ShopDreamUp AI ArtDreamUp
Deviation Actions
Literature Text
It took three days and nights to get to New York City by greyhound, three days with hardly a scrap of food to eat and three nights with almost no sleep. All I had in my possession were a few books and odd things, an extra t-shirt and a hundred dollars in cash—all the money I had in the world, and most of which was stuffed into my left boot. I was going to need it to last a long time, because I had no help waiting for me in New York, no family, no friends, no plans, nothing. Everyone else who was on the bus probably had families with apartments, money for hotel rooms, taxi cabs or subway destinations in Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, Harlem. Everyone had a somewhere and a someone. Not me.
I recall that there wasn’t much knee room on the packed bus. My knees were bent up against the back seat, aching day and night. I hardly walked in all that time either, except to go to the back of the bus to the shitter, a tight little sweat box that reeked a little more each day and had flies that buzzed in the brown, sloshing darkness at the bottom of the can. I recall the stench of unwashed, long-distance itinerants, the awkwardness I felt with neighbors who never spoke and my annoyance with those who were never silent.
It was a profound moment when, coming out of New Jersey, the bus rounded a corner and I saw for the first time, beneath the pristine grey of a cloud-covered sky, washed clean by a heavy summer rainfall, shining for a moment with smogless clarity and surrounded by the cold, white Hudson waters, the New York City skyline. And I remember staring for a long time without blinking at the city’s multitude of monolithic structures that rose like glass Babels into heaven, medieval tenement roofs tightly packed onto the hard, rocky island surface of Manhattan, the Twin Towers still standing in those days, still breathing, still shadowing the city like brave sentinels.
A few minutes later, I passed under the Hudson through a wide tunnel that was lit up by rows of yellowish, fluorescent lights, and then finally arrived at the New York Port Authority.
I can imagine myself getting off that bus, imagine a fourteen year old with beat-black leather boots and long brown, anime-boy hair, standing amidst the multitudinous crowds at the Port Authority Bus Terminal wearing a worn out, dark green, high school backpack with a faded, whiteout batman logo, a pair of blue jeans thin at the knees, and black button-up shirt over a pale blue t-shirt.
The t-shirt was given to me by a little-known punk rock band named after the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. I knew the band personally, because I was always at their shows. In my backpack, incidentally, was a collection of poems by Rilke —whom I idolized— and another collection by Whitman. I had stolen both collections from a Barnes and Noble book store only a few months earlier.
This was the first time I had ever been to NYC and knew absolutely nothing about where to go or how to survive once I got there. People will say I was crazy, of course. Why would a fourteen year old boy travel halfway across the country with no plans, no one waiting for him, almost no money and nothing to live off but naïve hopefulness? People will say all kinds of things. But I don't care. Those people probably haven't lived half the life I have.
Whatever the reason for my being there, I was there and had to survive.
Since I had no place to go, I just started walking. I wanted to see Times Square which was to the north of the Port Authority, but not knowing this I headed south. Street after Street, I walked for hours all the way down to Chinatown and further. I had no map nor had ever looked at one closely. And in those days the only internet access was by landline. At some point, I hung a left and ended up on the east shore line.
I passed through endless crowds of people whose impressions stayed with me like images from a great film: business suits with radiant silk ties; old retirees in scruffy shoes cautiously crossing taxi-infested streets; overweight middle-aged men in cheesy t-shirts scowling, spitting out expletives and rubbing their greasy Buddha bellies; college-age sweethearts in tight shorts, trendy boots, shuffling their asses, swinging their arms; soccer moms weighed down by shopping sacks; young girls with long shiny hair dancing with the sound of invisible rhythms; decrepit men wrapped in Salvation Army throw outs; bums with dirty, red and drunken faces weathered sick by long December snow nights; working class twenty-somethings cooked hot by carbon fumes of the hazy summer day; weary old women with toothless grins and wrinkled eyes; strangers engaged in noisy arguments and, in a few miserably mad cases, crazies arguing with unseen enemies.
