![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouJust a series of collected notes-to-myself that I’d made while replying to the replies on my original post(s). I knew they were around here somewhere -- archived onto a disk when I converted to the new computer -- and la, found them. Rather than go through and completely rewrite and rearrange, just throwing them together and posting. May edit later. In meantime, here ya go, more various details and observerations, with a good dose of ancedote littering the post.
Several folks asked me to list any books I’ve read with good-to-strong verite. Hrm. I’d say Holly Black’s books, Tithe, and Valiant, were pretty freakin’ awesome, but that comes with a really big caveat: the gritty and realistic parts were actually the parts I didn’t really like much, myself. That’s not a paradox. I say that because I was raised around people who’ve spent their lives inside society, and I now live surrounded by folks like that. It’s not too big a jump for me, at times, to ‘think’ like someone for whom suburbia and security and safety have always been present. For you, Black’s books are probably going to be eye-openers in urban fantasy (if YA, but they’re readable as an adult, so it’s not a major issue), but for me... hrm, how to put it.
I would say Black plays the ‘stranger’ card (a la Stranger in a Strange Land) except that I don’t want the negative connotation we usually associate with “a ___ card”. Okay, I’ll call it a trope, instead: in both stories, the main POV is a young girl who falls into/ends up in the midst of a peculiar fairy/otherworld that meshes with, influences/touches the street life and its people. This isn’t an uncommon thing, to draw a parallel for a reader between “the magical” and “the kind of strange that really exists” -- and for most readers, “people who live in cardboard boxes and are happy with their lives” certainly counts as strange. Hell, look at the tradition of the Magical Negro if you want correlation between ‘not-like-us’ and ‘automatically wise and magical’ blah blah blah insert random anthropological observations here.
Carrying on: the Traveller trope -- because it’s really someone travelling into, passing through, and then leaving, the Strange Land (similar to Card’s milieu plot category) -- means that the author can see this strange and fascinating world entirely through the traveller’s eyes. That main POV becomes the reader’s stand-in, the everychild who looks at the Other’s “normality” and sees magic, or dirt, or horror, or whatever. Sometime the traveller has a tour guide character accompanying him/her; sometimes the traveller is the reader’s tour guide, but in all cases, the author can, and usually does, highlight all the bizarro parts of the Other, almost revelling in them.
I gritted my teeth and carried on through Black’s second novel, because I couldn’t help my instinctive reaction: cripes, girl, shut up, it’s not that bad, and I don’t see you contributing jack what-with your everyday high school life and your bought-new backpack. Stop looking at this like it’s something horrendous or scary or disgusting, I don’t see you bringing us a five-course meal so either eat what’s here or get out but stop with the attitude.
Because that’s the way I’d react, back then, and it’s a reaction hard to unlearn. It’s even harder to unlearn when returning to mainstream means any conversation about what I did between the ages of fourteen and twenty-two has to be hedged with vagueness. Getting specific means saying things that seem almost surreal in the light of a suburban home and a cell phone and a car that runs regularly and a heater that works: “oh, no, that year I was mostly staying at crashes and squats, it was the year after that, I lived in the apartment with fifteen other people.” The second you mention you lived on the outside of society, the reaction is -- almost without exception, now that I think about it -- “oh my god, how horrible!”
And since it’s not like I want to go into what my options were at the time, I don’t have many options in the conversation now, either, to explain why my gut reaction is: “Shut up and stop looking at me like you suddenly discovered I have a second head growing out of my elbow.”
When you stood on the outside of the mainstream, reading stories that rely on the tourguide/traveller trope can be... tiring. Yeah, so readers think they’re edgy, and feel like they “know something” now about “that life”, but the truth is... they don’t. And they don’t for one simple reason: the POV the author is using to express this life is a POV that remains within the mainstream. It’s not someone in, and of, the Other; it’s someone only there for a bit, passing through, until s/he decides the way back home is open, or preferable, or whatever.
This also has a lot to do with the reasons people leave, and why they come back. Characters who experience a sudden gut-wrench that throws their entire life into question -- and ditch it all and run off to the circus -- are enviable, to readers, because the character is pitching everything in the way that most readers won’t ever get the guts to do. (What was that movie about the guy who cracks in yet another day at work and suddenly goes off on a long-distance trip driving to nowhere? Uhm... whatever.) But, and this is a really big honkin’ but -- authors sometimes forget that the Other is a damn unattractive place to be, sometimes. Not because the Other itself is bad or good or indifferent, but because if you have been raised your entire life within the Inside, it’s not a simple prospect to admit, accept, let alone embrace that you’re now Other. The character may be in it, but not of it, until the time s/he goes back to the Everyday world.
Is this making sense to anyone? Take a character who’s thrown out of his house for whatever reason... let’s say he loses his job, he comes home, and his girlfriend throws him out of the house -- let’s go really over the top and say she’s keeping all his stuff, and has cleaned out his bank account. Oh, and they live in a foreign country so he’s not even that good at the language... that’s right, take away any and all resources. That may get him into the Other, but as long as there’s the chance of regaining his money, or regaining her heart, or getting another job, the path back will always remain within his head. As long as that path exists, the character will look at the world around him and say, this is not my place, I do not belong here, and what the hell is up with these people’s crazy logic? Because it doesn’t resemble anything I know.
You don’t burn your social/cultural bridges by going native, not when it’s in the back of your head that someday you’ll go home. You only go native when going back home is no longer an option.
One commenter had noted fringe-folks tend break out into three loose groups.
a) lower-income/working-class background
b) middle class background
c) college students slumming
With additional observation that B tended to look down on C more than A did (I think that was the gist). And, too, that A was more likely to be prickly over B than over C. I'd add that C could hang informally with economic fringe but steered clear of social fringe -- that is, regardless of background but currently working, and the slummers seemed just fine. I recall college students giving cold shoulders to street kids who were clearly non-working, had no source of support, or no permanent address -- though I'm not sure whether this was due to dress, age, conversation, education, or what. Maybe just a general discomfort, dunno.
At the time, I usually wrote it off to private-college-types being kinda secretly snobby, even when allegedly 'slumming' -- I mean, yeah, so they were living squeezed eight to a house in rather iffy usual rental-baron places, but I also know for a fact that the shared rent on one friend's house not far from the university was more than my parents' mortgage, and my parents had a decently-large suburban house with a quarter acre. So, uhm, not exactly slumming when you're still shopping at the International Safeway, y'know?
Anyway.
I can recall that of the kids who'd fit as A-type, a more than fair number were often casually 'encouraged' out of the house -- go get a job, you've got a job, go get your own place. Or they were unsupervised to the extent that what began as running wild became pretty much full-time. That was actually a huge shock to me at the time; I'd expected the majority to be close to disowned, either fleeing the bad or getting thrown out by it. Stereotypical/hollywood expectations aside, plenty of the tiny-house, blue-collar inner-burbs kids around me did in fact keep in touch with their folks, even went home every now and then. There just wasn't room, or money, or time for them, so they did their own thing, even if that meant wandering the city at loose ends and working odd jobs (of various legality).
The B-group includes the socio-economic background that's full-time on the street, but also what NYC calls "the bridge and tunnel club"; kids from the suburbs come into the city on the evenings/weekends and then head back home at the end of the night. It's the HS version of the slumming college student, in a way. It's just a part-time version. That is to say, not everyone "on the streets" is really there full-time -- and if a runaway meets up with and/or falls in with a group of pushouts (the A-types), and moves in with them to cut living costs, is that newcomer still ‘on the streets’ or is s/he now working towards some kind of security and stability? (I still classify such mentally, myself, as ‘on the streets’ in the sense of that’s where such kids spent most of their time, anyway, but YMMV.)
Middle-class kids -- by whatever means they arrived -- were sometimes lumped (however unfairly) with slumming college students. I met my share of those, like the guy who went to an Ivy League school, and lived in a small apartment with nine other people. Starving arty-type, colorful hair, and breathtakingly handsome, man, those were some cheekbones. (My inner-grandmother voice kept saying, “wow, good breeding.” *kicks self*) Then we hung out, and swung by his parents’ house so he could retrieve something. Ahem. That house wasn’t a house, that honestly was a mansion; his room was the entire attic and had been built as the servants’ quarters -- separate staircase and all. I’m saying the foyer was the size of my current living room.
I never saw anyone give him grief, but he wasn’t within the circle of my peers; we crossed thanks only to similar clubs/musical interests. He and his were all wealthy (apparent only once you took a closer look at the Swedish stereo under that duct tape and spray paint). Though I look back now and think that’s pretty gutsy for someone coming from that cushy background to take a shot at doing it on his own -- I also know that kind of guts really only comes along, to really go all-out, I mean, when you’ve got resources. Family, savings, friends, some kind of security.
