new edit at /hoboentro

I flew into Seattle around noon. I didn't want to get there too late in the day because I had no idea where I was going when I got there, I didn't have a place to stay and nobody to meet. I'd only been there once before for the Army, a short layover on my way to Alaska for my duty station the previous summer.

The chandelier art installation above the escalators in the airport welcomed me once again into a new life as I took the slow ride down. After getting off the plane I immediately went into the city using the light rail. Taking it all in for the first time, I walked around the famous fish market and along the boardwalk wondering what to do. I met a guy wearing a large travel backpack walking, I stopped him and asked if he was camping. He said yes and I asked for his advice.
He'd been camping for 11 years in Seattle and said it was rather easy once you got used to it. Coupled with my gear, he said I would be fine. We talked about the homeless lifestyle for quite a while. He mentioned that even the streets were usually fine to sleep on if you could find a nook or cranny. He said if I got too exhausted to go to the park in the day and catch some rest, then pick up some coffee and stay up until the morning came. He told me of a place under a bridge nearby where I could go to get free food in the afternoon. He warned me to stick to myself and stay away from the jungle, the green spaces along the highway that the addicts and homeless controlled. I thanked him for his time and we went our separate ways

At Native Park I naively talked to a guy in military fatigues who really wanted to show me some good spots that coincidentally sounded like they were in the jungle. He didn’t have any gear and claimed he was getting SSI benefits in a few days which would allow him to go to California. After a few minutes talking I realized he was pretending to be a veteran and left to wander.
The homeless population in Seattle has relatively easy living compared to the rest of the United States. The weather rarely dips below freezing and when it does it hardly stays that way long. The city does whacky things like give hundreds of thousands of dollars to the owner of an empty lot downtown who 'lets' the homeless stay there, which actually equated to neglecting the property for so long while choosing to or being unable to do anything about it that it became a sanctioned place for them to stay. The city even has specific laws about messing with a homeless person's things that would make it a hate crime for doing so. From a sidewalk I once saw a camp up against a fire department with a laminated sign posted in front of the camp that said they were going to move the persons things in two weeks and if the person didn't move their things they could collect their property from the address listed.

The first night I stayed under a bridge near the light rail station in Seatac, an area near the Airport several miles from the city proper. I don't think I slept more than a few hours. The next day I continued exploring the city, mostly downtown near the market. I found myself sitting near the water watching the world go by. Thousands of people with things to do, places to be - responsibilities. Even if they were there for leisure they would eventually have to return to their lives. What did I have to do? At the stoplight across from the market I sat on an electric box and watched the thousands of people go, stop, go, stop while a homeless man who appeared to be like every other addict downtown would get in their way and hold a cup out. Eventually someone put a few dollars into it and he retrieved them to his pocket before getting in the way of the next person.
I was getting something to drink at the 7/11 downtown when a guy came in and punched another who was in a wheelchair in the back of the head, apparently the one in the wheelchair ran into the other. This prompted a melee from the nearby patrons which continued out into the street as an entire mob began beating the man for attacking someone in a wheelchair, joined by the man in the wheelchair. The mob then realized the man in the wheelchair was standing and almost began beating him too but he quickly pulled up his sweatpants to reveal a gnarly calf with fresh bandages so they let him go.

That second night I attempted to sleep on the light rail as it traveled back and forth from the airport to downtown, wondering if I had gotten myself in over my head and how this was all going to work. The backpack was much heavier to carry than I anticipated, my hips ached from the hip straps and the tightness of my pants. I felt exposed in my clean clothes and gear which might as well have been a neon sign. Compared to the rest of the homeless around I looked like a tourist. On the light rail some businessmen asked me if I was a thru-hiker and they clammed up when I explained I wasn’t.
The third day I got off at different stops along the light rail to explore but I still had no idea where to go or what to do. While walking next to the road someone tossed a pizza crust at me from a car and it took me a few moments watching it bounce along to realize they'd been aiming at me. Later that day I was on a bus headed downtown when a guy my age wearing an empty travel backpack complimented me on my backpack and asked if I was traveling. His name was Diver and he wasn't traveling but was homeless and knew other traveling kids who hung out at a place called Black Coffee, a coffee shop in Capitol Hill. He invited me back to his squat house in Georgetown, a few miles south of the city. We hopped off the bus and immediately back on one going the other direction. A block away from the house he showed me a giant cowboy hat and boots, some sort of tourist destination in a run down park.