I saw one street kid, a young girl in a small red shirt, holding out a little water cup for a fall of change. It was obvious that most passers-by were too jaded, too acclimated to the blitzkrieg frenzies of the Manhattan streets, to notice her unique suffering. But when I closed my eyes, I could still see her image, her dark, messy brown hair, her beautiful, almost innocent brown eyes. My chest felt heavy at the thought of her.
New York is the sort of place where a person can fall dead on the street and people will pass by without even a feigned pretense of momentary concern. In a million man city, problems pile up like trash bags in a landfill, endlessly, endlessly rising.
There was a cafe, low class but clean. It was separated into two rooms: one room had a bar-style cafe and the register; the other, two rows of booths, one row on each side of a small walkway. I chose it because of the booths; plus, there was coffee and I had the impression that I could be there for hours without anyone bothering me or being shooed away.
I nestled myself into a brightly-lit booth in the back of the cafe and pulled together a dollar in change. Certainly the look of vagrancy was beginning to creep up on me. Nevertheless, a waiter came to my table and quizzically looked me over, handing me a menu.
“What would you like?” he politely asked.
“Uhm … I'll just have a cup of coffee.”
“Coffee? Is that all?”
“For now, yes.”
I was famished and desperate for food, but something inside of me made me frugal like a gnostic monk.
“If you'd like anything else at anytime just call me and I'll bring you something. We have some really good soup. It's only two dollars.”
I needed that soup. I had enough money to get my belly to shut up, but after that, what? The more I spent the harder it would be to last in the city. I needed time to figure out something long term. I would have to stretch the money as far as possible.
By the time my waiter returned carrying a clean, white cup and saucer of black coffee, two miniature plastic cartons of liquid creamer and several packages of sugar, I had opened my backpack and laid out several blank sheets of paper. In thick black ink, I was writing a poem spontaneously without stopping between lines.
I had already finished a cup of coffee and was ready to call for another when an idea occurred to me. I had a fresh sheet of paper and began copying a poem onto the sheet. One page for a single poem.
There was another booth that caught my attention where two attractive girls were sitting and talking over salad. They were about to leave. I had to hurry. I wrote as fast as I could while keeping the poem neat and legible.
One of the girls was fumbling around in her purse while the other was looking for the waiter.
I signed my name at the bottom of the page: Frank Jaspers.
Taking the page in one hand, I walked over to the girl’s booth and more or less accosted them.
“Hey, how are you girls doing?”
I'm sure they were wondering what this crazy kid was doing. Trying to flirt?
“Uhm ... Fine and yourself?”
“Oh, good, good. But, hey, I'm sort of hungry, just came into town. Do you want to buy a poem from me?
‘Hah! I've never heard that one before.” one of the girls smiled, looking at her friend for a sign of approval. “How much do you want for it?”
The girl's friend looked at her like she was an idiot, and then pretended to fumble in her purse to distract herself.
“Whatever, you know, a dollar, the price of a soup. I think it’s two dollars. Whatever you want, you know?”
“I guess I can give you two dollars for soup. I mean, yeah, just for originality.”
She ended up giving me five crisp, new Washingtons.
I went back to my booth to transcribe another poem and buy a soup. Outside the window, the same girl caught my eye. She was looking down at the poem reading it in front of the window. She looked over at me, smiling, then walked away.
I don't know if that was the world’s first poem-hustle, but I'd like to think so.
Soup. Once I bought it, I wasted no time putting it down. The warm sustenance coating my stomach almost made me sick.
I left the cafe, leaving no tip.
Stepping out the door, I still had nowhere to go. After an hour of searching, I found a nook hidden down an alley where I could lay back my head against a brick pillow. Sleep came surprisingly quickly without a blanket. I was rolled up right with my shoulder propped against the corner where two walls met.
Night in the alley was so quiet you could hear each car pass. Only one car drove by every five or ten minutes. A stark contrast to the daytime.
The smell wasn't so bad. There was just a dumpster with splotches of rusty flesh peeling off,with its bowels clogged in sticky layers, with ten years of vomit soup and spoiled oil and rotten beer, pouring its breath out from its open mouth.
Years later I would write this poem:
Coming far, going nowhere;
No one recognizes this stranger
Who has wandered onto the brilliant avenues;
And though names like Broadway are familiar,
I am still lost.