Anyway, the folks who worked at the bars, along with the couriers and waiters and retail folks gathering at happy hour for a few drinks (or an entire bottle) were mostly working-class regardless of upbringing. The majority were in their early to mid-twenties, worked pretty hard, made too little, scraped by, and -- as I got to know some of them better -- appeared to come, pretty uniformly, from lower-middle-class backgrounds. Blue collar mostly, with some white collar mixed in here and there (one or two had parents who were school teachers, one had a mom who was a police officer, I seem to recall). Even the one kid I met, with parents the honest-to-goodness American Dream Realized (but only after 20+ hardscrabble years), was raised in an old farmhouse and the scant money that comes with farming. (The ‘new’ money hadn’t seemed to faze him, and in fact he seemed to get a great deal of respect for insisting he’d do the bootstrap thing, too, thanks.)
It was the musicians who tended to have white collar and upper-class family backgrounds. Most had been playing in bands since fourteen or fifteen, the usual junior high, high school “gonna be a rock star!” thing. I recall finding out that a well-known musician & club employee was leaving the scene to enter law school. I was boggled, even moreso when I asked him about the specialty he’d chosen. Apparently his father worked in that field; a few years later, it came up in conversation and I mentioned his name to my mother. Her jaw dropped, and I found out I’d been hanging out with a Major Name. Boy, he didn’t look that major after playing for two hours with his back to the double Marshall stacks. Hunh.
Come to think of it, the musicians (and artists) did seem to have the best relationships with their families. Those were the most visible relationships, that is; I met a few siblings who’d come to visit brothers or sisters who worked in the clubs, but you only ever saw parents when it came to musicians. Go to a hardcore show in my city, and some nights you’d see a couple in their sixties arrive a half-hour before showtime, chat politely with the doormen, order a soda each, and take up a spot where they could see the stage. It was Mr. and Mrs. Stabb, the parents of Government Issue’s lead singer. Ten years, and they never missed a show when he played his home city. Actually, on any given night of a local band playing (or a band that originated locally), you’d find at least one relative, if not two or three, there to show support.
Then again, it does make sense (assuming an author’s willing to stop and think about it). Music, like art, is a luxury. There’s the cost of classes to learn the instrument, and the cost of the instrument itself, and then the ongoing cost of upkeep on that instrument -- guitar strings, drumsticks, cleaning supplies, new reeds, even getting your piano tuned or your electronic keyboard cleaned. You can’t play what don’t work, and your skill will definitely be limited if you have no place to practice and/or no way to improve/expand your skill set. Art supplies are damned expensive, as well, so the fact that the majority of kids/young-adults I knew who fell into the “starving artist” or “struggling musician” categories came from predominantly middle-class backgrounds shouldn’t really be a surprise. Yes, there were exceptions, but the few I met were folks who worked their asses off to have the spare cash it takes to continue with an instrument or art. I met far more who wanted to, but couldn’t afford to, so settled for doodling or just going to shows and appreciating other folks’ music instead.
The majority of those working as bartenders, doormen, soundmen, and the like, were push-outs (even if gently so in a good number of the cases). As such, they’d been working for quite some time, knew their way around, and had pretty much worked out their reputation with, and interaction with, the street/city. They’d been in one place long enough to have seen more than a lifetime’s share of faces come and go, while they remained the scene’s backbone. Yeah, so the faces in the moshpit were vibrant and young and excited about things, but it’s the little-seen doormen, the sound guy, the club manager, the barback, who make the scene (and the individual shows) even happen.
More on that economic/social part in a following section.
You see a lot on the usual After School special and Touched-by-Something crap about runaways on the streets, often with some idiotic author's idea that it's a real twist to find out the runaway is actually -- gasp! -- a throwaway. Which might shock some folks, insert eye roll here, but the problem is that the two act very differently. At least, I could pinpoint each from a mile away, and I suspect those of us in each category were probably hardly opaque to any other sharp observers.
Except it's really three types: those who say, "I'm leaving!" and bolt in fear or anger. There are those who are told, "you're leaving," and get thrown out. And then there are those who're just pushed out (which I'd mentioned above as more likely to be in group A's socio-economic brackets). They're never formally thrown out; they're just made unwelcome. I knew one blue-collar background girl whose mother had remarried and had a new baby. The girl ended up in a squat in the city, and the whole of her eventual, casual, explanation was, "my mom's all about my little brother and he's great, and I love him, don't get me wrong, but I'm just in the way, so I figured I'd get on with my life, y'know? He's her whole life, now, and I'm just... y'know, not as important." Limited resources, and for whatever reason, the teenager is aware that their use of the resources is resented by the family, or is a drain on the family, so the kid heads out to get free of that neglect/disinterest/resentment as well as to help the family, even if by absence alone.
Those kids are, to some degree, proud of themselves for making this sacrifice, this growing-up choice, even if it's mingled with regret that they can't go home, at least not for more than a short visit. Different for runaways, and there's a sort of logic in the stupider the reason the kid/person has for running away, the more likely they are to ask you what you're doing in the city.
This was a regular conversation for me, when chatting with kids at the subway, outside a club, while in line for a show, whatever, in order of conversational steps:
1. Start with basic intro questions. My usual response was to take the questions ultra-literally, often with deadpan delivery:
Where you’re from?
South of here.
What high school did you go to?
[HS name]
So you’re just in the city for the night?
No.
[Alternate versions: “Yeah, all night unless it rains,” or, “Yeah, if a night’s six months long.”]
Where do you live now?
That way. *vague hand-wave*
Short pause while kid processes flat answer(s). That was my test: did the kid laugh and get that I was saying that I wouldn’t say and/or it was NOYB, or would the kid push? Conversation ends, or moves to next step.
2. At this point, you have to "report your credentials", that is, "list who you're with in case there are mutual friends in your circles who can then verify you independently later". Finish up those lists and cross-references -- "di'ya know Seth, the bartender, he works Tuesdays..." and "the band playing opening last night, their bassist..." kinds of things -- and we've pretty much done the resume review (where'ya from, where'ya live), and the references check (who ya know).
3. And then we're getting to the personal segment of the interview: what are you doing here? For those of you who write, note that "why're you here?" and "what are you doing here?" can get a variety of answers, and it's entirely dependent on the actual (real) reason. The farther a person was from "justification stance" of a runaway, the less likely you'd get any details -- ie, someone who chose the city as a positive option (instead of the lesser of two evils, however realistic those evils) seemed to feel less need to justify. Several versions I've exchanged:
Kid: What're you doing here?
Me: Standing in line.
Kid: How'd you end up here?
Me: Took the bus.
Either the kid gets the hint and drops it, or the kid takes the answer -- sometimes any answer, even a nod -- as permission to launch into their own answer to the question they'd asked you. The really self-centered or self-focused kids would just skip to step 2, and tell you off the bat without bothering to ask for your version.
The broader a person took the question's meaning (as in, "why are you here" = "what made you be homeless like this" as opposed to "why are you here" = "do you like this band"), the more likely -- at least in my experience -- that they had something to dis/prove. The old phrase that knowledge is power: hello, there's an excellent phrase for writing folks on teh fringe. Knowledge is power, and to give you knowledge of my reasons for being here -- literal or existential -- is to give you power. When I don't have anything but what I'm carrying and the trivia in my head, I don't have any power to spare, so I conserve by staying vague. In contrast, someone on the fringe for inadequate, dubious, or frivolous reasons gains power by sharing their knowledge/story -- if they can get you to agree that their version has validity. It's the verbal, street, version of someone flexing their measly muscles to convince you that they coulda beena contendah -- the one who has a justifiable, valid (read: no way back) reason for being there doesn't need to prove they're "on the street". They know it. They can't get away from it.
Thing is, most runaways’ take on their personal stories are colored with shame. I mean, no one likes to be a runaway -- it's saying, in a sense, that you're a quitter. That you left your family, and despite whatever shit they might've been handing out, that something in our culture/society/humanity says, that's family, and you shouldn't leave. The stupider the reason you left, the more likely you're going to explain, or rationalize. Like the girl who got into an argument with her mom over what kind of jeans she could have. Or the boy who got tired of having to borrow his dad's car, and that his folks wouldn't get him one of his own. Or the kids who wanted to get stoned/smoke/drink and didn't like parents grounding them for it. Now think about that. Think about it as an adult would, in the sense of: you decided to embrace a miserable, always-hungry, never-totally-clean, hand-to-mouth existence in the dangerous nights of the murder capital of the world because your parents wouldn't buy you a car?
