The radio interviewer had a question: “Do homeless people have sex?”
Yes, Lee Stringer answered. Yes. After all, he said, “they’re not another species.”
The 47-year-old Stringer laughs, recalling the moment. It’s been a wild three months for him ever since the publication of “Grand Central Winter” (Seven Stories Press), his memoir of living nearly a dozen years on the streets of New York City.
He has appeared on “CBS This Morning” and NPR’s “All Things Considered.” He has been profiled by CNN and USA Today. Kurt Vonnegut and George Plimpton have called him gifted. He has been compared with Jack London and Damon Runyon. And The New York Times has written about him three times.
Now he is on a quick-hit promotion tour, visiting Chicago for a day before heading off for Tennessee. He’s staying at the Day’s Inn on Clark Street at the northern edge of the Old Town neighborhood across the street from Lincoln Park and its zoo.
It’s one of those early fall afternoons, not quite warm, not quite cold, half sunny, half cloudy. But with winter approaching, it’s a tempting day to sit outside, and that’s what Stringer’s doing. He’s smoking his Lucky Strikes and drinking heavily sweetened coffee at a table outside the Park Place Cafe in the middle of the zoo. Behind him, the zoo’s flock of flamingoes are fretting among themselves.
Stringer, dressed in a dark blue work shirt and a beige sport jacket, is talking about his life on the streets.
“I never saw it as a tragedy,” he says. “I saw it as an odyssey. Perhaps even an adventure.”
– – –
Virtually everything said and written about Stringer’s book in the news media has been positive. But just about all of it has missed the point.
For one thing, Stringer has been treated as the literary equivalent of a talking-dog story. It’s not so much what he has had to say, for reporters and reviewers, as the simple fact that he can talk — or, in this case, write — at all. Indeed, one interviewer termed Stringer’s story-telling ability “nearly miraculous,” given his years on the street and addiction to crack.
For another, coverage has tended to view “Grand Central Winter” as akin to a dispatch from Mars, and to give the impression of a huge social chasm that separates the homeless and other frequenters of the street from the rest of society.
One profile of Stringer was headlined: “From crackhead to literary star.” A review of the book described the work as a rare example of “articulate memoirs from the abject poor.” Even Vonnegut, who wrote the book’s foreword, emphasized the sheer alienness — the otherness — of those who live in the world of the streets. Stringer’s stories, Vonnegut wrote, are “about how the most useless and rootless and endlessly harried of New York City’s outcasts manage to stay alive . . . (written by someone who) was for years and years as bereft of dignity and self-respect as are his subjects.”
Did these people read the book?
Stringer, a tall, thin, soft-spoken man, carries himself with a certain poise and bemusement. In person and on the pages of his book, he is dignified, self-aware — far from abject.
“Grand Central Winter” is, in fact, a subversive work. Its characters and stories fly in the face of the most hallowed stereotypes that American society holds about homeless and near-homeless people.
Life on the streets is a horrible existence filled with anxiety. No, Stringer writes, it’s a challenge: difficult, to be sure, but surmountable. If you’re not too picky — and you learn quickly not to be too picky — you can find a place to sleep and food to eat.
Life on the streets is filled with an aimless, lazy despair. No, Stringer writes, it’s filled with work. Each day is a new day, and each day requires a street person to hustle. Food must be found; a sleeping spot must be claimed or protected. And, for the many addicts, like him, there is the physical imperative to get the money necessary to fuel their habit.
Life on the streets is utterly lonely. No, Stringer writes, homeless people have friends and acquaintances (and, like anyone else, enemies). There was a camaraderie among the vendors of Street News, the New York version of Chicago’s Streetwise. And, yes, some street people fall in love. They even, at times, baby-sit.
One of the most telling scenes in “Grand Central Winter” occurs when Stringer gets a call from Richard, a soft-hearted, soft-headed friend who’s given to writing bad poetry.
Richard had lived on the street until landing an $80,000 court settlement for injuries from a traffic accident. Now he has an apartment and a sort-of wife — she’s a drug-taking prostitute who, although legally married to Richard, charges him to sleep with her — and his wife’s toddler-daughter, Valentine.
On this night, Richard calls Stringer from jail in New Jersey where he has been picked up on an old drug-possession warrant. He’s in for the night, at the very least, and Valentine’s mother is nowhere to be found. Would Stringer baby-sit?
Sure. He goes to the apartment, and, as soon as the woman who had been holding down the fort for two hours leaves, Valentine turns around to see, not her mother or stepfather, but Stringer.
“She blinks once. . . . Looks up at me. . . . Her lips begin to quiver. . . . And in the next second she is wailing away,” Stringer writes. “It comes from deep in her gut and pours out of her little mouth, emptying her completely. She has to gasp for breath before each terrible howl.”
Stringer tries everything: goo-goo eyes, hide-a-face, wiggly ears. Nothing works.