The riot of footsteps
On these New York streets
Makes me think of raindrops
Rebelling against the sky.
I am a cork floating in the jetsam,
Bobbing down hot rivers of pavement
Under the influence
Of hypnotic blinking traffic lights.
Fiery crowds of human angels
And fallen machines stampede
Across the brick and steel frontier,
And my heart flutters
Like a thousand startled pigeons.
I feel the vibration of ghost cars
Tunneling under the rock, and
The windows, the passers-by, the emptiness
Tumble with a terrible uncertain motion.
Like a drunk drowning
In his own sea sick stomach,
I have nowhere to rest, no stasis,
No stillness. I am lost;
Going far, yet getting nowhere.
And in a moment, with one exhausted blink, the tumult stopped. There was silence, and in that silence the chance to dream.
What did I dream about? The girl, not the one who gave me the five dollars, but the other one, the street girl. I imagined her in tight jean shorts walking towards me, wearing a thong and a cut t-shirt so that the bottom of her breasts were visible just below the nipples. There was a plate of watermelon. Black seeds were spread across its face like freckles. She picked up the melo and licked along its edge. She took a bite, and sugary, red juice ran down her chin, staining her t-shirt. Then for some inexplicable reason she licked the watermelon from her hand all the way up her arm. She took her shirt off and … I woke up.
Goddamit.
Blue fell over the alley and the great, quiet darkness faded. As the morning delivery trucks passed, I counted them. There were two or three passing every minute. It must have been about six in the morning. I had no watch. That didn’t matter; time was basically meaningless for me.
My back ached as I felt the blood running slowly back into my arms and legs. I could tell it was going to be a warm day. I picked up a poppy seed bagel from a wide-eyed caffeine vendor on some Chinatown Street. I watched the city wake up and the blue dawn began to swelter in the rising heat.
My feet were tired and my stomach still felt empty. And I had an even bigger problem: I had smoked my last cigarette at a bus rest in Memphis and I couldn't afford to buy another pack. What was I to do?
I recall that there wasn’t much knee room on the packed bus. My knees were bent up against the back seat, aching day and night. I hardly walked in all that time either, except to go to the back of the bus to the shitter, a tight little sweat box that reeked a little more each day and had flies that buzzed in the brown, sloshing darkness at the bottom of the can. I recall the stench of unwashed, long-distance itinerants, the awkwardness I felt with neighbors who never spoke and my annoyance with those who were never silent.
It was a profound moment when, coming out of New Jersey, the bus rounded a corner and I saw for the first time, beneath the pristine grey of a cloud-covered sky, washed clean by a heavy summer rainfall, shining for a moment with smogless clarity and surrounded by the cold, white Hudson waters, the New York City skyline. And I remember staring for a long time without blinking at the city’s multitude of monolithic structures that rose like glass Babels into heaven, medieval tenement roofs tightly packed onto the hard, rocky island surface of Manhattan, the Twin Towers still standing in those days, still breathing, still shadowing the city like brave sentinels.
A few minutes later, I passed under the Hudson through a wide tunnel that was lit up by rows of yellowish, fluorescent lights, and then finally arrived at the New York Port Authority.
I can imagine myself getting off that bus, imagine a fourteen year old with beat-black leather boots and long brown, anime-boy hair, standing amidst the multitudinous crowds at the Port Authority Bus Terminal wearing a worn out, dark green, high school backpack with a faded, whiteout batman logo, a pair of blue jeans thin at the knees, and black button-up shirt over a pale blue t-shirt.
The t-shirt was given to me by a little-known punk rock band named after the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. I knew the band personally, because I was always at their shows. In my backpack, incidentally, was a collection of poems by Rilke —whom I idolized— and another collection by Whitman. I had stolen both collections from a Barnes and Noble book store only a few months earlier.
This was the first time I had ever been to NYC and knew absolutely nothing about where to go or how to survive once I got there. People will say I was crazy, of course. Why would a fourteen year old boy travel halfway across the country with no plans, no one waiting for him, almost no money and nothing to live off but naïve hopefulness? People will say all kinds of things. But I don't care. Those people probably haven't lived half the life I have.
Whatever the reason for my being there, I was there and had to survive.
