I did not come from poverty. I came from an educated family that lived
in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Harare, Zimbabwe. My father was
an economist, my mother a lecturer at the university. When I turned 20,
they sent me to America to obtain a respectable degree (law, medicine,
business), thinking that I would return to Africa to own property,
accumulate wealth, and marry the daughter of an important man in the
Ministry of Industry and Technology or the Ministry of Education and
Health. But almost immediately after arriving in the land of milk and
honey, I rejected this clear future for no future at all. I came to
America for exactly what it is famous for: freedom.
The freedom that comes with riches has its double in another kind of
economic freedom: the freedom of owning nothing. Both liberate you from
time, obligations, and other people. Because the Zimbabwean dollar was
weak, because I could not work in America (I didn’t have a permit),
because my parents were thousands of miles from me, and because my
college situation on the East Coast was not yet sorted out, I quickly
and deliberately found myself living with five males in an extremely
cheap but huge basement in Pioneer Square.
We entered through the alley between First Avenue South and Alaskan
Way. Like all alleys in Pioneer Square at the time and today, it had a
whole tribe of rats that competed for resources with a wandering tribe
of homeless humans. The entrance to the basement happened to be across
from the exit for the Underground Tour. Every afternoon, tourists would
emerge from Pioneer Square’s underworld, impressed by the dead
things—streets, sidewalks, and stores—they had seen. At
sunset, the tourists stopped visiting the underworld, and artists and
anarchists began trickling into the other underworld.
The basement was not a place anyone was supposed to be living in, an
abandoned beauty academy: decaying styling chairs with hydraulic pumps,
dusty shampoo bowls, broken manicure tables, dryers on rusty wheels, a
wall of cracked mirrors, all covered in years of dust. There was an
area converted into a kitchen (a toaster oven, a mini refrigerator, a
hot plate, a microwave oven that hummed horribly—the expression
“nuking” your food made sense with this Dumpster-salvaged appliance).
In the center of the primary area was a blue tent where one of the five
of us, Luke, slept. He supplied the basement with eggs from his day job
as a baker. None of the rest of us had a job. At the back of the
basement was a passageway leading to three offices and a broken freight
elevator. Three of us made our bedrooms in the offices. I slept in the
elevator shaft.
It was hard to pull a buck from the streets of Seattle (then going
through the recession of 1990) into the depths of the basement. Money
loathed our place. Once inside, it wanted to flee, to fly back to the
streets, to find cover in the drawer of a cash register. Cash always
looked so unhappy in our hands. Fresh bills rotted instantly in our
soiled pockets; the reason our clothes were so dirty was because we did
not have enough cash to wash them. We washed our underwear in the sink
and hung them in the dusk and dust of the main area.
We each paid 80 bucks a month, and not one of us ever made the rent
on time. I completely depended on miracles to come up with my share. I
almost always began the month with absolutely nothing and ended it, I
don’t even remember how, with 80 bucks going to the landlord. He was
letting us live there illegally and only had contact with one of us,
Kurt, a funk guitarist with long black hair and a stutter that sliced
his words into a mess of phonemes. Kurt lived in one of the offices and
slept with no clothes on. Nudity was a common thing in the
basement.
And the parties we threw were huge and long and noisy and free.
These parties began with a band, devolved into drugs and deeds of lust,
and dissipated long after the sun first cracked the night sky. There
was lots of sex in the basement, because sex costs nothing. There was
lots of Rainier beer, because it costs next to nothing. (Wine was
totally out of the picture.) Though only five of us lived in the ruins
of the beauty school, it caused us no surprise whatsoever to see one or
two strangers drifting past an office door, looking for someone who
attended a party, a gathering, a band session that ceased hours or days
ago. I recall waking up one afternoon and finding in the kitchen area a
woman (a pure hippie flower, with golden hair and a slim waist) and a
much-older man she’d met the night before and slept with in some dark
corner of the main area. The evidence: a sticky condom. The new lovers
were microwaving a moist marijuana leaf for breakfast.