Hey, guess what: your listener's attitude/response right now is just about identical to the emotional response of any listener who's on the streets as a result of being thrown away or pushed out. It's anywhere from polite disinterest to downright disgust. With the exception of those fleeing abuse like physical abuse, incest/molestation, extreme neglect, etc -- which, to my mind, is another form of throwaway because if you wanted the kid around, you wouldn't treat them like something disposable, would you? -- the runaways didn't get a lot of respect from me. Hell, the runaways didn't actually get a lot of respect from most folks, almost maybe a bit of pity at times. Because in some ways, the runaways had the option of going back home. Call collect, moron, and go back where you belong. You don't need to be here.
Runaways do tend to congregate. I used to feed a crowd of them on regular days -- erm, technically I was feeding them but it was in the name of “learning how to cook the restaurant’s specialities,” and amazingly, my judges (read: the kids) constantly rated my efforts Just Not Quite There Yet, Please Try Again, Woot. (Heh. Good times.) Although I socialized with several runaways and/or groups of them, if we ran into each other while out and about, they were never really my core group in terms of who I relied on, who I turned to. You might think that’s where I’d feel most comfortable, given that these kids were from a similar socio-economic, financial, political, educational stratum as myself, but it was actually where I was least comfortable, when you get right down to it.
After all, they were in the city by choice. For those in the first flushes of this new freedom, it was an exciting and adventuresome time. It also came with a bright-eyed kind of thrill over picking fights and stealing beers and raising cain and causing trouble of any kind, for the fun of it... until the city began to really wear on them, and either they drifted back home and made amends, or they drifted deeper into the city (at which point I didn’t see them again, anyway, except in distant passing).
This is one point where I must emphasize that my city was not a major megalopolis of the likes of Chicago, NYC, or LA, or Paris, or London. It’s more the size of about Stockholm, maybe? I can envision people sinking deeper into the city’s dregs (the homeless do it all the time) but it’s not really a city where you can hide, not in the sense of being lost in a million teeming faces. For starters, the city’s roughly sixty square miles -- that’s 177km to you metrics reading -- of a partial square 10m (16km) on two sides, and about 5m (8km) on the short side, not counting the length along the riverfront. Doing about 2-3m an hour (standard walking pace for most adults), you can walk from the Northeast quadrant to the far Northwest edge in about two hours. The actual number of residents in the city is about half-a-million, but that’s not counting all the people who commute daily into the city, and leave for the suburbs at five pm; daily, the city’s population quadruples in size and then falls again when twilight comes. The surrounding metro area, though, has half a billion residents (yet is overall only the 8th largest population center in the US).
I mention the geography to underline something that is not necessarily true of other cities (or so I’ve been told): from anywhere in my home city, if you want to get out, it’s entirely feasible to walk. It’s not really a city with a reputation for “where to go as a runaway” -- that’s NYC, LA, and for reasons I’m still puzzling out, apparently also Phoenix and Seattle, but hey, everyone’s got personal issues. The majority of the runaways that I met, then, were mostly from the near to farthest ‘burbs, with a handful coming up from Richmond or Baltimore -- in which case the train tickets home were actually rather cheap. $5 got you back to Baltimore on the MARC, while about $8 got you as far as Fredericksburg on the VRE, where you could hop on Amtrak and head south to Richmond for another $10. These are easily panhandled amounts (or even loanable amounts from any well-intentioned fellow runaways willing to help you get back home, if you chose). If you lived anywhere within the ring of the city’s beltway, walking was the cheapest, and a quite manageable, option.
So it’s a hike, but hey, never underestimate the distances you can cover when you’ve got soda, smokes, sturdy boots, a full pack of matches, and a good rhythm in your pace. Just got to watch out for those who slow down and “offer you a ride”, and if you see a cop go past in one direction, it’s time to take a quick detour through a neighborhood. So it’ll increase your time a bit, but it’s still better than being picked up by some cop for vagrancy -- because anyone under the age of thirty who’s out walking at three a.m. must be a runaway; hell, anyone over the age of thirty’s just plain a vagrant (and would probably get stopped and questioned anyway). I can’t blame the cops, though. Not like they’ve got any other excitement cruising quiet suburban streets at three a.m.
A kid who's been thrown away is far less likely than a runaway to tell you why they're on the fringe, which is one point where I get all eagle-eyed on authors writing current or former street kids. Think about it, people! Would you really introduce yourself as, "Hi, nice to meet you, I was once married but my spouse left me for another person who wasn't fat, stupid, and lazy like me." Can you see yourself saying, just laying it out, as: "Hi, yeah, I'm living here because the last home I had, my six roommates voted me out and tossed all my stuff on the sidewalk while I was at work."
Oh, please. No one wants to admit they have a big honkin' scar of "NOT WANTED" sliced on their forehead, so if -- very big if -- the story's told, it'll probably be vague, it'll leave a lot to your imagination, it'll slant things to sound like the scar isn't the speaker's fault. Granted, plenty of authors can get that any reasonable person will give you a slant when the story might cast them into a bad light -- unreliable narrator and all that -- but the difference here is why. For the runaway with a stupid reason, the rationalization is to convince you, the listener, that the kid's (secretly desperate need) story be believed and considered reasonable -- to combat the kid's inner knowledge that their reasoning was anything but. For the throwaway or pushout, it's not a rationalization, it's an evasion, and the slant isn't to make the Other Person (the parent) look bad, and yet the kid doesn't want to look bad, so it's easier to just avoid it and not say anything.
For those of you unfamiliar with how the throwaway's logic works, here's a quick summary. First, try to think of what it'd be like to have your parents tell you -- by words or action -- that they don't want you, they'd get rid of you if possible. No kid wants to be rejected so thoroughly, and every kid -- to some degree -- does love their parents, however malicious or neglectful or just plain useless the parents may be. So here's someone the kid wants to love, and to be loved by, saying the kid isn't worth having around. To hear someone say, "man, your parents suck for doing that," is an agreement that indicates that you'd just admitted your parents are bad -- and if they're bad, but you love them anyway, what does that make you? And if they're good, and didn't want you, what does that make you, then? It's a lose-lose situation for a kid's brain. The only way to deal with it is to just evade the question as best you can.
I can't stand it when stories have fringe-folk dumping their life stories on each other. No, wait, I can't stand that if done badly, in any story -- but what I can't stand in fringe-element characters is how they react to the news. If you came to the fringe because you wanted a new car and couldn't have one, the fringe-listener is going to look at you like you have two heads. "Go home," they'll be thinking. If you came to the fringe because you got thrown out, the sad truth is that the better your socio-economic background, the more likely the fringe-folk is to tell you to go home anyway: the longer they've been on the street, the more likely they are to see a roof, plenty of food, and new/clean clothes as fully worth the price of random physical, mental, emotional, abuse -- double that if they're on the street because of money/economic issues and not fundamental emotional conflicts. A throwaway who stays on the fringe is often doing the best s/he can to draw a line in the sand and refuse to go back to that... but the better the background, the more pressure s/he will likely get from peers to go back to where s/he "belongs". As if.
You can see how throwaways/pushouts tend to swing through their own parabola in the street-cultures. They don't act, or react, like the kids who moved out at a young age (like some of the lower-class kids, or the gentler push-outs), or even like the runaways or the slummers or the working class -- all of whom, for one reason or another, will often urge the throwaway to go back home -- in part, too, because unlike a runaway, a throwaway is not on the street because s/he wants to be there. The kid's just making the best of a bad situation, with little to no resources.
I can’t really speak to the law now, but the last time I checked, it is not a requirement (at least in the US) that you carry ID on you at all times, or that you can prove you are who you are -- if you’re not committing a crime. (If you are, that’s another issue completely.) However, I say that while also knowing that in some jurisdictions -- Richmond, VA is one of them that I know of -- if you do not have some kind of ID on you, then you can be picked up for vagrancy. I knew someone sitting on a bench waiting for the very last bus of the night who got hassled by cops for being a vagrant; fortunately he did have a student ID on him.
[I’ve been told -- at least, I was back in the 80s and 90s -- that the reason my passport wasn’t checked when entering England or France was because I couldn’t do jack in either country without a helluva lot more paperwork than just my personal word, or even a single fake ID were I to spring for one. And, too, that without a full stock of my personal paperwork collection, I couldn’t get a job, rent an apartment, buy a car, all sorts of mean nasty things, and that the US was bizarrely lax in contrast. Despite checking ID at the borders, anywhere inside the country it’s pretty low-key, and still is... like the fact that apparently driving from one state to the next, and not needing to show ID, is an unusually ‘free’ ability to citizens of some countries/regions. But, then, I’ve never really done any research on how much this is true, so that’s 100% purely anecdotal and possibly just as 100% wrong. Caveat reader!]
Most student IDs don’t count as “official” ID in the sense of pleasing a cop, nor will most businesses accept them (in those rare instances where someone requests ID when you use a credit card), but in general they are a picture ID. They just don’t usually have home address, license number, or SSN. Other forms of ID are the residential ID (also known as a “walker’s license,” a variant on the driver’s license that doesn’t give you rights to drive but does work as a replacement legal ID in those ID-check situations), a passport, or a military ID.