Since I had no place to go, I just started walking. I wanted to see Times Square which was to the north of the Port Authority, but not knowing this I headed south. Street after Street, I walked for hours all the way down to Chinatown and further. I had no map nor had ever looked at one closely. And in those days the only internet access was by landline. At some point, I hung a left and ended up on the east shore line.
I passed through endless crowds of people whose impressions stayed with me like images from a great film: business suits with radiant silk ties; old retirees in scruffy shoes cautiously crossing taxi-infested streets; overweight middle-aged men in cheesy t-shirts scowling, spitting out expletives and rubbing their greasy Buddha bellies; college-age sweethearts in tight shorts, trendy boots, shuffling their asses, swinging their arms; soccer moms weighed down by shopping sacks; young girls with long shiny hair dancing with the sound of invisible rhythms; decrepit men wrapped in Salvation Army throw outs; bums with dirty, red and drunken faces weathered sick by long December snow nights; working class twenty-somethings cooked hot by carbon fumes of the hazy summer day; weary old women with toothless grins and wrinkled eyes; strangers engaged in noisy arguments and, in a few miserably mad cases, crazies arguing with unseen enemies.
I saw one street kid, a young girl in a small red shirt, holding out a little water cup for a fall of change. It was obvious that most passers-by were too jaded, too acclimated to the blitzkrieg frenzies of the Manhattan streets, to notice her unique suffering. But when I closed my eyes, I could still see her image, her dark, messy brown hair, her beautiful, almost innocent brown eyes. My chest felt heavy at the thought of her.
New York is the sort of place where a person can fall dead on the street and people will pass by without even a feigned pretense of momentary concern. In a million man city, problems pile up like trash bags in a landfill, endlessly, endlessly rising.
There was a cafe, low class but clean. It was separated into two rooms: one room had a bar-style cafe and the register; the other, two rows of booths, one row on each side of a small walkway. I chose it because of the booths; plus, there was coffee and I had the impression that I could be there for hours without anyone bothering me or being shooed away.
I nestled myself into a brightly-lit booth in the back of the cafe and pulled together a dollar in change. Certainly the look of vagrancy was beginning to creep up on me. Nevertheless, a waiter came to my table and quizzically looked me over, handing me a menu.
“What would you like?” he politely asked.
“Uhm … I'll just have a cup of coffee.”
“Coffee? Is that all?”
“For now, yes.”
I was famished and desperate for food, but something inside of me made me frugal like a gnostic monk.
“If you'd like anything else at anytime just call me and I'll bring you something. We have some really good soup. It's only two dollars.”
I needed that soup. I had enough money to get my belly to shut up, but after that, what? The more I spent the harder it would be to last in the city. I needed time to figure out something long term. I would have to stretch the money as far as possible.
By the time my waiter returned carrying a clean, white cup and saucer of black coffee, two miniature plastic cartons of liquid creamer and several packages of sugar, I had opened my backpack and laid out several blank sheets of paper. In thick black ink, I was writing a poem spontaneously without stopping between lines.
I had already finished a cup of coffee and was ready to call for another when an idea occurred to me. I had a fresh sheet of paper and began copying a poem onto the sheet. One page for a single poem.
There was another booth that caught my attention where two attractive girls were sitting and talking over salad. They were about to leave. I had to hurry. I wrote as fast as I could while keeping the poem neat and legible.
One of the girls was fumbling around in her purse while the other was looking for the waiter.
I signed my name at the bottom of the page: Frank Jaspers.
Taking the page in one hand, I walked over to the girl’s booth and more or less accosted them.
“Hey, how are you girls doing?”
I'm sure they were wondering what this crazy kid was doing. Trying to flirt?
“Uhm ... Fine and yourself?”
“Oh, good, good. But, hey, I'm sort of hungry, just came into town. Do you want to buy a poem from me?
‘Hah! I've never heard that one before.” one of the girls smiled, looking at her friend for a sign of approval. “How much do you want for it?”
The girl's friend looked at her like she was an idiot, and then pretended to fumble in her purse to distract herself.
“Whatever, you know, a dollar, the price of a soup. I think it’s two dollars. Whatever you want, you know?”