We arrived at the squathouse as it was getting dark, a tiny blue house with the words 'Hen Haus' spraypainted at the entrance. We had to be sneaky, Diver explained, because a few weeks before they had thrown a massive party which saw the police called and everyone ran off. He showed me one of the printed flyers for the party, it looked like any other you'd see for a show outside a venue. It had a picture of a house with a nuclear explosion going off above it, the words 'Blowing up the Squat (Without blowing up the Spot)' stylized over and the details at the bottom - '6650 Corson Ave, Free Folk Punk, Buskers Encouraged, Bring Your Own. ' The idea was insane; a party at an abandoned house in a quiet neighborhood, where you could shout out to the neighbors without raising your voice.

The house itself was wrecked, holes in the walls and garbage everywhere. The kitchen and one entrance to the house were completely blocked by trash. On the wall directly in front of the door where one walked in was written 'No Hard, Shard or Black'. The bathroom and toilet were an unholy cesspit too vile to describe properly with words -power and water had long been cut off to the house. The other two rooms on the floor weren't as bad, one was relatively clean of trash and covered in graffiti while the other was extremely cluttered with random things.

The cluttered room was Diver's, his name coming from his favorite passtime; dumpster diving. A Tom Waits poster, a Seahawks jersey and many pieces of random art adorned his walls, all of which Diver proudly explained came from the dumpster. He showed me several of his most recent finds like a bluetooth speaker and a silver chain with all the excitement a child shows an adult their favorite toy. Diver was from Washington originally and was on disability for his mental instability, he received approximately 400 dollars a month which he promptly spent on weed or weed accessories every time. Diver's dumpster treasures were a fun novelty to me, though it was mostly stuff I wouldn't want, I could see the appeal - his room looked like a normal college kid's room and he hadn't paid a cent. Many interesting shows and tells later I eventually retired to a space in the trashed kitchen, near the back entrance and the only working door.

Not long after I had laid down for the night, the door to the house was kicked open and several figures stood shining flashlights in. A girls voice called out 'Oi!' and then 'Oi, Who the fuck is sleeping in the kitchen?' at me. Diver came out of his room and explained he'd brought a new traveler back and that we were still trying to be sneaky for the neighbors- to which the girl laughed at him and scolded him for bringing someone the rest of the house hadn't met yet. I went back to sleep while the girl and her party went upstairs.

The next day I met the rest of the current residents of the Hen House. The graffiti room adjacent to Diver's on the ground floor was Zachs and to a lesser extent his friends, Omar and Emmett. Zach was an easily impressionable late teen who had settled on the nickname Philly, since he came from Philadelphia. His own worst enemy, he drifted between extremely self destructive behavior and moments of profound clarity. He had apparently moved to Seattle with his mom and taken up street life as that was what the cool punk kids did. He knew Omar from high school and together with Emmett, another kid from their school, they formed a little graffiti crew 'FWS - Full Wingnut Status', though Omar and Emmett would often stay at their parents house instead of the squat house.

The girl upstairs was Rosalyn, everyone called her Ros (pronounced Rozz) for short. A short dreadlocked punk girl, Ros came from somewhere in New York and loved to embellish her accent when talking to Philly or anyone else she thought was from the East Coast, like most New Yowkas. She was extremely politically outspoken and liked to believe our little squat would one day lead the revolution- mostly because of the crowd at Black Coffee constantly hyping everything up. Rosalyn had previously spent some time living on a bus with some hippy guy in California, they had a kid together but Ros gave up custody to someone she knew in Seattle. Rosalyn was constantly going on about how her ex would find her and 'get her' if he knew where she was. Despite her constant claims to be in hiding, a simple google search of her name would turn up many hits for a modelling website that included her current location and ways to contact her. Nobody besides Rosalyn mentioned their past much and Rosalyn often only did so in the context that she was hiding from her ex.