W hat American poverty offers—and this is not the case with
African poverty, which is nothing but oppressive—is the
possibility that anything might happen: miracles of money, one-night
stands, movement to anywhere by any means (back of a truck, back of a
bicycle, back of motorbike, back of a bus). Other relatives from Africa
came to America and joined the middle class, but to me, the
middle-class situation was wholly unappealing. The middle class is
immobilized by the heaviness of paying bills, borrowing money, saving
pennies, and so on and so forth. It does not have true freedom but is
constantly in the situation of longing for it, and always fleeing from
the other freedom, the freedom of owning nothing, paying little or no
expenses. True, poverty is not pleasant, but it does offer freedom from
the pressures of being a constant consumer and borrower. In the
basement, I went to sleep at any time of the day, woke up at any time
of the day. If Luke happened to say, “Let’s go and drink mushroom tea
near Mount Index,” I would go. Because why not go and do drugs
in the woods? What was stopping me?
Often on Fridays I would leave the basement and, if I had any money,
eat something small at Mitchelli’s, which was across the street and
double the size that it is today. (Rumor has it that the long-lived
Mitchelli’s is not going to survive the current recession.) Or I’d
drink at the Pioneer Square Saloon, the only place that did not card
me. Or I’d visit the three girls who lived in a loft space around the
corner on Alaskan Way. One of the three girls, Carrie Akre, had at the
time recently joined a band, Hammerbox, and was working on an EP that
another friend, Lisa Orth, eventually released on her label, Big
Flaming Ego. Orth often boasted that she got the money to start the
label from an insurance settlement for an accident that resulted in a
metal plate in her forehead. She would let me touch it.
At Akre’s loft, which had an excellent view of the traffic on the
viaduct, I listened to music (Billie Holiday, Throwing Muses, Miriam
Makeba) and tried to say smart things to one of her roommates, a
dark-haired girl I secretly fancied. The order and femininity of Akre’s
loft gave me a break from the nonstop chaos that dominated the
basement. Her roommates were studying at the university, had jobs, and
seemed to be building their futures. They even had nice
furniture—or it looked nice when compared to what we had in the
basement.
One Friday night, I returned to the basement and walked right into a
strange scene. Near Luke’s blue tent, he and two young women sat in a
circle of styling chairs. One woman was largish, the other thinnish.
The largish one wore camouflage pants and a black T-shirt. The thinnish
one wore a long brown overcoat—with no underwear, skirt, or shirt
underneath it. The largish woman (who, I later found out, was supported
financially and emotionally by the naked woman in the overcoat)
dominated Luke’s attention. She was telling him about her military days
in Nebraska. She had been a soldier and had seen many awful things.
“I saw it with my own eyes,” she was saying. “It’s at a base near
Grand Island, Nebraska. There are these bees that are the size of cats.
They kept them in a black warehouse. You had to go inside to see them.
It was an experiment. Genetically modified bees, dude…”
Luke, a fast talker who deeply mistrusted the American government
and bought all his reading material at the anarchist supply store
Fallout, was eating all of this up, and I was on the verge of laughter.
The largish woman looked up at me and saw that I did not believe her
one bit. Why would the army make bees that are the size of
cats?—that was the expression on my face.
“Look, just because it doesn’t make sense to you doesn’t mean it’s
not happening. I saw a lot of things in the army that would blow your
fucking mind!” she said.
The hand of the woman in the overcoat gave the army woman’s leg a
reassuring caress. She had seen her partner in this difficult situation
before—seen her go crazy at the nonbelievers.
“The army is experimenting on all sorts of shit, man, that’s why I
left and why they’re after me. They can burst through that door at any
moment, kill all of you, and take me away!” The largish woman was now
vibrating with rage. Fearing that she might be the one to do this
killing, and not the government agents swarming in her head, I left
this little scene for the solitude of the elevator shaft.
