I have been to the top and the bottom of the Madison Square Garden experience.
Many mornings during the time that I was homeless in New York I was in and around midtown Manhattan . If I had slept I’d wake up and go wait in line at the church on 31st street for free breakfast and coffee. After filling my stomach and getting the caffeine fix I needed I would walk 3 blocks to 34th street at the main entrance of Penn Station (the basement of Madisom Square Garden) to make it for rush hour.
I’d find a clean enough cup in a trash can and park myself right in front of the entrance to try to scare up some change to help me get fucked up and eat more breakfast. Between 7 and 9 am you can encounter thousands of commuters coming in from Jersey. Sometimes I had a sign but I tended to lose my sharpies (that I had shoplifted from Duane Reade), so most of the time I didn’t have a sign.
If my mood was decent enough I would sing songs (if there’s one thing I know, it’s a few tunes). I really liked to sing this one tune I heard for the first time in an Uber:
When you are in that position it’s very damaging to the ego, no one wants to be begging the worker bees of the day for change, but you just do it… whatever, I had learned to accept the unacceptable a long time ago. There are a few reactions I would get from the commuters.
Some people want to pretend you aren’t there, because for whatever reason they can’t handle the proximity to suffering, or maybe they find it abhorrent that I haven’t got a job. I don’t know why they do that, and i couldn’t ask them (after all I was invisible).
Other people apologize for not having any cash, as they quickly move past you making brief eye contact, pretending to pat down their pockets. I was not accepting paypal at this time.
Some folks drop change… a few times I got a fiver, one time I even got a 20 from a young professional looking lady. I usually walked with at least 30$ by the time it was 9 am. One day I made a quick 50$. That’s why I found it so easy to pick up heroin from two blocks away, where the pushers never close up shop. A McDonald’s hotcake meal and a few bags of dope…all in 3 hours of the kindness of strangers.
If you want a homeless person to eat, give them food… sometimes homeless people need to anesthetize themselves to deal (I did), I suspect you might do the same. Once you give them a dollar, it’s up to them if it’s for booze, drugs or hot cakes. People would say “don’t buy drugs”. Ok sir, whatever you say, thank you. It isn’t like i was going to go buy a condo with these contributions, and solve my homelessness.
It really messed me up to be right there, begging for change, all dirty and gross. In the summer of 2017 I saw 7 of the 13 night Phish baker’s dozen run, 3 years sober at Madison Square Garden right above Penn Station. One night I got lucky, went on the train from Asbury Park, NJ to NYC without a ticket and actually ended up in the Chase luxury box for one of the shows. That’s another story, but the contrast of luxury Phish shows to dirty change begging in the same place was pretty jarring. That’s what the difference is between sobriety and using drugs is to me, a complimentary buffet in a fancy private luxury box inside of an arena rock concert, and trying to scrape enough change together to eat and get high.
I heard being a patron of the ev was cool and good
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