Again, I don’t know how it works now, but I can tell you how it worked when I was in the city -- back in the days when computers weren’t quite so reliable, the system had a few more loopholes, and people weren’t all in a panic like crazy about illegal immigrants blowing stuff up on our shores (ignoring the fact that the terrorists all had legal passports for entry). Anyway, the first thing you need is a legal address, a street address, not a PO box, which means you either rent an apartment or you sublet from someone else, or you just stay on someone’s sofa and make sure to get at least one bill in your name -- gas, electricity, cable, phone, water, whatever -- something from one of the municipal or corporate utilities. (I believe a major credit card bill works as well, but it’s got to be a bill, not just a letter you’d been sent: in other words, it’s proof that some company is expecting that when they want your money, they get it by contacting you at that address.)
Then, you take the envelope + bill to the local DMV (department of motor vehicles), and you wait in line. When it’s your turn, you explain you just moved to the state, here’s an official piece of mail showing your new address. No, you don’t have a driver’s license to transfer from another state. Yes, you’ll fill out the paperwork for a walker’s license (unless you go whole hog and do the driving/writing tests as well, and that depends on whether the state will require that you take a driver’s ed course -- VA does, I think MD doesn’t, it depends on the state so most folks I knew who took this path, just got walker’s ID). You get your picture taken, they type in the info you give them (note: yes, that you give them), and then you walk out with a shiny new ID that may or may not contain your true birthdate, name, or even address, but it does have your picture on it, and it won’t get snagged as “fake” because, technically, it’s not.
This is how some of my friends got ‘legal’ ID that showed them as old enough to drink, because the computer system didn’t store license-pictures in the computer until about maybe two or three years ago. (Just wasn’t the technology nor server room to keep every blooming license-ID in the average state, y’know... but now there is.) Anyway, your of-age friend loans you her SSN card, or her birth certificate, and a bill that comes to her address. You go to the DMV with these, and say you’ve lost your driver’s license and need a new one. No problem, they find you in the system, they check “your” paperwork against what they have, it matches, they take your picture... and now you have a legal ID (for which any future notification will go to the correct owner/holder) but this ID has your picture, not your friend’s. A doorman may give you a dubious look that you can’t possibly really be 23 (while a DMV person probably will ignore it, because they’ve got all your “other” information that “proves” you’re you, ahem, your friend, even if you sure look only seventeen) -- but the doorman can’t, erm, legally confiscate the ID because that is the state seal, and that is your picture.
[They may quiz you, though, to be assholes. “So you had a birthday last month,” when your listed birthday would’ve been ten months ago. Or, “what’s your SSN?” back in the days when state licenses had SSNs on them -- now, if someone quizzed me on my DL#, I’d be all, “what? are you high? who the hell memorizes their frickin’ driver’s license number?” Although the one time I got quizzed -- and it was my own, legal, of-age ID, no less -- I was so annoyed I couldn’t help but snap, “what, can’t you read? it’s right there on the ID.” Sometimes a little attitude does help. Sometimes.]
There was a huge scam going on in VA that finally got broken up back in ‘02 or ‘03, I think it was; some quasi-lawyerly type was arranging for state IDs for illegal immigrants, by providing them with fake leases and fake bills sent to the address on the lease. All they had to do was walk in, use that to get fully-legal VA id, and then they could go work anywhere and not get caught for “not having legal US ID”... I think it was also being used by some to evade taxes in higher-taxed states, or evade car insurance rates in MD by having VA license/address, stuff like that. Needless to say, now if you want ID -- hell, even to renew when you already have valid, legal ID -- you have to provide birth certificate and/or passport, social security card, and at least one picture ID (student, current ID, military ID). I think if you’re new to the state the list includes the lease/house-sale info and a mailed bill, but all I know is when I had to renew my license in VA in ‘06, I had the valid license in hand and they still wanted all that other crap. Ridiculous, going more than a little overboard to make up for about thirty years of being one of the easier states to get a fake ID.
Mostly, depending on your job and your housing situation, you can get away with cash-only and no ID. When you rent an apartment, the landlord’s biggest issue isn’t who you are, but whether you can pay: showing a bank account statement, or a paycheck stub, is usually the most important requirements. (The slummier the landlord, the more they’ll cut down to the bare minimum.) If you don’t have either job or bank account, you sublet, or you move in with someone else who signs solely, or someone co-signs with you (as parents often do for a college student’s first apartment, while still a student and thus unemployed). Most jobs require ID... but there are plenty of ways to job-hop around that, since some of the industries with faster turn-over won’t balk at “getting the paperwork later” so long as they have the warm body now.
Here’s how that works: you walk into a restaurant, fill out the application with whatever info you have (or choose to make up, whatever). Rattle off a few places you’ve worked (this is the one place they will spot you lying, though; kitchens and bartenders are good at bench tests and it’s hard to fake restaurant knowledge), or drop the right phrases, blah blah blah, and then agree to start on X date. Let’s say it’s the next day. When you come back in is usually when they’ll say, “we need to do the tax paperwork.” If you’re lucky, they’ll either forget, or you’ve started at the lunch rush and they’re busy anyway and could use you right now (or you push that point by saying so cheerfully, “how about I help get past this rush, first?”), or they may not even have the paperwork-level manager on the premises so you’ll get told you need to “do it first thing tomorrow.”
Technically, mind you, you’re not supposed to work a job without a very particular piece of paperwork completed, and it’s not the tax information. Contrary to most assumptions, the tax info paperwork can wait a bit, in that it really only needs to be done for the business’ purposes of doing your deductions on your paycheck for you; if incomplete, they’ll go with the default and you’ll get hit with the most taxes removed per your paycheck’s bracket, sans deductions. (If readers already know this, sorry, figured I should include for any non-USA folks.) What is mandatory before one can legally “start working” is the piece of paper that validates that you are legal to work in the US (including born-citizen, naturalized, green card, work visa, other visa, etc), and that you’ve provided X forms of ID from column one, and Y forms of ID from column two. For a US citizen, this is usually satisfied by providing a driver’s license (or walker’s license) and a SSN. The company will xerox both, attach the copy to the form, the company’s manager or HR person will sign and date to verify that they witnessed the originals and returned them to you, and then it all gets sealed up and sent off to some office, uhm, somewhere.
Which means: if you provided fake ID, or ID that’s flagged in the system... you probably have about two weeks’ worth of employment before that letter arrives, gets opened, logged, and entered, and your flag (or lack thereof) shows up -- and the company gets called and you get nailed (or canned). Again, other forms of ID also work, in various combinations: bills mailed to your house, a lease/mortgage (I think), validated birth certificate, college ID, military ID, and a few other things I can’t recall. I do believe that up until a few years ago, a passport trumped everything -- that is, with a passport, you didn’t need to have the rest. I’m not sure that’s still true.
Let’s say you managed to evade the entire paperwork issue for almost two weeks, by constantly “forgetting” to bring it with you to work. Or, if you claim to have just moved, “not being able to find” your SSN card or your old military ID or whatevah excuse you’re using. While there are places that may clue in, pretty quickly (or may have clued in previously based on who referred you), and then offer in an oblique way to pay you in cash (ie, “under the table”), most companies want to at least make the effort to appear above-board. You hit about two weeks (since the most common pay period is, well, two weeks), and they’re going to say, “we can’t keep you working here if you can’t give us the proof of your right to work in this country.”
Then, you put up a stink, and say, geez, it’s not like I haven’t been looking!, or, I’m still unpacking!, etc. What you want is not to quit, but for them to fire you... because in the US, you cannot fire someone and not have their paycheck on hand, right then. Essentially, your ‘final paycheck’ must be in a back account by midnight of the same day as your firing (or at least in your hot little hands, if you didn’t have direct deposit). That means, when you ask what’ll happen if you can’t provide the paperwork, and they say, “we’ll have to let you go,” you ask: “wait, are you firing me?” When they agree, you say, “well, fine, be that way. I’ll just take my pay for the last week/two-weeks/x days and move along.”
A’course, this does require you job-hop quickly, these days, and are in a city with enough restaurants and low unemployment that kitchens will have high enough turnover and plenty of spaces to fill. (It happens, though the overall economy will affect the ease of finding such kitchens.) Back when things weren’t as computerized, the lag might be longer; I worked at a restaurant once with someone whose SSN was flagged as being wanted for bank robbery (!!!) and he’d been at the restaurant for nearly two months before his paperwork went through and the FBI got the red light pinpointing his location. Unfortunately, if you do use fake ID info, this is a major, major violation, and you’re not looking at the local cops to come sniffing around, nor will the company just say, “your paperwork got rejected and we’re letting you go.” Nooooo, the FBI will probably come around to ask you questions, and if you’d provided a passport (or are not a US citizen but claimed to be one), instead it’ll be the Diplomatic Secret Services (no kidding) who’ll show up, and then you are most definitely the proverbial toast. You might bolt at that point, but while you might be able to slip precinct when it comes to local cops, both the FBI and the DSS are international, and neither of them take illegal citizenship paperwork as a lighthearted joke.