T he elevator shaft was all wood and rusty metal and dead buttons and
levers. I’d appropriated one of the beautician’s chairs and placed it
next to the mattress on the floor. Luke came in and sat in the
beautician’s chair around two in the morning. A jam session of
funk-punk was raging in the main area. Everyone was drunk or high. The
soldier woman was long gone, but other crazy people had replaced her
and were telling their impossible stories to the other roommates. The
regulars who used to waste time with us included a man who made strange
movies with a video camera (I was an extra in one or two of them) and a
man who’d been to art school in Chicago and was obsessed with art made
by serial killers (nearly two decades later, he committed suicide by
walking into Lake Washington).
Luke had something on his mind. With his legs crossed in the manner
of that famous photograph of Ian Curtis in despair, and a cigarette in
his mouth and a dirt-cheap beer in one hand, he said: “Man, you think
you know everything.”
“Not true. I don’t know what death is,” I said. “I don’t think
anyone can know that. But I do know you can look all over the world and
not find one bee that is the size of a cat. That I do know.”
Luke’s eyes had an almost theatrical intensity. Though crazy for the
kinds of pranks he picked up from the punk manual RE/Search, he
took himself very seriously. His clothes and manner expressed this
sense of self-gravity: dark felt dress hat, paramilitary boots. He
said, “Charles, do you want to experience death?” He said it as if it
were an option, something we could do to kill a few hours.
“You mean to die and come back to life?”
“No, I don’t mean like that… I know of a place where you can
experience death without dying.”
“And where is that?”
“It’s only a few blocks away. It’s in the middle of the train
tunnel. You can’t see anything. Just pure blackness. I have been there
a few times with Kurt and feel like going there right now. Go with
me?”
In my situation, at my age, at that time of night, with all that
alcohol in me, how could I say no?
T he Great Northern Tunnel is one mile long, 28 feet high, 30 feet
wide, and 125 feet beneath downtown. Its southern portal is next to
King Street Station, its northern portal below Pike Place Market. It
was made with James “Empire Builder” Hill’s capital and the raw muscle
of 350 forgotten men. During the construction, which began in 1903, the
miners came across a prehistoric forest. At the center of this
long-dead forest, they found a completely preserved tree, which, when
exposed to the light of day, vaporized like a vampire into a pile of
dust and pulp. Above the southern portal’s keystone is the year of the
tunnel’s completion: “1904.” Early in the morning, I found myself
standing beneath that date with Luke, my Virgil in punk clothes. We
drifted into the tunnel without a thought.
Each crunching step diminished the light behind us; utter blackness
was slowly approaching. The tracks were dumb and cold. After walking
for about 10 minutes, it occurred to me that if a train were to come
through, I would be in a spot of trouble. The problem with the freedom
that results from an absence of money, the freedom of limitless time,
is that the future loses its power. What only ever matters is the now,
the present, the primal moment. Now all of a sudden, the future made an
appearance in the dark, and it looked quite deadly. My imagination saw
the lights of a freight train approaching me at a murderous speed. I
saw its wheels crushing my body, crunching my bones. I envisioned the
newspaper headline: “Zimbabwean Drifter Killed in Tunnel.” I saw a
thousand rats feasting on my bloody remains.
Panicking, I asked Luke, who was ahead of me, what to do if the
train entered the tunnel. “Hope for the best,” I heard. I looked back
and saw that the light at the point where we’d entered was almost gone.
But I could not abandon the mission at this point. I was so close to
absolute darkness. And besides, going forward was now as good as going
back. The best thing to do if a train came through, I figured, was to
run to one side of the tunnel and crouch down like some terrified
animal as its massive bulk roared past. I pictured this happening again
and again on that mile-long walk.
Finally we reached the death that I was promised. It exists in the
middle of that tunnel. It is the point where the light from behind and
the light ahead completely vanish. You can’t see the end of your nose.
You can’t see your hands. You have almost no idea what your feet are
doing. Your body is gone, and all there is is your consciousness. It is
the sensation of immateriality itself, which is a kind of
transcendence. You feel not so much like you’re dead, but surprised by
the bareness of your being. You sense it in the area of your chest. It
seems to flicker there, it seems so frail, it seems that even a light
breeze could blow it out. We stopped walking. Many years later, I’d
discover that this experience—this reduction of my whole life to
just the heart of being alive—was not anything new or
exceptional. It took only one visit to a posh health club for me to
realize that the train tunnel was nothing more than a poor man’s
sensory deprivation tank.
