He sat down in front of the camera on a Friday in late March, weeks out from the move, and opened the way he always opens — a greeting, a hope that the week has been good. The frame does not move for the length of what follows. There are no cuts, no second angle, nothing to look at but rswfire and the enclosed room he is speaking from. What he says he wants to talk about is homelessness, and what it really means, and why he thinks he is so scared of what he is about to do.
The first thing he does is revise an assumption. He describes having believed, up to this point, that he was sharing an experience his audience would recognize — that people would watch, want the same adventure, feel roughly what he feels. He states plainly that he is no longer sure that is true. His past experiences, he says, play a big role in what he is going through. The correction is delivered without apology; it simply resets the terms of the transmission. He is not narrating a universal adventure. He is narrating his own, and the two are not the same thing.
Then he goes after the word. Homeless, he says, doesn't really mean anything — a very shallow word, one that carries none of the depth or the profundity of what it names. He lists the ways people arrive there: a lost job, parents who threw them out, an escape from a bad relationship, a way of life held so long that transition out of it stops being legible. He addresses the drugs directly and calls it self-medication, states that if you were on the streets you would do it too, and states that he did. He notes what is different now — that the supply is strong enough that every use is a risk of death. He states that they should not be judged for it, and that society judges them anyway.
Having emptied the shallow word, he fills it. From seventeen to somewhere around twenty-seven, a dozen times he cannot count precisely. Tents pitched just outside a workplace he was employed at. A tent between an expressway and a mall. Parks. Gravel in a mall parking lot. Playground gym equipment, where he describes waking out of a dead sleep to children playing around him and their parents standing right there watching — embarrassing, he says, and what you do is get up and walk away and try to do the best you can with the rest of the day. The record is specific because the word was not.
He continues into the nights, because sleep was not available and so the hours were spent walking. People stopped their cars for him. Usually he said no. One time he said yes, because the man said he had a place for him to stay, said he had kids, said he felt sorry for him. rswfire describes getting into the car, being driven into the middle of the woods, and being raped there. He states it directly and states it was not the only time — the man who offered him a house and wanted sex, the pattern of it, how often it happened. He describes trying escort work to make money and not being able to do it. He describes a group who came close to beating him, and states he does not know the reason, that maybe they sensed he was gay. Being on the streets and navigating the world the way he has had to, he says, are a bad combination. You truly cannot imagine what it's like. He would not wish it on his worst enemy — and he means that, he says, he is his own worst enemy — except on those without empathy or compassion for homeless people, and only so they would develop it.
He returns to what he did to get out. A Taco Bell and a Burger King, two jobs at the mall, and concrete in the parking lot to sleep on, weeks of it. Then a tent, moved out between the expressway and the mall, and months of that. Another time, far outside the city for a temp job across the street from the woods he was living in, where another unhoused man he never met left him a garbage bag full of bagels from the shop in town when he came back from his shift. That was the only person who helped him during that period, he says. The only one. Another homeless person.
Then he comes back to the room and the camera and the threshold he is standing on. What he is doing now is bringing all of it up again, because he is going to be homeless again — except this time, he states, he chose it. He says he doesn't know what he was thinking. He says he doesn't regret it, and then says it again more carefully, that he doesn't want to say he regrets it, because he doesn't, because he wants to do this, because he thinks he is going to love it. What is causing the pain and the fear is not the decision. It is the history the decision is walking back through. He ends where he started, on the thing he has been asking for the whole time: just have compassion for people. Try.