The art of homelessness: a number of articles have been written by a handful of decent writers on the subject of homelessness, but no one to my knowledge has covered this gross national tragedy by purposely walking in the shoes of the vagabond.

The art of homelessness: a number of articles have been written by a handful of decent writers on the subject of homelessness, but no one to my knowledge has covered this gross national tragedy by purposely walking in the shoes of the vagabond. So when the opportunity presented itself, I felt I should become my own subject and walk the streets and alleys and parks and parking lots of Miami-Dade, Florida, as one of the homeless. And let my notebooks tell the story.

The lyric "If I go crazy will you still call me Superman?" rings my drums. I turn it up till my headphones literally vibrate. When I asked this question of my love she'd emphatically said, "No!" And so, empty hand clutching a burst heart I departed with just two wrinkled five dollar bills in my fold and everything I owned stuffed into my World War II French army backpack and black canvas satchel. A man of the world I take to the stage, exchanging a fine woman, a comfortable home, and decent employ for a walk-on part as an actor in a quiet war where goals and dreams fall hard like rain. I kick myself to the curb, hitting the streets of Miami in the face of a potential downpour.

And with no direction and almost no money, I walk down past the glitter and glamour of South Beach, past fat cats and cute chicks dressed to the nines who stare disconcertedly at bums digging through trash cans for a morsel of discarded meat. I go down, down over the train tracks and back behind a series of tall empty buildings and find a shelter with a hand painted sign on an alley-side wall that reads, "Camilla House, dedicated to homeless everywhere." But the place--paid for by a mandatory tax imposed in 1993 on the city's restaurants and bars that raises $7 million annually--is closed. On the sidewalk under an awning in front, the "doomed and depraved" lay down and out on pieces of damp cardboard salvaged from industrial dumpsters. One guy, not much younger than me, lifts his head when he sees me and says, suggestively, "Pull up a piece of cardboard and get comfortable. This place don't open till Monday." Then he lays his head back down into dream.

Looking at him I remember an old Chinese proverb that went something like, "With only a bowl of rice to eat and my bended arm for a pillow, still I find comfort in these things." I think how less than twelve hours ago comfort for me was my dry apartment where my love would be waiting with open arms and a warm bed, food in the fridge, television to entertain, candlelight dinners, and the company of good friends. And now comfort is a dry piece of cardboard to sleep on, two burgers for two dollars from Burger King, and this belief that what I'm doing by living this reality will someday serve a higher purpose.

Then I think what horrible things could happen to me in this dirty and dangerous place and I start to pace. I see that, in comparison to others, I have too much. Too much weight in my heart staggering my movements and too much weight on my back. I look bent and broken--easy pickings for the five glossy-eyed, toothless men who just at that moment decide to relieve me of my heavy load.

They come at me like starved dogs on a lame animal. I almost laugh at the irony of being beaten and robbed in front of a shelter. However, seeing the seriousness of my situation and, after taking several shots to the head and body, I decide that fighting it out is futile and make a break for it. I put a death grip on my satchel and charge through the bunch knocking the smallest of them down on the rain soaked street and escape back out into a humid Miami night.

The beach, I find, is a fine place for sleeping. The moon beams gleam off the black waters of the Atlantic. As I lie down beside its quiet side, I feel my fears sink into its deepest depths; my mind finds peace, my body rest.

And then, of course, this being south Florida, it rains again. I wake up wet. All around me are dozens of others down and out in the sands. They too come awake, and we all go shuffling off into this surreal evening.

That reminds me how this whole thing began. Back when I lived in Richmond, Virginia, I would walk to work every morning past dozens of healthy looking men standing around outside this brick building. They would shake cups for change and mooch cigarettes. It was annoying.

If I was in their shoes, I'd thought, I'd go someplace warm, like Florida. I could reside on a beach or in the woods and live off the land, steal fish from the sea. Besides, what's the difference between being homeless and traveling? You keep clean by taking birdbaths in gas station and restaurant sinks. Fold your clothes to keep the crease, keep out the wrinkles. Have plastic bags to put wet and dirty clothes in and keep books and papers dry. You shower along a beach or under someone's backyard hose. You brush your teeth twice a day as the recommendation goes. And when you're as broke as a joke you steal shampoo and soap, even towels, early in the morning from a hotel cleaning lady's cart, which is always in the hallway and always unguarded. You wash your laundry in a sink, then lay it out on the grass in the sun and read a book or nap or fly a kite for fun. Because, like traveling, homelessness is a state of being, for most just a temporary thing ... I thought.