“We are lucky. No trains have come by yet,” Luke said, revealing for
the first time his own fear. “Let’s get out now.” I could not see him.
All that lived was his voice. And a voice in the dark is Hume’s voice
of God. We began walking again, the gravel crunching beneath our feet.
For a while there was no light in either direction, but then a pin of
light danced in the distance. It was far ahead, glowing like a tiny
star. (Anyone who has seen my movie Zoo will finally know the
source of the opening scene.) One of the tracks reflected the light,
barely. With each crunchy step, the light slid into a longer and longer
silvery line.
When we exited the tunnel, there was a moon, the lights of a
sleeping city, and a rapidly approaching train. We crossed the western
tracks, and as we reached a parking lot, the train plunged into the
tunnel.
An hour later, I was on my mattress in the elevator shaft. There was
a little life somewhere in the basement—two or so people playing
faux-Gypsy music. Luke was fast asleep in his tent, and I was looking
up at the shaft, which for the past three or so months I had lived here
had had no significance at all. Now it seemed to mean something sad and
true. It suggested that these days of freedom were numbered. It was
just so absurd to be living in an elevator shaft. Eventually I’d reach
the end of the tunnel of this particular moment in my life and surface
in the world of work and wages.
One day a letter arrived from Zimbabwe. It came from my parents, who
were terribly upset about my disappearance from the radar of formal
society. The letter was handed to me by my cousin Farai, who was
studying electrical engineering at the University of Washington. He and
his brother Tendai—a civil engineer who worked on the bus tunnel
that had then recently opened and was soon to be featured on the first
video by Hammerbox, “Size of the World”—were the only Africans
who visited me in the basement, and kept the shame of its chaos and
lawlessness a secret from the folks back home.
The envelope Farai handed me contained a check for $1,000. This was
the end of the tunnel. That kind of money wanted nothing to do with the
basement; the figure demanded that I move to a place that housed normal
people and hours. I betrayed the basement and used the check to move
into a large house near the corner of Harvard Avenue and Roanoke
Street, with two stories, three productive roommates, real furniture,
and a standard kitchen. We held parties that came to an end at
practical hours. More and more of my friends were university students,
and fewer and fewer were punks dreaming of becoming the next Jello
Biafra. I was back on the surface of society and beginning the long
journey to where I am now—a landowning father, salaried writer,
credit-card holder, husband, and filmmaker, who lives in a comfortable
Pioneer Square loft with a view of expensive buildings, but who knows
the value of owning nothing, making nothing, doing nothing. 
This guy should write a novel. He has the gift to grab the attention of the reader and brings to life memories that would otherwise probably never resurface.
Beautifully written photo….
and we should all be So lucky to have similar indexes of commonality in the stories we tell about name and birth recognition myth and reality and friends who mark our time periods.
i found this article inspiring. reminded me of my homeless phase. amazing charles!
I normally don’t care for what you do, but this one stood out.
I liked it.
Great story Charles. Well done.
Charles, you are wonderful. Never listen to the reactionaries that say otherwise.
thanks Charles, that was great
best thing i’ve read all day.
Excellent writing, Charles.
really beautiful story. couldn’t stop reading.
I usually zone out when I see a first-person narrative in The Stranger, expecting indulgent nonsense.
This was stellar. You’ve got a novel or two in ya.
You take a lot of shit for some of the things you write on this blog Charles, but this was excellent. Suck it haters.
In a paper whose best writing usually resides in the ‘I Saw U’ section or next to Annie Dillard and company, these words shine.
I agree with BombasticMo – usually don’t care for your articles, but this one was wonderful. You really should write a novel.
that was very well written, it takes you back to a time that most of us forgot or pushed away in the back of our heads. awsome story.
keep up the good work
Well-written and interesting. Keep ’em coming, Charles!