Now, just don’t ask me how I know any of this, okay? Let’s just say it’s all in the name of solid research. (Even though it’s a damn good chance if you interview anyone from the FBI or the DSS that they’ll laugh and say, “oh, maybe you could’ve managed that a decade ago, but now? ... our turn-around time is a lot faster.)
Anyway, that’s one way to stay under the radar, sans legal ID (or at least being forced to show it, or explain why you don’t have it).
A ‘scene’ of any sort -- beyond just “we hang out at Dupont Circle most of the time” -- means that you have to have a place for people to gather (an old radio hall, a bar, a warehouse, an upstairs office), something for them to do once they get there (drink, dance, listen to music, play pool), and the money to pay for it (charge cover, charge cover + drinks, no cover but drink prices increase, charge by band, etc). There’s also the cost of whatever folks are doing -- pool tables aren’t cheap, buddy, and nor is any band once it’s figured out it’s got a decent following (meaning, can be certain of at least X number of attendees who will pay to see the band, as opposed to “Y number of people show up when we play free at the park on Thursdays”). To establish, organize, manage, and maintain any of these scene-focusing venues, you have to have resources... and that’s probably one more reason that the majority of “guest night” managers, of “collection show” organizers, of “travelling rave” hosts, all the way up to established brickfront bars and clubs, are all pulling so hard from the middle class. Those are the folks with the background resources, who have contacts with resources as well (and potential investors among family, too, which I ran into once or twice, where a business-parent was bankrolling the affair but expected to see numbers, using it as an inventive and practical way to give the kid real-life management and business experience), and have education/access to education to get the basic skills and/or improve on current skills.
(As my own investor told me years later, “to make cash, you must have cash. It’s that simple.” It really is.)
To clarify some of the terms in that paragraph: a guest night (called different things in different cities, though the concept seems to exist in a lot of places) is when the bar has, say, a standard of being Just Another Dance Club. On certain nights, though -- maybe every other Friday, or the first Tuesday of every month, or every Monday, whatever -- a ‘guest manager’ will take it over, usually bringing along their own DJ and music, and who does their own advertising to pull in a specific sub-culture that might otherwise avoid/disregard the bar. I used to swing by and visit friends on the goth nights at a bar in Boston, which from looking at the bar’s upcoming band roll and “top hits” from the DJ lists, was usually somewhere between college indie and mainstream top 40... yet every other wednesday it would be decorated lavishly, and the goth music pumping, and the goths coming out of the woodwork to stand around, dressed for that night’s theme, complimenting each other and preening but generally having a good time (an spending a huge amount at the bar, of course). I believe the manager paid the club a percentage of the take, but in turn got a percentage of the bar’s take, so it was in the guest manager’s best interest to not only get in warm bodies but also encourage them to drink, too. My brother used to run nights like that at several clubs in NYC, as well, so I know the basic economics though I never had any interest in actually doing it. Too much work, plus, too much dealing with people. Ugh!
A collection show (what else could I call it? no idea) is when it’s not a normal band venue, like playing bands at the local community center, or at a church’s attached theater during its off-hours, or like at my city’s old radio music hall (before a major club bought the property and turned it into something really fancy). The organizer in that case must be the go-between for the landlord and the actual crew manning the event, but doesn’t have a club’s or bar’s resources like door, kitchen, or bar staff, let alone coat check. Most often the only way to make the event financially manageable is to either pack in as many low-demand, upcoming local bands as possible for a decent price (”ten bands for ten bucks”, “five bands for five bucks,” that sort of thing) although usually with some lip service paid to the idea that all bands would appeal to similar groups -- or, alternately (and most commonly) to do it as a fundraiser of some sort.
One church in the city was particularly amenable to hosting multi-band nights, so long as the cover price was something like “two dollars and two cans”... at the end of the night, whomever was standing around (friends, band members, relatives, whatever) would get roped into loading up a car or two with all the cans so they could be ferried to the shelter of the church’s or organizer’s choice. I always thought it was somehow kinda cannibalistic in a rather amusing/ironic way: I knew for a fact that some of those kids had shoplifted those cans, and there was also the chance some of those kids would be later eating the soup made from those cans! Peculiar, but hey, it gave folks a place to hang out and listen to music and see friends, and we weren’t on a street corner. Plus, bands often went for that because playing in a similar-venue with similar-style bands meant you’d get exposure to more people who might arrive for another band but stay for you. A lot of bigger names came up that way, through the ranks at the six-hour multi-band el cheapo in-a-church-basement kind of affairs.
Travelling rave shows -- those organizers (or a combined group of folks) renting massive empty warehouses at the Navy Yard for one night to host an all-night rave... that was just beginning to show up in the city about the time I left. (Right along with MDMA, E, X, whatever your decade calls it, which was a backbone of the rave scene.) That brings up another point of the economic element of drugs, that -- in the few instances in stories I’ve read that mention drug use amongst city folk -- often get ignored. It’s not just the drugs you do with the people you know, but also the impact drugs have on what you do.
That’s tangential to this, but could be relevant, and it sure was to the bar/club managers I knew. The problem with MDMA, from a bar’s perspective, is that it dehydrates you severely, and that most people avoid mixing it with alcohol (which will subdue the drug’s effects, if not compress them almost completely), so you have a large group of people swarming a dance club, who are dancing all night... and only drinking water. (It was a real sign of the new drug’s impact when the bars I frequented suddenly changed their policies from “water is free” to “a buck for a glass of water” if not more!) A dance club, a bar, does not make its money in its cover price: that’s usually just enough to cover the basic operating expenses. The real money is in the bar tabs people pay. Clubs with live music are more like movie theaters, where the $10 cost is based on the assumption that no one will buy food; any food sold, then, is profit/loss over and above the operational cost. A restaurant, like a bar, is the opposite: even assuming there’s an entry fee (or for a restaurant, a minimum table take is calculated and assumed, even if not actually ‘charged’), the money is in the services provided by the establishment itself, not in what it routes to you -- that is, dinner is a self-produced element; a hosted band is a routed element. The operating costs of the first is much higher than the second, but the potential profit margin of the first is also higher than the second.
Man, I hope that makes sense to folks reading. If not, let me know and I’ll clarify where needed. Or just write this off as a crash course in scene-business ventures.
all the parts ▪ dear [not just urban fantasy] author part I ▪ dear [not just urban fantasy] author part II ▪ dear [not just urban fantasy] author part III ▪ permanent record, pt I: edginess, and street fighting ▪ permanent record, pt II: guns, knives, and making it hurt
Several folks asked me to list any books I’ve read with good-to-strong verite. Hrm. I’d say Holly Black’s books, Tithe, and Valiant, were pretty freakin’ awesome, but that comes with a really big caveat: the gritty and realistic parts were actually the parts I didn’t really like much, myself. That’s not a paradox. I say that because I was raised around people who’ve spent their lives inside society, and I now live surrounded by folks like that. It’s not too big a jump for me, at times, to ‘think’ like someone for whom suburbia and security and safety have always been present. For you, Black’s books are probably going to be eye-openers in urban fantasy (if YA, but they’re readable as an adult, so it’s not a major issue), but for me... hrm, how to put it.
I would say Black plays the ‘stranger’ card (a la Stranger in a Strange Land) except that I don’t want the negative connotation we usually associate with “a ___ card”. Okay, I’ll call it a trope, instead: in both stories, the main POV is a young girl who falls into/ends up in the midst of a peculiar fairy/otherworld that meshes with, influences/touches the street life and its people. This isn’t an uncommon thing, to draw a parallel for a reader between “the magical” and “the kind of strange that really exists” -- and for most readers, “people who live in cardboard boxes and are happy with their lives” certainly counts as strange. Hell, look at the tradition of the Magical Negro if you want correlation between ‘not-like-us’ and ‘automatically wise and magical’ blah blah blah insert random anthropological observations here.
Carrying on: the Traveller trope -- because it’s really someone travelling into, passing through, and then leaving, the Strange Land (similar to Card’s milieu plot category) -- means that the author can see this strange and fascinating world entirely through the traveller’s eyes. That main POV becomes the reader’s stand-in, the everychild who looks at the Other’s “normality” and sees magic, or dirt, or horror, or whatever. Sometime the traveller has a tour guide character accompanying him/her; sometimes the traveller is the reader’s tour guide, but in all cases, the author can, and usually does, highlight all the bizarro parts of the Other, almost revelling in them.