The reality, however, is seen not only in the meanness of the streets but the legions who occupy them. The Department of Children and Families, with the assistance of Florida's twenty local coalitions, began counting the homeless in the early 1990s and estimate that there are 57,000 in this state alone. Of these, 59 percent are Caucasian, 34 percent African American, 8 percent Hispanic, and 2 percent belong to "other populations." Seven percent are age sixty and older, 64 percent are age nineteen to fifty-six, and 29 percent are age eighteen or younger. Forty-six percent are in families, 21 percent are single women, 2-3 percent are women veterans, and 46 percent are single men. Twenty-five percent are mentally ill, 37 percent are alcohol- or drug-dependent, and 8 percent suffer from HIV or AIDS. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates three times more homeless people than counted because, as Hilda Fernandez of the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust told me, "Homeless people are hard to keep track of."

Soon I become hard to keep track of. But I find better digs at the Homeless Assistance Center (HAC) at Metro Mover School Board Station. For awhile, anyway. But the place makes me tired. There's constant noise: always someone's screaming child permeating my brain. And all those families, it's so sad to see: children deprived from the start because their parents, just kids themselves, got on the junk, cracked up on crack, and turned their lives to crap and now don't want to do anything for themselves. They live off assistance programs and food stamps--and have more babies to get more assistance, more food stamps. At the HAC I break curfew twice. There are consequences, and I decide it's time to leave.

In 2000, $70 million in federal allocations were dispersed to address homelessness nationwide:

* $38.4 million went to fifteen Housing and Urban Development (HUD) financed continuum of care systems for emergency shelter, transitional housing, homeless outreach, supportive housing for special needs populations, and permanent housing and support services.

* $6.2 million were Emergency Shelter Grant Dollars.

* $1.5 million went to services for the mentally ill homeless.

* $24 million went to Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS (HOPWA).

However, prevention and early intervention is where state programs focus their energies. For "those at immediate risk of homelessness due to natural and household disaster, loss of wages, and other conditions that cause sudden economic deprivation," the Florida Department of Children and Families offers financial assistance.

But money doesn't alleviate the whole problem, and it isn't easy to leave homelessness. In these days of living the life, I've been beaten up and robbed, fractured a foot, and lost my top front tooth. Now I look like a freak. So I go to Mt. Sinai Hospital and they fix my foot for free. But the woman behind the counter in the dentist's office tells me, "Homeless or not, it's $80 to see a doctor." Jackson Memorial Hospital's Dentistry School pulls teeth for free on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays--but it's first come, first served, and the line is long. According to Rachel Jenkins, an advanced registered nurse practitioner (ARNP), the Stanley C. Myers Community Health Center in Miami "is a place where you effectively receive more when you have less"; they triage people on an A-B-C-D scale with A indicating destitute people like me. However, for dental work you must first be a card-carrying member of the homeless for six months.

So I'm ugly now and I limp. I have no money to wash my clothes. I'm tired and weak and haven't eaten in days. I search for work but no one will pay me any more than an ear full of "I'm sorry."

"No comprehensive plan exists to alleviate homelessness," says Casey Conwell of the Miami Beach Police Department. I agree. So out here I'm forced to believe in chance, fate, and luck. And lucky me, walking the streets of South Beach, I find six dollars. I buy roll-up cigarettes, a burger, and a six-pack, then find a shady silent spot and get lost in stale-beer, mid-morning meditation. Six dollars or six cents--it's going to get spent.

So for awhile I'm back on the sands of South Beach, sleeping under the lifeguard towers; watching Garry, a Vietnam vet, patrol the beach night after night peering through five-dollar plastic K-Mart "night vision" binoculars while talking to no one on a plastic cell phone; waking up to some old man grinning as he offers to pay me twenty dollars to blow me. "You just have to lay there and pretend my mouth is your girlfriend's." A sick male predator out prowling for some young kid down on his luck. Mace comes in handy in situations like this.

Millions of dollars are spent annually to relieve the homeless problem but the numbers continue to grow: according to March 2000 census estimates 210,000 nationwide, 30,000 in New York City alone, with 170,000 assisted in shelters on any given day. Why so high? Joseph Minicozzi in the West Palm Beach City Planners Office believes, "It's because, by design, cities create poverty.... Housing is built first for the wealthy, second for the middle class, and lastly for the lower classes."

Maybe. Though I contend that the number grows because dollars go to pointless studies--such as those proving that tracking the homeless is difficult. And then there's the bureaucratic red tape that uses zoning, building, and fire ordinances; site selection; and the possibility of lawsuits to block mass production of a $300, four-person mobile shelter designed by Minicozzi and other University of Miami students back in 1992.

Or possibly the numbers grow because HACs are run in so authoritarian a manner that any self-respecting person, regardless of economic deprivation, would rather sleep in a bush with the mosquitoes and risk being arrested for vagrancy or trespass--or any other "order of maintenance" law the state can and will use against them.