Excellent feature.
Why oh why when I posted this story to FB was there a picture of a smiling white hipster girl with a Save The Earth T Shirt?! The picture of Charles at the top of the story is so much nicer.
Yes, we need a full book of this from you, sir. This just wasn’t enough. But it was wonderful.
Thanks for writing this. Your story really resonated with me. I’ve never been as happy as I was at my poorest, and having nothing to loose and nothing to protect really does free you up.
Another thing you don’t mention is that poverty makes relationships more genuine- people spend time with you because they want to. In a middle-class setting they might be doing it because of societal norms or work relationships.
It’s interesting how this week’s theater reviews illustrate everything that’s wrong with your writing, and this piece illustrates what a fine writer you are.
I think it helps you to have a story tell, almost as much as it hobbles you to be limited to making arguments or providing commentary.
Incredible! thanks. I agree with Silvie’s comment.. Please write a novel!
Charles Mudede remains one of the few flickers of light in the overarching grayness of Seattle.
Thank you, Charles. I’m glad you wrote that.
What I liked most about it is that people who are interested will now have the opportunity to ask themselves, whatever became of that amiable risk-taking Mudede that made him into such an implacable Marxist, so insistent on the material conditions of life, so impatient with what the rest of us find cozy and comfortable? I like that possibility very much–that people may read something in this trajectory that they have now had the pleasure of reading.
thanks charles. once again, you have taught me something.
Great writing. Great ideas. At age 51, totally drowning in consumer debt and student loan debt, yet owning very little and trying to raise a child as a single mother, I dream of that freedom you describe. Practically everything I acquired with credit and spent money on has been stripped away little by little as I’ve moved 12 times in the last 13 years… each time losing more and more possessions yet still owning the debt of having acquired them. And all for what? Maybe we’ll all be living in poverty soon and something will reawaken in our collective psyche.
I wish you’d write more like this and less like the asshole critical theory profs that kicked me out of grad school.
Great essay. Should’ve been part of last week’s “Economic Survival Guide”. Recessions have their beauty.
wonderful, freedom is, when you also have the freedom of being without children or other dependents. Your life, indeed, was full of incipient luxury.
Nice article, Charles. Thanks for bringing me back to Pioneer Square in the early 90s. Almost makes me wish I could be staggering from the Red Front Tavern to my room in the Alps Hotel again.
thank you, charles. i needed that.
Awesome and true.
You’re a terrific writer. It’s always a pleasure to read your stuff.
Mr. Mudede, thank you for articulating the far reaches of your experience in such an evocative manner. I agree that if you haven’t already started a novel, you oughta give it a think.
Love the photo. I met you at Radio Free Leroy’s @ The Pioneer Square Hotel, in the early nineties, your head lowered as you sat at the table, big black saucer eyes glancing up. You then read from a part of a novel you were working on and it had something about Michael Jackson. I read some prose, nervously. You found my number and we met up, you wanted to make films, it was burning in you. After I knew you some time, you announced you were getting married. I said, “but you are a novelist, a writer, you can’t get married!” You now have two lovely children and a wife. You write, make films, teach, and here it is, your true voice. Keep going, this is the rich stuff and is damn good. I want to hear more, the attorney’s place you lived in that beautiful treehouse of a place in N. Seattle, it seemed so incongruous, and yet you always were lucky; your trajectory as a journalist/editor, filmmaker, father…
I have, at times, skipped over your slog contributions, but this piece was amazing. Keep these coming!! Thanks Charles!
Wow, that was one of the most thought inspiring pieces of writing I have ever read. That article was really captivating and intense.
It felt as if I was actually inside the basement.
Agreed, the author should write a novel. 🙂
Wow – outstanding.
Wow – outstanding.