I gritted my teeth and carried on through Black’s second novel, because I couldn’t help my instinctive reaction: cripes, girl, shut up, it’s not that bad, and I don’t see you contributing jack what-with your everyday high school life and your bought-new backpack. Stop looking at this like it’s something horrendous or scary or disgusting, I don’t see you bringing us a five-course meal so either eat what’s here or get out but stop with the attitude.
Because that’s the way I’d react, back then, and it’s a reaction hard to unlearn. It’s even harder to unlearn when returning to mainstream means any conversation about what I did between the ages of fourteen and twenty-two has to be hedged with vagueness. Getting specific means saying things that seem almost surreal in the light of a suburban home and a cell phone and a car that runs regularly and a heater that works: “oh, no, that year I was mostly staying at crashes and squats, it was the year after that, I lived in the apartment with fifteen other people.” The second you mention you lived on the outside of society, the reaction is -- almost without exception, now that I think about it -- “oh my god, how horrible!”
And since it’s not like I want to go into what my options were at the time, I don’t have many options in the conversation now, either, to explain why my gut reaction is: “Shut up and stop looking at me like you suddenly discovered I have a second head growing out of my elbow.”
When you stood on the outside of the mainstream, reading stories that rely on the tourguide/traveller trope can be... tiring. Yeah, so readers think they’re edgy, and feel like they “know something” now about “that life”, but the truth is... they don’t. And they don’t for one simple reason: the POV the author is using to express this life is a POV that remains within the mainstream. It’s not someone in, and of, the Other; it’s someone only there for a bit, passing through, until s/he decides the way back home is open, or preferable, or whatever.
This also has a lot to do with the reasons people leave, and why they come back. Characters who experience a sudden gut-wrench that throws their entire life into question -- and ditch it all and run off to the circus -- are enviable, to readers, because the character is pitching everything in the way that most readers won’t ever get the guts to do. (What was that movie about the guy who cracks in yet another day at work and suddenly goes off on a long-distance trip driving to nowhere? Uhm... whatever.) But, and this is a really big honkin’ but -- authors sometimes forget that the Other is a damn unattractive place to be, sometimes. Not because the Other itself is bad or good or indifferent, but because if you have been raised your entire life within the Inside, it’s not a simple prospect to admit, accept, let alone embrace that you’re now Other. The character may be in it, but not of it, until the time s/he goes back to the Everyday world.
Is this making sense to anyone? Take a character who’s thrown out of his house for whatever reason... let’s say he loses his job, he comes home, and his girlfriend throws him out of the house -- let’s go really over the top and say she’s keeping all his stuff, and has cleaned out his bank account. Oh, and they live in a foreign country so he’s not even that good at the language... that’s right, take away any and all resources. That may get him into the Other, but as long as there’s the chance of regaining his money, or regaining her heart, or getting another job, the path back will always remain within his head. As long as that path exists, the character will look at the world around him and say, this is not my place, I do not belong here, and what the hell is up with these people’s crazy logic? Because it doesn’t resemble anything I know.
You don’t burn your social/cultural bridges by going native, not when it’s in the back of your head that someday you’ll go home. You only go native when going back home is no longer an option.
One commenter had noted fringe-folks tend break out into three loose groups.
a) lower-income/working-class background
b) middle class background
c) college students slumming
With additional observation that B tended to look down on C more than A did (I think that was the gist). And, too, that A was more likely to be prickly over B than over C. I'd add that C could hang informally with economic fringe but steered clear of social fringe -- that is, regardless of background but currently working, and the slummers seemed just fine. I recall college students giving cold shoulders to street kids who were clearly non-working, had no source of support, or no permanent address -- though I'm not sure whether this was due to dress, age, conversation, education, or what. Maybe just a general discomfort, dunno.
At the time, I usually wrote it off to private-college-types being kinda secretly snobby, even when allegedly 'slumming' -- I mean, yeah, so they were living squeezed eight to a house in rather iffy usual rental-baron places, but I also know for a fact that the shared rent on one friend's house not far from the university was more than my parents' mortgage, and my parents had a decently-large suburban house with a quarter acre. So, uhm, not exactly slumming when you're still shopping at the International Safeway, y'know?
Anyway.
I can recall that of the kids who'd fit as A-type, a more than fair number were often casually 'encouraged' out of the house -- go get a job, you've got a job, go get your own place. Or they were unsupervised to the extent that what began as running wild became pretty much full-time. That was actually a huge shock to me at the time; I'd expected the majority to be close to disowned, either fleeing the bad or getting thrown out by it. Stereotypical/hollywood expectations aside, plenty of the tiny-house, blue-collar inner-burbs kids around me did in fact keep in touch with their folks, even went home every now and then. There just wasn't room, or money, or time for them, so they did their own thing, even if that meant wandering the city at loose ends and working odd jobs (of various legality).
The B-group includes the socio-economic background that's full-time on the street, but also what NYC calls "the bridge and tunnel club"; kids from the suburbs come into the city on the evenings/weekends and then head back home at the end of the night. It's the HS version of the slumming college student, in a way. It's just a part-time version. That is to say, not everyone "on the streets" is really there full-time -- and if a runaway meets up with and/or falls in with a group of pushouts (the A-types), and moves in with them to cut living costs, is that newcomer still ‘on the streets’ or is s/he now working towards some kind of security and stability? (I still classify such mentally, myself, as ‘on the streets’ in the sense of that’s where such kids spent most of their time, anyway, but YMMV.)
Middle-class kids -- by whatever means they arrived -- were sometimes lumped (however unfairly) with slumming college students. I met my share of those, like the guy who went to an Ivy League school, and lived in a small apartment with nine other people. Starving arty-type, colorful hair, and breathtakingly handsome, man, those were some cheekbones. (My inner-grandmother voice kept saying, “wow, good breeding.” *kicks self*) Then we hung out, and swung by his parents’ house so he could retrieve something. Ahem. That house wasn’t a house, that honestly was a mansion; his room was the entire attic and had been built as the servants’ quarters -- separate staircase and all. I’m saying the foyer was the size of my current living room.
I never saw anyone give him grief, but he wasn’t within the circle of my peers; we crossed thanks only to similar clubs/musical interests. He and his were all wealthy (apparent only once you took a closer look at the Swedish stereo under that duct tape and spray paint). Though I look back now and think that’s pretty gutsy for someone coming from that cushy background to take a shot at doing it on his own -- I also know that kind of guts really only comes along, to really go all-out, I mean, when you’ve got resources. Family, savings, friends, some kind of security.
Anyway, the folks who worked at the bars, along with the couriers and waiters and retail folks gathering at happy hour for a few drinks (or an entire bottle) were mostly working-class regardless of upbringing. The majority were in their early to mid-twenties, worked pretty hard, made too little, scraped by, and -- as I got to know some of them better -- appeared to come, pretty uniformly, from lower-middle-class backgrounds. Blue collar mostly, with some white collar mixed in here and there (one or two had parents who were school teachers, one had a mom who was a police officer, I seem to recall). Even the one kid I met, with parents the honest-to-goodness American Dream Realized (but only after 20+ hardscrabble years), was raised in an old farmhouse and the scant money that comes with farming. (The ‘new’ money hadn’t seemed to faze him, and in fact he seemed to get a great deal of respect for insisting he’d do the bootstrap thing, too, thanks.)
It was the musicians who tended to have white collar and upper-class family backgrounds. Most had been playing in bands since fourteen or fifteen, the usual junior high, high school “gonna be a rock star!” thing. I recall finding out that a well-known musician & club employee was leaving the scene to enter law school. I was boggled, even moreso when I asked him about the specialty he’d chosen. Apparently his father worked in that field; a few years later, it came up in conversation and I mentioned his name to my mother. Her jaw dropped, and I found out I’d been hanging out with a Major Name. Boy, he didn’t look that major after playing for two hours with his back to the double Marshall stacks. Hunh.
Come to think of it, the musicians (and artists) did seem to have the best relationships with their families. Those were the most visible relationships, that is; I met a few siblings who’d come to visit brothers or sisters who worked in the clubs, but you only ever saw parents when it came to musicians. Go to a hardcore show in my city, and some nights you’d see a couple in their sixties arrive a half-hour before showtime, chat politely with the doormen, order a soda each, and take up a spot where they could see the stage. It was Mr. and Mrs. Stabb, the parents of Government Issue’s lead singer. Ten years, and they never missed a show when he played his home city. Actually, on any given night of a local band playing (or a band that originated locally), you’d find at least one relative, if not two or three, there to show support.