I`m beat, walking in these smelly shoes, wandering about Miami looking for a safe place to sleep, something to do, something to eat. It costs a quarter to ride the trolley. I have no money. So I jump the turnstile and climb the stairs two by two, confident there's no cop at the top of the platform to bust me. I get on the Metro Mover. It moves me up and above and around the city. I see the sights, the lights, the harbor so pretty. It's as if I were on the set of a toy town--the kind kids play with, spending all day pushing tiny trains over plastic tracks.

I get off at Government Center, go down the escalator, cross the street, climb steps two by two up to the Miami-Dade Main Library where we homeless soldiers hang around outside on metal chairs at morning tables, reading discarded papers of yesterday's news. Skipping through the classifieds, too dirty and tired to get a job that will get us off the street, we look at the pictures and read the captions and wonder what it would be like to be worthy of a picture, words. We feel more like a Doonesbury cartoon, living moment to moment, frame by frame, in the absurd. There are 299 transitional housing facilities with a combined 10,576 beds throughout Florida's fifteen districts and yet we can't get off these damned streets. We sleep behind bushes and, waking up damp and hungry, may need to get across town for a job interview but have to carry everything we own, everywhere we go, because we have no place to stow it. What we need is a place to live. A job. Bus tokens to get there. And a telephone to call from when we're sick or late or hung-over.

The library is about to open. Here comes Magic Mr. Wendell. His face woeful, white hands hanging down at his side, as he shuffles in time with Bumper. They see me and sit opposite, the sun in their eyes. They have to squint or look down or away toward the art museum.

"What time is it?" I'm asked.

"Time for you to get a job so you can buy yourself a watch, Bumper, you fat dirty bum," I say with true affection.

"Hell with you, man. I'm fifty-six years old. I got me a bad back. I have AIDS. I'm gonna die soon. So, what do I care if I work. Besides, who's going to hire me?"

Wendell, silent, shuffling his deck, spreads the cards before me and says, "Choose." But I'm sad--mad because I know Bump is right and that he knows he's right. And with no family, both of these boys are beyond beat. Besides Bumper having AIDS, Wendell has Huntington's disease. And both men are terminal. Doomed to sidewalk sleep, minimum-wage labor days, all-night rotten-tooth stay-awake sessions, banging their head against a wall. Weeks of waking into euphoric puke sessions from sickness. I don't want to end up like them--with nowhere to go but from shelter to shelter, curb to curb, until one day someone trips over my dead and bloated body, rigor-mortis-posturing finger to heaven, bare-ass to the world.

Six weeks after I began, I decided my research was done. The story was originally supposed to be about the feel of homelessness--the desperation and struggle. And by walking in the shoes of the homeless, I'd hoped to find the art.

But there is no art. And the only feel is that being homeless sucks. For people like Magic Mr. Wendell and Bumper it is, as my new girlfriend says, a fate worse than death.

And so, to all the lucky people who have never known what it's like to be penniless, I want to say that, yes, what they assume to be true is true: the majority of this meek army of homeless are drunks, drug addicts, failed seekers, sallow sunken souls, mean ornery bastards, or wimps who gave up, got beat down and beaten for whatever reason--as well as those who are just plain crazy. However, if people look past the tattered clothes, they'll see in most a shiny, happy soul that belongs to someone's someone--a father's daughter, a mother's son. They'll see that all are human and want to know joy and love and a tender touch.

But that's not how they're viewed. Sitting there on the stoop, they can see you looking down your nose at them and only noticing their dirty, shabby clothes. You sneer and they feel like they may as well be on death row. Though you tell your children never to judge a book by its cover, you walk them across the street when you see the homeless, hoping they'll disappear back under the rock you assume they must have crawled out from under. The homeless have become dirty, discarded books that nobody wants to read. Allen Ginsberg once wrote: "There is no shame in the dignity of experience." And he was correct. The shame I felt during my research was for a society that, as George Orwell wrote, "is in conspiracy against its members."

And now that this article is done, I'll shuffle my stinky been-sleeping-in-the-trunk body back out to the four-door Honda Civic where a wonderful woman, who is now on the verge of a total breakdown, sleeps. And I'll go to the hotel where I've put my last bit of money down on a room so that she and I can have a shower and slumber in a real bed. It feels unfair, though, that I should have a bed just because I have a family to loan me money and am healthy and smart enough to work. After all, were it not for that lifeline, my few weeks could have become the rest of my days.

Buffalo Latham is a rogue journalist who has spent the last decade traveling throughout the continental United States, collecting the opinions of people from all walks of life, and writing for newspapers. He has hitchhiked, hopped freight trains, and even flown in the Goodyear blimp. Presently he is working on a book.