This was absolutely fantastic! It made me appreciate the nothingness of right now – where broke college student has a whole new meaning to it, bring it on then! :]
I never read the lead stories in the Stranger. For some unkown (to me) reason I picked on this one and was totally hooked. I have been through the “possesive” phase, for many years and now live with a guy in Sicily in a small village on the slopes of the mountain. I own nothing but he works at a job he doesn’t really like but which allows him to interact with people. His pay is small but about four times the allowance he arranged for me from the Italian government. It is a very good life with absolutely no stress, living among people who commonly live to over 90. Because of the family traditions here, the old people are cared for by non-live-in family or by Rumanian girls who are the biggest import into the village!
I agree with Charles that the non-ownership society is good, but, if you can control it, the ownership society is also good. I spent a coulple of years living on a small sailboat with my sole income being the SSI from the American government. It was just enough to pay the moorage and electricity (a 24ft boat doesn’t use much) and buy the cheap food in the village and the food banks in the town.
People could not understand how I could be happy in this situation. Americans cannot be happy without endless aquisition of “things.”
Now they envy me with no obligations.
Thank you Charles for bringing this back to my mind. I will pay more attention to your writings in future.
that was a damn good piece!this is good writing.please please please,stay away from the hip hop reviews!stick to more stories like this.this is great.
This is the best article I’ve read in a long time. Couldn’t put it down.
Good stuff, Charles
It was a well written article of an appropriate topic to a captivated audience. Bravo!
Mudede is WAY too good to be writing for The Stranger. This is the best thing I’ve read in this rag in a LONG time.
Charles,
Great story. I’m a fan! Once my friend was visiting from out of town and we wandered into that tunnel. We thought it was abandoned. It looked so old, how could it not be abandoned? After we wandered out, perhaps a minute after, a train came barrelling through. We looked at each other.
I’m about to lose my unemployment checks. Being poor (in America) has a dual sensation of powerlessness and possibility. One may as well embrace it, but it’s like embracing a live wire. Last recession I had to get so bored and disspirited that it seemed like clocks had stopped. Only then could I embrace the vast opportunities of now. Currently after five great earning years I’m still locked up in the straight word of budgets and externalized hope, I’m afraid. Six more weeks and the money will stop.
Your fan,
mcfnord
a joy to read. bravo.
fucking brilliant, charles. inspirational. took me back to a very similar point in my life, perfectly. that freedom from ownership & the future taught me things i can never forget.
Makes me want to leave my life as a married law student and go live in an elevator shaft. Maybe then I would figure out who, and what, I really am.
Great piece, Charles. Thank you.
Thanks for sharing your story. Made my night!
I knew crossed paths with this guy back in the day. One of his cousins had tried to screw my girl. A lot of this is probably fantasy, but what it lacks in truth, he makes up for with imagination.
I will acknowledge it is well written and kind of fun. But come on. Upper class, wealthy kids slumming. A far cry from a real homeless person just trying to get by. go ask a homeless person who just had his stuff thrown away by the city how romantic or great it is to not own anything.
the author had the wits and werwithal to get by, and could make a phone call and get out any time.
but a decent read.
ahhh.. “reet,” partly true, and well said, however I must say, you miss the bigger point. Yours is implicit. Charles’ family wealth is not equivalent to America’s, nor is his presence here. He equivocates the cultures in his existence as an artist in the world today, shedding light on a subculture that did and still does exist.
How old are these commentators? My god, you have a gift for the overly-romanticized hyperbole. I promise you that if there was some nuance to your recollection, the story would shine so much brighter. I have a feeling that you’re on the edge. Consider reeling it in, just a tad. Honesty yields good things.
sounds like a a liberal becoming a conservative charles
This is nonsense. You say you “know the value of owning nothing, making nothing, doing nothing” but if that is the point of this article then you’ve only illustrated how much you truly do not.
American Poverty offers the things that you romanticize so long as they are chosen. You chose to live underground and reject the future you knew was waiting for you while the world of adulthood and responsibility pulsed above your head. You needed to prove to yourself that you could have made it in this country if you weren’t born of a well-off family, so you convinced the people around you that you were just an immigrant living with the rats in Pioneer Square.
Into a tunnel and out a changed man?
You know the value of privilege, and not much more.
