supposed to be nuts, but holy shit. These fucking guys couldn't even tell what planet they were on. Out of about twenty guys I walked up to, only two knew what I was talking about! It was weird. It seemed like they were either too mentally ill to understand the concept or, when they did, too proud to make a fool of themselves. This prank was starting to "bum" me out. I decided to change tactics. Maybe if I got an old woman, she would be so desperate for a drink that she'd have to take part. Plus, the longer you're on the streets, the crazier you get—right? Maybe I could get her to climb a tree or jump in front of a bus. After that, it didn't take long to find my first subject. Gloria is a 70-year-old widow who's been homeless for five years. She was panhandling at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue, and when I told her about the Visa cards, she was especially overjoyed because her bag had been cut right off her shoulder by a thief while she slept on the subway the week before. Score! Plus she looked as thirsty as an Irishman at church. Her first stop was to buy a monthly MTA Metrocard for $35. "I usually ride the trains up and down all night in the winter," she said. "The cops let me alone. It's when you sleep at a station that they give you trouble." It wasn't too crazy of a start, but I figured she was just getting warmed up to go really loco, so I went along with it. Next she told me she wanted to go to Kmart. Last time I checked, they didn't sell Thunderbird in the Big K, but I figured maybe she was more into the resale-for-crack-money game, so away we went. Before I knew it she'd picked out a Playtex bra ($13.99), a pair of panty hose ($2.89), and this fuzzy pair of socks ($2.49). She said that her feet were quite swollen, so the socks needed to be wide enough to get over them, but still narrow enough to fit in her shoe. Fucking warm socks? What about a fifth of Popov Vodka? What about falling down in the street and pissing yourself? It's like all this bitch cared about was staying alive. When she was telling me that she needed a dark-colored bra because that would mask the dirt, I was just like, "Oh."

Gloria at Kmart. Photo by Tim Barber

Next Gloria went downstairs in Kmart and bought soap, a toothbrush, and deodorant. That's the kind of stuff I would buy on a normal trip to the store. She went so far as to say that even though she only has one tooth left, she wants to brush that one and hold on to it. I was starting to wonder when I was going to find the opportunity to make her do something really gross. After that, she told me she wanted to grab some food. "Now we're talking," I thought! Let's watch her squeeze some Kennedy Fried Chicken into her dirty homeless mouth, and maybe wash it down with a 40 of Steel Reserve malt liquor. "I'd really like some tabouli salad," she says. Tabouli fucking salad? That's what rich hippie girls eat when they're in college. It isn't a meal for a 70-year-old homeless woman. She's supposed to claw through the garbage and pull out a fish skeleton like in Heathcliff and then eat the whole thing at once. No dice. Instead she sat daintily at a falafel place and picked at her healthy snack. She didn't even finish it! What happened to those bums like in Oliver Twist, who crammed spoiled beef into their mouths with grimy fingerless gloves? Or at least the guys in Bumfights who eat dogshit or whatever. This was starting to be a real downer. She kept trying to talk about her life, but I did my best not to listen. I decided that Gloria had to be the exception to the rule and that most bums could party harder than Bluto in Animal House. I got her to spend the rest of her card on gift certificates at McDonald's and I went on my way. I was determined this time to find a real fucking human turd. The sun was already setting and I hadn't seen even one drop of bum puke. When I spotted Steve on Avenue A, I knew I had my man. A weathered but still kind of okay-looking 46-year-old, he had that glint in his eye that (to me) said, "I'll fuck a stray dog in the ass on camera for a hit of crack." I approached him, explained the deal, and off we went. He led me to the Lower East Side to, I assumed, buy some drugs. But then there he fucking went, stacking up a hat ($5.99), a pair of gloves (also $5.99), and some toasty thermal underwear ($10). I finally broke down and suggested that he might want some blow to go along with his new twelve-pack of socks ($10), but he told me that he's in recovery from a heavy coke addiction he picked up working on a farm down in Mexico. "I worked on a fruit grove and a poppy seed farm," he told me. "I got to where I was shooting up twenty times a day. Now it's all about staying alive and that means staying away from drugs." I tried to talk him into one quick joybang, but to no avail. Next he picked up a Walkman ($9.99) so he could listen to Howard Stern. After all the boring shit he'd bought, he had about $20 left on his card. That's when he said (kind of sheepishly), "That's about enough for a bottle of vodka. My drinking's gotten pretty bad and if I don't get some booze every twenty hours or so I go into seizures." It was weird to hear that because my sister had seizures as a kid and it used to make me and my twin brother cry for hours worrying about her. Seizures aren't funny. I decided to stick it out with him and stood there as he bought a bottle. It was the only time I saw him smile all day. When he started to drink it, all I could see was a sad guy having a really bad time. All of a sudden I didn't feel so much like seeing him break his arm trying to jump over a garbage can anymore. Just sitting there in complete silence, listening to him sip his vodka, I started to feel kind of shitty about myself. I had thought this project would be like a funny frat party with bad skin and no teeth, but this was more about starvation, misery, shame, suffering, mental illness, isolation, loneliness, hunger pains, bad luck, foot rot, humiliation, fear, anxiety, chronic bronchitis, migraines, cold, violence, regret, loss, hoplessness, and basic survival. Iguess that's not so funny.