Hugo listens and nods. “Being homeless is a vicious circle,” he says. “The longer you are homeless, the harder it is to break out of it.”
Hugo became homeless seven years ago. Drugs were the reason. Before, he used to work as a doorman at fancy hotels like the Marriott and the Hilton. Hugo started to snort coke but could not control it. He decided to temporarily stop working. “I was afraid I would be caught using drugs at work. Then I would have fucked up completely.” He explains that all hotels keep a blacklist of ex-employees that use drugs or are unreliable. Hugo sighs. “At that time I had never heard of rehab and assistance programs. It sounds ridiculous, but I figured that there was only one way to get out of it. I gave up my apartment and of all things, I joined the fucking navy.”
Hugo went through boot camp a few months with no problems. Just before the graduation there was a final test. “I made an unforgivable mistake. The night before we had a party. The next day there was a compulsory piss test. They found traces of cocaine.” Hugo got an Entry Level Discharge. His family was embarrassed and wanted nothing to do with him anymore. In his first weeks of homelessness, Hugo stayed with friends. “I had a whole schedule. Two days here, three days there. But in the end it did not work out. I had to pay ten bucks for a place on the goddamn couch. I had an argument and I was kicked out. It was fucking scary. I didn’t know what to do, where to go. For three days I rode the subway, up and down with the Seven from Times Square to Queens and the other way around. I slept sitting up on a bench.”
Hugo gets a painful look when he talks about that period. “Yeah, I was fucked up. I did not know about shelters, had never heard about soup kitchens. Another homeless person in the subway had to explain that to me. He told me about a shelter, on Ward Island, near Riker’s. But to go there, you had to walk through a bad neighborhood. One time I was mugged by a bunch of blacks. I said ‘Yo, I’m homeless!’ But they did not believe me. They nearly stabbed me when they couldn’t find money. In the shelter they stole my last clothes. My only winter coat. I finally went to sleep at La Guardia airport. They leave you alone as long as you move at seven in the morning.”
During the day, Hugo made money handing out fliers for fortune-tellers and clairvoyants. If he worked hard, he could make twenty, thirty dollars a day. “I worked for every gypsy and fortune-teller in town. It was always the same. The first days were okay, then they started to get difficult: ‘We pay you tomorrow.’ Then I knew what time it was and I was gone.”
Later, Hugo distributed fliers for strip clubs: The Kit Kat Club at Times Square and the Pink Poodle Bar on the East Side. “It was zero degrees,” he remembers. “The steady crew stayed home. When it got warmer, they returned. The boss told them they could fuck off and take me as an example.”
Because he worked the nightshift, he slept during the day at Saint James Church on the Upper East Side. “You could sleep there as long as you sat upright. They even set apart a special section for us.” When this sleeping spot became too popular and the church was flooded with the homeless, the pastor put an end to it. After that, Hugo slept all over the place: on porches of banks, in a hallway at a hospital, in burnt-out houses and parking lots. He finally wound up at the so-called Rotunda at Riverside Park.
The Rotunda is a half-covered open space in the park where a small colony of homeless was camping out. During the day, churches from the neighborhood came to bring soup and sandwiches. Hugo slept in a huge fridge he had found on the street. “It was just a small house,” he smiles. There, he met Julio who slept next to him in a cardboard box.
In the winter of 1991 the park police cleaned up the Rotunda. Julio and Hugo went to sleep in the park. “During the day we had to hide our blankets in the bushes,” recounts Hugo. “If the park police found them, they threw them away. And then you just had to see how to spend the night. The next day we had to go to Times Square where the Coalition was handing out blankets.” In the end, Julio and Hugo found the tunnel and befriended the Cubans. “If you compare this with where I used to sleep, this tops everything… Privacy, electricity, your own little house. The only thing that lacks is room service.”
Yesterday’s heat has transformed into oppressive humidity, and dark clouds pack the sky as I walk with Julio and Estoban towards Central Park. Julio knows the park like the back of his hand, as he slept there for months before he came to the rotunda. He poses for a photo in front of the Dakota at the spot where John Lennon was shot. Fans still bring fresh flowers. Then Julio takes me to Strawberry Field, a spot in the park named after the dead Beatle.
Like a experienced tour guide, Julio shows me all the corners of the park: the watch tower, where bird watchers are observing the rare peregrine falcon; the Ramble, a rocky part of the park where gays and rent boys are cruising; the lake on the South Side where Julio used to sleep at an entrance of the subway till the park police kicked him out; the spot where puppet players do their show mimicking the Sisters Sledge; the roller skating rink, where kids perform acrobatic tours in front of an audience of tourists, yuppies and bums.
Julio loves the park and nature in general. “If it wasn’t for the park, I would have gone crazy in the tunnel,” he says, as he inspects every garbage bin for empty cans with the taciturn Estoban. “I need to get away once in a while from the rats and the garbage to walk around the trees and the squirrels.”
People are arriving at the Rumsey Baseball Field, an open space with a grandstand where the summer concerts take place. Today the audience is mostly black, since the Brooklyn based Haitian/Jamaican group Vodou 155 is playing. People are carrying big protest signs to draw attention to the case of black journalist and activist Mumia Abu Jamal, who has been on death row for years.
“Wow, that sucks,” says Julio when I explain who Jamal is and that he is accused of killing a cop. Julio has had very little education, in fact he’s nearly illiterate, unlike Poncho, who reads the Times everyday. I love discussing Castro, O.J. Simpson, and Bosnia with Poncho.
“I tell you, crazy, crazy people. This Karadzic, crazy man, just like Castro,” he always says whenever we talk about Bosnia. Poncho is of the opinion that NATO should bomb the Serbs into oblivion. That actually happens a few weeks later and Poncho is clapping his hands with joy. “What did I tell you… Boom, boom, boom!” Poncho has followed the bombardments live on CNN from the tunnel. Julio doesn’t understand much of the war in Bosnia, but thinks that the snipers in Sarajevo suck.
“Be quiet, you guys,” calls Julio to the dozens of sparrows that jump around him. “There is enough for everybody.” We are sitting on the side of a low wall, feeding the birds with bread. Julio has hung his can bag strategically on a garbage bin next to the pizza and beer stand.
There is not much to do. The people who want to throw an empty can away deposit it in Julio’s bag. Then, very nicely, we say thank you. When someone throws a can in the garbage bin, we demonstratively take it out and put it the right bag. Estoban in the meantime is walking around the audience and collecting cans over there.
We had bought some cheap beers at the supermarket and smuggled them in the bag with the empties. Since Julio knows the guys from the beer stand and always helps them clean up, they don’t make an issue of it. They even give us a bag of ice.
Meanwhile Julio has discovered an ant colony and throws crumbs at the entrance. When the crumbs are too big, Julio helps the ants and pulverizes the crumbs into smaller pieces. He happily he watches how the insects take their bread to their underground home. The band starts to play and Julio stands in-between the audience with a can of beer in his hand. He is mesmerized by the beautiful Haitian singers, dressed in long skirts and tight T-shirts, who swing to the rhythm. The sky gets darker and turns a nasty green color. Thunder booms, and when the raindrops start to fall, the organization decides to cancel the concert. Julio screams that they have to go on and waves aggressively with his can of beer. When the downpour starts, everybody runs for shelter under the grandstand or at the food stalls. Everyone except Julio. He has taken off his shirt and catches the raindrops in his wide-open mouth while performing a wild rain dance.