Then, he sings: “My funny Valentine/My funny Valentine/You always smile when skies are gray . . .” It works, and Stringer is amazed.
“I keep on singing, afraid to stop, panicking over the words, humming when they don’t come, and suddenly, four verses in, the whole thing strikes me as absurdly funny,” he writes. “I imagine my dealer standing in the doorway watching. Eight o’clock Friday night in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen, people chasing demons all up and down the darkness outside, let’s go see what Lee is up to.
“I’m cracking myself up.
“Head tilted back —
“Eyes up at the ceiling —
“Laughing right out loud —
“And Valentine joins right in.
“Flaps her little arms up and down like wings and howls with delight. Her joy like a fragile gift.
“I feel higher than I have in years.”
– – –
A bee buzzes around Stringer’s coffee, and he waves the pest away.
“When I used to do the can thing, they used to hover — because of the syrup,” he says, using his hands to indicate a cloud of bees around his head. “The can thing” was his main method of making money when he was first on the street: collecting pop and beer cans and redeeming them for five cents each at supermarkets. (Later, he was a Street News vendor and then a writer and editor for the newspaper.)
Stringer pantomimes having a large plastic garbage bag, stuffed with empty cans, over his shoulder, and talks of learning to walk into the wind to keep the bees away. “I had an actual technique to fool the bees.”
As he sits in Lincoln Park now — a setting that reminds him of Central Park, one of his regular can-collecting stops — Stringer acknowledges that not everything about the street was sweetness and light, not by a long shot.
There was frustration and anger. There was violence. Not everyone was as successful as he was at finding a way of keeping body and soul together. Many homeless people were mentally ill. It wasn’t a lark.
Yet, neither was it a trip through hell. It was, to his mind, at the time, a reasonable alternative.
He had worked as a television cameraman, had held a variety of other jobs and had been a partner in a profitable design studio. But he wasn’t happy. “I grabbed a piece of the dream, and it did nothing for me,” he says.
His business partner died, and then Stringer’s brother died. He began drinking too much, then started smoking crack. And then, one day, he was evicted from his $900-a-month studio apartment.
“It was surprising,” he says. “I didn’t want to scurry back to where I was. When I hit the street, it was: Now, there’s nothing but possibilities.”
Of course, it wasn’t a completely free choice. As an addict, Stringer had had little interest in other aspects of his life. When he had his drug, he felt good. When he didn’t, he felt the craving. Being on the street didn’t affect that much, one way or the other.
Stringer writes with honesty about the pleasures of smoking crack. (“I . . . fill my lungs with the sweet caramel-and-ammonia-tasting smoke. My brain immediately leaps into hyperdrive. The streets suddenly crackle with electricity.”) But he’s been clean now — and off the streets — for more than two years.
He’s back living with his 78-year-old mother in his hometown of Mamaroneck, a New York City suburb in affluent Westchester County. He’s in AA. He’s working as a teacher’s aide with 4th- and 5th-graders. And he’s already into his next book, a novel, tentatively titled “Short Sugar’s Best Boo.”
Writing, first with Street News and then with a book contract in hand, had much to do with his decision to leave the streets and give up crack. But is it enough to keep him clean?
“I think so,” Stringer says. “For me to sit down and write, I have to face down all my fears. It’s very therapeutic for me. Writing at least gives me the possibility of not reverting back.”
But, even with the surprising success of his book and the new focus to his life, Stringer retains a deep affection for those still out on the street — people like him, like everyone else.
“Down on the street,” he says, “it matters who you are, and it rises to the surface. You really get to see what people are made of. I kind of love all these people. They were that blade of grass coming up through the concrete.
“They were just trying so hard to be. Against all odds.”
`$20 FOR TWO PIECES OF SOAP’
Excerpts from “Grand Central Winter” by Lee Stringer:
On making a buy from a young dealer
We do it on the down-low, brushing by each other, making the switch-off with fast fingers. I press the money into his hand, he drops the little baggies in my palm. Off I scramble in a fever, stem already in my hand, tearing the bag open with my teeth, squeezing the stuff out into my palm, thumbing it into the pipe — all the while looking left, right, ahead, behind, for any prying eyes. But then, from biting the bag open, a bitter, all-too-familiar sliminess hits the tip of my tongue and the world spins out from under me. . . . Twenty dollars for two pieces of soap.
On New York City’s experiment of using Grand Central Terminal as an overnight homeless shelter:
It proved to be a short-lived arrangement.
For no provisions had been made for the fact that we would still be there when the terminal opened in the morning, and that, it being winter at the time, a good number of us would elect to stay for the remainder of the day.
Among other things, this caused a mob scene in the bathrooms each morning as dozens of us literally bathed and did our laundry in the sinks — a spectacle that fairly rattled early-bird commuters.