Then again, it does make sense (assuming an author’s willing to stop and think about it). Music, like art, is a luxury. There’s the cost of classes to learn the instrument, and the cost of the instrument itself, and then the ongoing cost of upkeep on that instrument -- guitar strings, drumsticks, cleaning supplies, new reeds, even getting your piano tuned or your electronic keyboard cleaned. You can’t play what don’t work, and your skill will definitely be limited if you have no place to practice and/or no way to improve/expand your skill set. Art supplies are damned expensive, as well, so the fact that the majority of kids/young-adults I knew who fell into the “starving artist” or “struggling musician” categories came from predominantly middle-class backgrounds shouldn’t really be a surprise. Yes, there were exceptions, but the few I met were folks who worked their asses off to have the spare cash it takes to continue with an instrument or art. I met far more who wanted to, but couldn’t afford to, so settled for doodling or just going to shows and appreciating other folks’ music instead.
The majority of those working as bartenders, doormen, soundmen, and the like, were push-outs (even if gently so in a good number of the cases). As such, they’d been working for quite some time, knew their way around, and had pretty much worked out their reputation with, and interaction with, the street/city. They’d been in one place long enough to have seen more than a lifetime’s share of faces come and go, while they remained the scene’s backbone. Yeah, so the faces in the moshpit were vibrant and young and excited about things, but it’s the little-seen doormen, the sound guy, the club manager, the barback, who make the scene (and the individual shows) even happen.
More on that economic/social part in a following section.
You see a lot on the usual After School special and Touched-by-Something crap about runaways on the streets, often with some idiotic author's idea that it's a real twist to find out the runaway is actually -- gasp! -- a throwaway. Which might shock some folks, insert eye roll here, but the problem is that the two act very differently. At least, I could pinpoint each from a mile away, and I suspect those of us in each category were probably hardly opaque to any other sharp observers.
Except it's really three types: those who say, "I'm leaving!" and bolt in fear or anger. There are those who are told, "you're leaving," and get thrown out. And then there are those who're just pushed out (which I'd mentioned above as more likely to be in group A's socio-economic brackets). They're never formally thrown out; they're just made unwelcome. I knew one blue-collar background girl whose mother had remarried and had a new baby. The girl ended up in a squat in the city, and the whole of her eventual, casual, explanation was, "my mom's all about my little brother and he's great, and I love him, don't get me wrong, but I'm just in the way, so I figured I'd get on with my life, y'know? He's her whole life, now, and I'm just... y'know, not as important." Limited resources, and for whatever reason, the teenager is aware that their use of the resources is resented by the family, or is a drain on the family, so the kid heads out to get free of that neglect/disinterest/resentment as well as to help the family, even if by absence alone.
Those kids are, to some degree, proud of themselves for making this sacrifice, this growing-up choice, even if it's mingled with regret that they can't go home, at least not for more than a short visit. Different for runaways, and there's a sort of logic in the stupider the reason the kid/person has for running away, the more likely they are to ask you what you're doing in the city.
This was a regular conversation for me, when chatting with kids at the subway, outside a club, while in line for a show, whatever, in order of conversational steps:
1. Start with basic intro questions. My usual response was to take the questions ultra-literally, often with deadpan delivery:
[Alternate versions: “Yeah, all night unless it rains,” or, “Yeah, if a night’s six months long.”]
Short pause while kid processes flat answer(s). That was my test: did the kid laugh and get that I was saying that I wouldn’t say and/or it was NOYB, or would the kid push? Conversation ends, or moves to next step.
2. At this point, you have to "report your credentials", that is, "list who you're with in case there are mutual friends in your circles who can then verify you independently later". Finish up those lists and cross-references -- "di'ya know Seth, the bartender, he works Tuesdays..." and "the band playing opening last night, their bassist..." kinds of things -- and we've pretty much done the resume review (where'ya from, where'ya live), and the references check (who ya know).
3. And then we're getting to the personal segment of the interview: what are you doing here? For those of you who write, note that "why're you here?" and "what are you doing here?" can get a variety of answers, and it's entirely dependent on the actual (real) reason. The farther a person was from "justification stance" of a runaway, the less likely you'd get any details -- ie, someone who chose the city as a positive option (instead of the lesser of two evils, however realistic those evils) seemed to feel less need to justify. Several versions I've exchanged:
Either the kid gets the hint and drops it, or the kid takes the answer -- sometimes any answer, even a nod -- as permission to launch into their own answer to the question they'd asked you. The really self-centered or self-focused kids would just skip to step 2, and tell you off the bat without bothering to ask for your version.
The broader a person took the question's meaning (as in, "why are you here" = "what made you be homeless like this" as opposed to "why are you here" = "do you like this band"), the more likely -- at least in my experience -- that they had something to dis/prove. The old phrase that knowledge is power: hello, there's an excellent phrase for writing folks on teh fringe. Knowledge is power, and to give you knowledge of my reasons for being here -- literal or existential -- is to give you power. When I don't have anything but what I'm carrying and the trivia in my head, I don't have any power to spare, so I conserve by staying vague. In contrast, someone on the fringe for inadequate, dubious, or frivolous reasons gains power by sharing their knowledge/story -- if they can get you to agree that their version has validity. It's the verbal, street, version of someone flexing their measly muscles to convince you that they coulda beena contendah -- the one who has a justifiable, valid (read: no way back) reason for being there doesn't need to prove they're "on the street". They know it. They can't get away from it.
Thing is, most runaways’ take on their personal stories are colored with shame. I mean, no one likes to be a runaway -- it's saying, in a sense, that you're a quitter. That you left your family, and despite whatever shit they might've been handing out, that something in our culture/society/humanity says, that's family, and you shouldn't leave. The stupider the reason you left, the more likely you're going to explain, or rationalize. Like the girl who got into an argument with her mom over what kind of jeans she could have. Or the boy who got tired of having to borrow his dad's car, and that his folks wouldn't get him one of his own. Or the kids who wanted to get stoned/smoke/drink and didn't like parents grounding them for it. Now think about that. Think about it as an adult would, in the sense of: you decided to embrace a miserable, always-hungry, never-totally-clean, hand-to-mouth existence in the dangerous nights of the murder capital of the world because your parents wouldn't buy you a car?
Hey, guess what: your listener's attitude/response right now is just about identical to the emotional response of any listener who's on the streets as a result of being thrown away or pushed out. It's anywhere from polite disinterest to downright disgust. With the exception of those fleeing abuse like physical abuse, incest/molestation, extreme neglect, etc -- which, to my mind, is another form of throwaway because if you wanted the kid around, you wouldn't treat them like something disposable, would you? -- the runaways didn't get a lot of respect from me. Hell, the runaways didn't actually get a lot of respect from most folks, almost maybe a bit of pity at times. Because in some ways, the runaways had the option of going back home. Call collect, moron, and go back where you belong. You don't need to be here.
Runaways do tend to congregate. I used to feed a crowd of them on regular days -- erm, technically I was feeding them but it was in the name of “learning how to cook the restaurant’s specialities,” and amazingly, my judges (read: the kids) constantly rated my efforts Just Not Quite There Yet, Please Try Again, Woot. (Heh. Good times.) Although I socialized with several runaways and/or groups of them, if we ran into each other while out and about, they were never really my core group in terms of who I relied on, who I turned to. You might think that’s where I’d feel most comfortable, given that these kids were from a similar socio-economic, financial, political, educational stratum as myself, but it was actually where I was least comfortable, when you get right down to it.
After all, they were in the city by choice. For those in the first flushes of this new freedom, it was an exciting and adventuresome time. It also came with a bright-eyed kind of thrill over picking fights and stealing beers and raising cain and causing trouble of any kind, for the fun of it... until the city began to really wear on them, and either they drifted back home and made amends, or they drifted deeper into the city (at which point I didn’t see them again, anyway, except in distant passing).
This is one point where I must emphasize that my city was not a major megalopolis of the likes of Chicago, NYC, or LA, or Paris, or London. It’s more the size of about Stockholm, maybe? I can envision people sinking deeper into the city’s dregs (the homeless do it all the time) but it’s not really a city where you can hide, not in the sense of being lost in a million teeming faces. For starters, the city’s roughly sixty square miles -- that’s 177km to you metrics reading -- of a partial square 10m (16km) on two sides, and about 5m (8km) on the short side, not counting the length along the riverfront. Doing about 2-3m an hour (standard walking pace for most adults), you can walk from the Northeast quadrant to the far Northwest edge in about two hours. The actual number of residents in the city is about half-a-million, but that’s not counting all the people who commute daily into the city, and leave for the suburbs at five pm; daily, the city’s population quadruples in size and then falls again when twilight comes. The surrounding metro area, though, has half a billion residents (yet is overall only the 8th largest population center in the US).