The others upstairs were people Rosalyn had brought back from Black Coffee, not really full time residents of the Hen House. One was a newbie traveling guy who played guitar, the other a couple who had a van but didn't always stay in it. Apparently the house was just sort of a well known place, the threat of getting in actual trouble didn't seem to apply at all. They'd only just begun staying in the house again after the party that was apparently thrown because they were worried about getting kicked out anyway.

The small house was somewhere over 100 years old and the upstairs was simply a finished attic with steep walls that required you to duck more and more as you went closer to the edge. These walls weren't punctured with holes all over and if there wasn't graffiti like downstairs all over the place one would've thought it was an entirely different house. The upstairs landing was completely clean and led to a solid wood door painted white, covered in writing. Rosalyn's was the cleanest of the rooms, though they told me they'd scrubbed some mold off the walls. There was one window that looked South down the alleyway over a parking lot of some studio apartments that'd been converted from an old barracks. The room had a minimal amount of trash like a regular hangout spot and even some furniture like a chair and a few tables. There was one mattress on the floor littered with several sleeping bags. On a table in one corner sat a cage with Rosalyn's pet rat, Lizzie.

Like the rest of the house besides Diver's room, nice stylized graffiti and extremely ugly writing could be found everywhere you looked. The sheer volume and contrast of the artistic calligraphy to the random poorly scribbled inside jokes made me feel like there was some sort of insane world I'd never known unfolding in front of me. The outside of the door to the room had several names on it, each written and stylized on a separate panel of wood, including a little drawing next to their names- Arrick, Eliott, Raven, and Philly each having a sailboat, a pot leaf, a dog and some train tracks respectively. Among other things, in the center of the room poorly written and crossed out was IM followed by MAN, I'M RETARDED. One corner had dozens of variations to what FWS could possibly mean such as Fairy Wizard Staves, Fuck White Sluts, Forlorn Winters of Solitude; my favorite was Filthy Worship of Salmon that later someone drew a strange anthromorphic godlike salmon next to. The wall with the door had all the space taken by massive stylized lyrics artistically written and decorated, 'Bugs in the Kitchen and Mold in the Sink, Chuggin down the Wiskey and we never stop to think; What do we do tomorrow?'

That day Rosalyn took me up north to Black Coffee, an anarchist coffee shop located in the Capitol Hill district of Seattle. Though I wasn't political at all, the others besides Diver fancied themselves something of revolutionaries. Aside from the political angle to the place, it served as a meetup for travelers and dirty kids. People from about 16-27 years old living on the street (or appearing to) were called Dirty Kids, a catch-all term separate of subsets like punk or hippy. Drop in centers for youth often begin aging people out at 26-27 and somehow the age cutoff for the term Dirty Kid is just arbitrarily what the youth center cutoff is. Many Dirty Kids rely on the youth drop in centers wholly for their food and clothing needs. Their entire schedules often revolved around the feeding times at these drop ins, being otherwise unable to get decent meals without asking for someone's whitebox leftovers outside a restaurant late at night.

A very large portion of the dirty kids who hung out on Capitol Hill did nothing but go back and forth between these drop ins, Black Coffee and Cal Anderson Park. In any West Coast city you can find many people who appear to be young travelers or street people forced into their situations, often it turns out they're just doing it because it looked cool and have family nearby that would accept them back. Black Coffee was filled with these sort of pseudo-homeless kids who seemingly all came from wealthy families less than a city bus ride away.

Of these, one of my favorites was a mysterious guy who went by 'Cloud'. He was fairly handsome with blonde hair and blue eyes, suspiciously like an extremely popular character from a well known series- though nobody ever pointed it out. His outfit looked as though it too belonged in Final Fantasy, having too many belts and half a dozen visible knives attached to his person at any given time. He never had anything to say, always empty offerings spoken in an even tone about whatever discussion was going on. He'd sit in the corner of the cafe with his laptop positioned so only he could see what was on his screen, I thought he was writing or something until one day he got up to go to the bathroom and I saw he was playing World of Warcraft. Most of the dirty kids hanging out there were like Cloud - merely pretending.

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Pub: 07 Aug 2025 00:42 UTC

Edit: 20 Aug 2025 19:04 UTC

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