“I guess I can give you two dollars for soup. I mean, yeah, just for originality.”
She ended up giving me five crisp, new Washingtons.
I went back to my booth to transcribe another poem and buy a soup. Outside the window, the same girl caught my eye. She was looking down at the poem reading it in front of the window. She looked over at me, smiling, then walked away.
I don't know if that was the world’s first poem-hustle, but I'd like to think so.
Soup. Once I bought it, I wasted no time putting it down. The warm sustenance coating my stomach almost made me sick.
I left the cafe, leaving no tip.
Stepping out the door, I still had nowhere to go. After an hour of searching, I found a nook hidden down an alley where I could lay back my head against a brick pillow. Sleep came surprisingly quickly without a blanket. I was rolled up right with my shoulder propped against the corner where two walls met.
Night in the alley was so quiet you could hear each car pass. Only one car drove by every five or ten minutes. A stark contrast to the daytime.
The smell wasn't so bad. There was just a dumpster with splotches of rusty flesh peeling off,with its bowels clogged in sticky layers, with ten years of vomit soup and spoiled oil and rotten beer, pouring its breath out from its open mouth.
Years later I would write this poem:
Coming far, going nowhere;
No one recognizes this stranger
Who has wandered onto the brilliant avenues;
And though names like Broadway are familiar,
I am still lost.
The riot of footsteps
On these New York streets
Makes me think of raindrops
Rebelling against the sky.
I am a cork floating in the jetsam,
Bobbing down hot rivers of pavement
Under the influence
Of hypnotic blinking traffic lights.
Fiery crowds of human angels
And fallen machines stampede
Across the brick and steel frontier,
And my heart flutters
Like a thousand startled pigeons.
I feel the vibration of ghost cars
Tunneling under the rock, and
The windows, the passers-by, the emptiness
Tumble with a terrible uncertain motion.
Like a drunk drowning
In his own sea sick stomach,
I have nowhere to rest, no stasis,
No stillness. I am lost;
Going far, yet getting nowhere.
And in a moment, with one exhausted blink, the tumult stopped. There was silence, and in that silence the chance to dream.
What did I dream about? The girl, not the one who gave me the five dollars, but the other one, the street girl. I imagined her in tight jean shorts walking towards me, wearing a thong and a cut t-shirt so that the bottom of her breasts were visible just below the nipples. There was a plate of watermelon. Black seeds were spread across its face like freckles. She picked up the melo and licked along its edge. She took a bite, and sugary, red juice ran down her chin, staining her t-shirt. Then for some inexplicable reason she licked the watermelon from her hand all the way up her arm. She took her shirt off and … I woke up.
Goddamit.
Blue fell over the alley and the great, quiet darkness faded. As the morning delivery trucks passed, I counted them. There were two or three passing every minute. It must have been about six in the morning. I had no watch. That didn’t matter; time was basically meaningless for me.
My back ached as I felt the blood running slowly back into my arms and legs. I could tell it was going to be a warm day. I picked up a poppy seed bagel from a wide-eyed caffeine vendor on some Chinatown Street. I watched the city wake up and the blue dawn began to swelter in the rising heat.
My feet were tired and my stomach still felt empty. And I had an even bigger problem: I had smoked my last cigarette at a bus rest in Memphis and I couldn't afford to buy another pack. What was I to do?
This is a memoir about my life as a homeless teenager.
So far I have about 200 pages of stream of consciousness writing on this part of my life. I'll be editing it and publishing it in the coming days.
The memoir is part prose and part poem with a series of actual poems interspersed.
It is not meant to be any one type of writing in particular but, rather, a creative free for all.
So far I have about 200 pages of stream of consciousness writing on this part of my life. I'll be editing it and publishing it in the coming days.
The memoir is part prose and part poem with a series of actual poems interspersed.
It is not meant to be any one type of writing in particular but, rather, a creative free for all.
© 2016 - 2024 Frank-Jaspers
Comments11
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Wonderful writing, Frank. Thanks for sharing with us. 
Loved these lines: "And my heart flutters
Like a thousand startled pigeons."
Loved these lines: "And my heart flutters Like a thousand startled pigeons."