Designer shades, quiet hustle: The entrepreneurs of the New York City homeless shelter
Still image from "Hell Yeah" video.
12:49 pm May. 12, 2011
Let’s face it: There is always something awkward between the urban down-and-out and their liberal, educated sympathizers. It hovers, it looms, but it won’t even whisper its name. If you are a member of the former, all you have to do to bring the monster out of the box is show a member of the latter a certain music video: "Hell Yeah," by Dead Prez. It is, in my opinion, the greatest rap video in the history of the medium. It's also, on the surface, a sharp slap at shallow liberal sympathy.
This video from 2004 is choreographed like a Muppet Show number directed by Spike Jonze (actually by Gil Green), but right from the start, its buoyancy is undercut by “home movie” footage of a white suburban family driving down the wrong block while on vacation. In a reality-TV-nightmare flipside to National Lampoon’s Vacation, they end up getting violently carjacked. Dead Prez members stic.man and M-1 take off in the car with a couple of homies, recording their crime with the freshly stolen family camcorder.
The rest of the video (and song) is a lyrical primer on every hustle, caper and scheme uneducated, underfed, over-stimulated poor folks pull to get by: armed robbery, petty theft, credit fraud, welfare fraud …
The sing-song choruses go like this:
Chorus #1 Got to get this paaaay-per I'm down for the caper, we steady on the grind It's a daily struuuuggle We all gotta hustle, this is the way we survive [x2]
Chorus #2 If you claimin' gaaaangsta Then bang on the system, and show that you ready to ride Til' we get our freeeedom We got to get over, we steady on the grind [x2]
Too bad for Fox News that Michelle Obama didn't invite Dead Prez to the White House instead of Common, since their work is so much easier to twist out of context—Hell Yeah most of all.
A few years ago, I showed the video to an online friend, an urban professional and self-professed progressive, who responded, “Holy shit! That was like eating a dirt sandwich!” When I protested that the video is actually a masterpiece he should watch again more closely, he said, “I’d rather stick needles in my eyes!”
So there was a disconnect there, but I appreciated his honesty. What the video actually addresses is something that goes unspoken most of the time—the exasperation among non-poor liberals with poor people who don’t appear noble, humble, physically vulnerable or, when they do something wrong, apologetic. It’s hard to know what to do with them. These are the people you don’t even want to think about. They are not interested in getting a job or bettering themselves through education. They just want to get high, stockpile designer threads and gaudy jewelry, party. Fuck a future, fuck the world.
You can appreciate the dilemma it causes for bright young people of privilege devoted to helping the inner-city poor. A teaching assistant is tutoring some underprivileged kids in a Bronx public library when a car blasting "Beamer, Benz or Bentley" at eardrum-shattering levels settles just outside the nearest window. She has to wait 60 excruciating seconds before the stop light changes and sends the hellish music away. While she waits, she peers outside the window to find a carload of young men who look determined to find trouble before the sun goes down. The window pane rattles in rhythm to their idiocy. She grits her teeth, clears her throat. Her face turns a tad red and her eyes mist over just a bit—not from sentimental thoughts but a kind of psychosomatic reaction: bullshit as an eye irritant. But she settles it in her mind before returning to the kids: She’s here to save them from ending up like those assholes outside.
A big-city secret is that those assholes outside often end up where I ended up, in a homeless shelter. It’s a secret because homelessness is the one condition they find shameful. An inner-city hustler’s entire life is devoted to either rising above his station or projecting the illusion of same. So when the drug abuse or prison term or unemployability send him into the street, he needs a hiding place. Homeless shelters are a place for him to hide his shame. What I discovered at various shelters in New York City is that they are also the place where hustling goes into overdrive.
I was standing on the dinner line at a certain shelter when a guy walked by carrying several dozen rosaries in one hand and in the other some kind of saints-and-popes trading cards, or patches. “One dolla, one dolla, one dolla,” he said. “Everything one dolla, one dolla, one dolla.” That’s the going rate for small items . Jumbo candy bars, one dolla. “Tube socks, one dolla, one dolla.” “T-shirts, t-shirts, t-shirts, one dolla.”
Loose cigarettes can fluctuate between 50 cents and a buck, depending on who is more desperate at the moment, the buyer or the seller. As you leave or enter the shelter, you pass a young man chanting, “Loose, loose, loose,” very faintly, without moving his lips much. Discretion is paramount.
Everywhere you go in the system, there's a guy who stops you to say, "You got state ID? If you got it, you can make a quick hundred dollas."
Bootleggers push the latest releases on DVD, “two for five, five for ten, all the latest, clear copies, clear copies, clear copies. I got that Madea, I got that Fast Five, cartoons, pornos, clear copies, clear copies…” If you want a phone or a laptop, name your price. Somebody in the building has one that means less to him right now than having some cash in hand. Just ask around.
I was headed to the bathroom to shave my head one morning, and a guy came up alongside me: “Hey, fam, those your clippers?”
“Yeah.”
“You wanna make some money? I know a whole lineup of brothers need their hair cut in here. You can cut hair?”
“Only my own.”
“Well, I can cut good. Let’s get this money. Your clippers, my skills, we split it fifty-fifty.”
“Okay, cool. Just knock on my door later. 40A.”