I´m a mexican who lived in seattle for about a year back in 1996-1997. attended high school at Bush… Now and then i read the stranger (i used to pick the printed version every weekend).. most of the times i just browse the pages but don´t read the stuff.. Luckily i started to read this article and found it beautifully written and catchy..
Amazing. It reminded me of my druggie years in Seattle- they were awesome and terrible at the same time. But I’m thankful to have experienced it, which if you haven’t had a time in your life like that, you probably can’t understand. Really, really great.
Hm. Thank you for taking me to so many places I will never see. The shape of my day and my thoughts have been unexpectedly altered.
Great article man.
This was a good article. I agree with thelyamhound; write about yourself, not others. Please abandon the police beat stories, in particular.
A very thoughtful meditation on freedom, Charles! A tremendous article.
Cultural production mobilized by everyday conditions = politics (of comparison).
Terrific story and great writing. I read it twice.
This guy is an idiot. He was homeless and poor by choice and writes about it like he is some kind of hero. Fuck him and his loft apartment. The real brave people are the one’s struggling to find work and money and get out of their situations. He was just being lazy and stupid and young. That article was a waste of time to read and a waste of ink.
So what was the point of this? That he was lazy and young and was homeless by choice?. Not a very noble story. the people that struggle to get out of their homelessness or poverty are real. This guy only told us that he was lazy and did drugs when he was young. BFD. What a waste of ink. If you liked this article you are stupid.
Charles I have you listed under “religious beliefs” in my facebook profile. I think that captures how i feel about your work.
This is piece is fabulously written. However – and i know this is knit picky – but i see a distinction between the priveldge of choosing poverty and a life without obligations, and being born into structural violence. I know that I’m preaching to the choir. I guess i just get frustrated with the glorification of poverty by those that have a safety net.
The bottom line is the piece was phenomenal and I so appreciate your work.
Your evocation of that time felt true. I returned to Seattle in 1989, and the Seattle I found had a feeling of young poor (often by choice) people collectively forming tribes. Your description of the tunnel and its metaphors was especially insightful.
It’s a well-written piece, I’ll give you that. But I had more than a moment’s pause dealing with your central thesis, which I would boil down to “the freedom of owning nothing,” when I realized you never actually owned nothing.
I would submit that you were a tourist in that world, and that despite the readability and great storytelling in your piece, it lacks the true experiential aspect it pretends to have.
You were never truly poor, because you had a ready avenue of escape–your family offered you a way out whenever you chose. There was no risk for you, really. True poverty, in my view, is characterized by the LACK of escape options. You might not have found the whole experience so profound and romantic if living that way was your only possible choice.
Or maybe you’re saying that American poverty is always by choice? I hope that’s not what you’re saying…’cause it ain’t.
I DON’T THINK THE WILL TO NOTHINGNESS IS COOL.
He really made me understand the appeal of being a vagrant…very moving story
Absolutely beautiful. I was completely engulfed when I reading this. Really, really lovely. It touched a place in me that few things do.
muh dik
Wonderful Henry V-like story
lovely story. One of the rare homeless by choice people out there.
This situation was almost exactly like the one I encountered when I was 19/20.
Except I didn’t have a choice.
wow. this is really beautiful.
i don’t really know what else to say. my mind is blown.
Started reading this story randomly at the gym, and even though I wanted to put it down, I couldn’t. Loved it.
Brilliant, beautiful story… knocked it out of the park, and the haters out too I hope.
That was a great article. Wow. Your funk guitar player has been my bass player, so funny!
That was probably the best thing I’ve ever read in The Stranger.
Tremendous. Excellent. Thanks, Charles.
Wonderful piece. Takes us there.
great story. a cold hand on the diseased heart of america.
I liked this story and I don’t think it’s about how homeless, marginalized, and doomed people should feel lucky to have nothing.
It’s about appreciating the opportunity to experience anything other than inevitable middle-class mediocrity.
I remember this basement and those times well. Your story is a true snapshot of a city, and time, now gone. I am sad that J ended his life–I did not know that happened until I read this.