Beneath Market Street, in San Francisco, live half a dozen teenage runaways who pool the day’s panhandling coins to buy the evening’s cheapest bag of heroin. Some date each other, some write poetry, some have sleeping bags and many have dogs, so that when you visit their squat, you have the sensation you are also visiting a dog shelter turned loose—there’s howling, as if with newfound freedom, and something feral, which is also what the teens emanate. In fact, the kids call themselves the Road Dawgz, and many of them hop trains, like Randi, who left Fresno and her parents by hopping a midnight freight.
I was twenty-three, and my job—I got paid actual money to do this—was to ask kids who lived on the street (or in this case, beneath it) to write poems. What did I know, at twenty-three, about asking someone close to my own age, who was addicted to meth and heroin, to tell me about their life? I didn’t know squat.
“Diddly-squat” is an old American term, originated by carnival workers who needed a secret word for money (a few nickels and dimes) to attract discreet gamblers along their traveling route. They’d say “diddly squat” as a code for coins. “Diddly” stuck, because it meant, in essence, “very little.” It meant “the least.”
To find the would-be poets, I’d wait along Market Street, the heels of the morning’s commuters clicking against the sidewalk, swinging out of Peet’s Coffee to drop coins into Randi’s panhandling cup.
“Thank you!” she would belt, her sweetness clear, but also her exhaustion, hangover, the wetness of her sweater and thinness of her frame. A white pit bull sat beside her, bearing the weight of the duo’s cardboard sign. Randi drank orange juice from a white Styrofoam cup, but when you got closer it was clear that wasn’t the odor of orange juice, and she’d own up to it with a sheepish smile. “All right, it’s vodka too, and what’s a girl to do?” It was Randi’s charm that led her panhandling cup to runneth over, and she’d carry the cup’s bounty—not exactly diddly—back to her squat.
There was no squatting in the squat—no crouching near to the ground, as you’d see in Hanoi, where shop owners smoked while squatting on the sidewalk, organizing their offerings (batteries, chewing gum) in neat rows. In fact, squatting does not come easily to many Americans, or to those who work regularly at desks, for that matter; the ankle flexibility isn’t there. At yoga class, those folks hear, “Now lower into a squat,” and knees bend and creak into a half-squat, at best.
In the underground runaway squat, squat was a noun but also a verb—as in, we’re squatting here. We are occupying this abandoned land, or building (or the building’s absence). What you realize about San Francisco’s ever-present construction boom is that vacant lots, before they turn into skyscrapers, actually serve as perfect hideaways for runaways. And that was the posture in the squat: we found this, and this is ours. This is our home, okay? You can visit, but you can’t tell anybody. You can’t say squat about our squat.
I didn’t know anything about rigging electrical wires to watch Sunday NFL games on TVs under sidewalks on lawn furniture, or about train-hopping, overdoses, the trauma that had led to squat life. But there was trust, in time, and they would write poems that broke your heart—because of the joy the writing gave, sneaking notebooks into tents under the sidewalk to try words out. The act of writing filled a cup, a sense of self. The kids knew a lot, a lot more than squat.
I had watched too many Hollywood movies by age twenty-three, and so believed in redemptive endings; and I had grown up in Washington, so was familiar with the notion of peace talks. One afternoon, after much convincing, I drove Randi to visit her mother in Fresno. She had cleaned herself with a bar of Dove soap that a squat friend had scored from the homeless shelter, where she also scored Randi a yellow sweater. To dress up for one’s mother: the definition of endearing. Her shoes still had duct tape around them, but her stomach was full—another friend, who’d taken to roaming hotel hallways mid-mornings, had pocketed a fistful of half-eaten room service scrambled eggs for Randi.
Randi’s mother, on our arrival, had only one question on her side of the negotiating table: Are you clean? Randi did not come clean and say, No, mom, I’m addicted to heroin. No, mom, I am not the heroine here. I am, in fact, among the least of us, to quote Matthew and the Biblical readings you adore. Perhaps Randi wanted to say these things, to say, Do you give your love to the least of us, the sick, the hungry? But she didn’t say that. The blame for such addiction was too complex, was the source of why she had boarded the freight in the first place, so we just drove back to the city in the stillness that befell us at the mother’s white linoleum kitchen table.
Alexandra Moe is a writer and journalist in Washington, D.C. Her essays and long-form features have appeared in the Washington Post, Politico Magazine, and the Washington City Paper.