I mention the geography to underline something that is not necessarily true of other cities (or so I’ve been told): from anywhere in my home city, if you want to get out, it’s entirely feasible to walk. It’s not really a city with a reputation for “where to go as a runaway” -- that’s NYC, LA, and for reasons I’m still puzzling out, apparently also Phoenix and Seattle, but hey, everyone’s got personal issues. The majority of the runaways that I met, then, were mostly from the near to farthest ‘burbs, with a handful coming up from Richmond or Baltimore -- in which case the train tickets home were actually rather cheap. $5 got you back to Baltimore on the MARC, while about $8 got you as far as Fredericksburg on the VRE, where you could hop on Amtrak and head south to Richmond for another $10. These are easily panhandled amounts (or even loanable amounts from any well-intentioned fellow runaways willing to help you get back home, if you chose). If you lived anywhere within the ring of the city’s beltway, walking was the cheapest, and a quite manageable, option.
So it’s a hike, but hey, never underestimate the distances you can cover when you’ve got soda, smokes, sturdy boots, a full pack of matches, and a good rhythm in your pace. Just got to watch out for those who slow down and “offer you a ride”, and if you see a cop go past in one direction, it’s time to take a quick detour through a neighborhood. So it’ll increase your time a bit, but it’s still better than being picked up by some cop for vagrancy -- because anyone under the age of thirty who’s out walking at three a.m. must be a runaway; hell, anyone over the age of thirty’s just plain a vagrant (and would probably get stopped and questioned anyway). I can’t blame the cops, though. Not like they’ve got any other excitement cruising quiet suburban streets at three a.m.
A kid who's been thrown away is far less likely than a runaway to tell you why they're on the fringe, which is one point where I get all eagle-eyed on authors writing current or former street kids. Think about it, people! Would you really introduce yourself as, "Hi, nice to meet you, I was once married but my spouse left me for another person who wasn't fat, stupid, and lazy like me." Can you see yourself saying, just laying it out, as: "Hi, yeah, I'm living here because the last home I had, my six roommates voted me out and tossed all my stuff on the sidewalk while I was at work."
Oh, please. No one wants to admit they have a big honkin' scar of "NOT WANTED" sliced on their forehead, so if -- very big if -- the story's told, it'll probably be vague, it'll leave a lot to your imagination, it'll slant things to sound like the scar isn't the speaker's fault. Granted, plenty of authors can get that any reasonable person will give you a slant when the story might cast them into a bad light -- unreliable narrator and all that -- but the difference here is why. For the runaway with a stupid reason, the rationalization is to convince you, the listener, that the kid's (secretly desperate need) story be believed and considered reasonable -- to combat the kid's inner knowledge that their reasoning was anything but. For the throwaway or pushout, it's not a rationalization, it's an evasion, and the slant isn't to make the Other Person (the parent) look bad, and yet the kid doesn't want to look bad, so it's easier to just avoid it and not say anything.
For those of you unfamiliar with how the throwaway's logic works, here's a quick summary. First, try to think of what it'd be like to have your parents tell you -- by words or action -- that they don't want you, they'd get rid of you if possible. No kid wants to be rejected so thoroughly, and every kid -- to some degree -- does love their parents, however malicious or neglectful or just plain useless the parents may be. So here's someone the kid wants to love, and to be loved by, saying the kid isn't worth having around. To hear someone say, "man, your parents suck for doing that," is an agreement that indicates that you'd just admitted your parents are bad -- and if they're bad, but you love them anyway, what does that make you? And if they're good, and didn't want you, what does that make you, then? It's a lose-lose situation for a kid's brain. The only way to deal with it is to just evade the question as best you can.
I can't stand it when stories have fringe-folk dumping their life stories on each other. No, wait, I can't stand that if done badly, in any story -- but what I can't stand in fringe-element characters is how they react to the news. If you came to the fringe because you wanted a new car and couldn't have one, the fringe-listener is going to look at you like you have two heads. "Go home," they'll be thinking. If you came to the fringe because you got thrown out, the sad truth is that the better your socio-economic background, the more likely the fringe-folk is to tell you to go home anyway: the longer they've been on the street, the more likely they are to see a roof, plenty of food, and new/clean clothes as fully worth the price of random physical, mental, emotional, abuse -- double that if they're on the street because of money/economic issues and not fundamental emotional conflicts. A throwaway who stays on the fringe is often doing the best s/he can to draw a line in the sand and refuse to go back to that... but the better the background, the more pressure s/he will likely get from peers to go back to where s/he "belongs". As if.
You can see how throwaways/pushouts tend to swing through their own parabola in the street-cultures. They don't act, or react, like the kids who moved out at a young age (like some of the lower-class kids, or the gentler push-outs), or even like the runaways or the slummers or the working class -- all of whom, for one reason or another, will often urge the throwaway to go back home -- in part, too, because unlike a runaway, a throwaway is not on the street because s/he wants to be there. The kid's just making the best of a bad situation, with little to no resources.
I can’t really speak to the law now, but the last time I checked, it is not a requirement (at least in the US) that you carry ID on you at all times, or that you can prove you are who you are -- if you’re not committing a crime. (If you are, that’s another issue completely.) However, I say that while also knowing that in some jurisdictions -- Richmond, VA is one of them that I know of -- if you do not have some kind of ID on you, then you can be picked up for vagrancy. I knew someone sitting on a bench waiting for the very last bus of the night who got hassled by cops for being a vagrant; fortunately he did have a student ID on him.
[I’ve been told -- at least, I was back in the 80s and 90s -- that the reason my passport wasn’t checked when entering England or France was because I couldn’t do jack in either country without a helluva lot more paperwork than just my personal word, or even a single fake ID were I to spring for one. And, too, that without a full stock of my personal paperwork collection, I couldn’t get a job, rent an apartment, buy a car, all sorts of mean nasty things, and that the US was bizarrely lax in contrast. Despite checking ID at the borders, anywhere inside the country it’s pretty low-key, and still is... like the fact that apparently driving from one state to the next, and not needing to show ID, is an unusually ‘free’ ability to citizens of some countries/regions. But, then, I’ve never really done any research on how much this is true, so that’s 100% purely anecdotal and possibly just as 100% wrong. Caveat reader!]
Most student IDs don’t count as “official” ID in the sense of pleasing a cop, nor will most businesses accept them (in those rare instances where someone requests ID when you use a credit card), but in general they are a picture ID. They just don’t usually have home address, license number, or SSN. Other forms of ID are the residential ID (also known as a “walker’s license,” a variant on the driver’s license that doesn’t give you rights to drive but does work as a replacement legal ID in those ID-check situations), a passport, or a military ID.
Again, I don’t know how it works now, but I can tell you how it worked when I was in the city -- back in the days when computers weren’t quite so reliable, the system had a few more loopholes, and people weren’t all in a panic like crazy about illegal immigrants blowing stuff up on our shores (ignoring the fact that the terrorists all had legal passports for entry). Anyway, the first thing you need is a legal address, a street address, not a PO box, which means you either rent an apartment or you sublet from someone else, or you just stay on someone’s sofa and make sure to get at least one bill in your name -- gas, electricity, cable, phone, water, whatever -- something from one of the municipal or corporate utilities. (I believe a major credit card bill works as well, but it’s got to be a bill, not just a letter you’d been sent: in other words, it’s proof that some company is expecting that when they want your money, they get it by contacting you at that address.)
Then, you take the envelope + bill to the local DMV (department of motor vehicles), and you wait in line. When it’s your turn, you explain you just moved to the state, here’s an official piece of mail showing your new address. No, you don’t have a driver’s license to transfer from another state. Yes, you’ll fill out the paperwork for a walker’s license (unless you go whole hog and do the driving/writing tests as well, and that depends on whether the state will require that you take a driver’s ed course -- VA does, I think MD doesn’t, it depends on the state so most folks I knew who took this path, just got walker’s ID). You get your picture taken, they type in the info you give them (note: yes, that you give them), and then you walk out with a shiny new ID that may or may not contain your true birthdate, name, or even address, but it does have your picture on it, and it won’t get snagged as “fake” because, technically, it’s not.
This is how some of my friends got ‘legal’ ID that showed them as old enough to drink, because the computer system didn’t store license-pictures in the computer until about maybe two or three years ago. (Just wasn’t the technology nor server room to keep every blooming license-ID in the average state, y’know... but now there is.) Anyway, your of-age friend loans you her SSN card, or her birth certificate, and a bill that comes to her address. You go to the DMV with these, and say you’ve lost your driver’s license and need a new one. No problem, they find you in the system, they check “your” paperwork against what they have, it matches, they take your picture... and now you have a legal ID (for which any future notification will go to the correct owner/holder) but this ID has your picture, not your friend’s. A doorman may give you a dubious look that you can’t possibly really be 23 (while a DMV person probably will ignore it, because they’ve got all your “other” information that “proves” you’re you, ahem, your friend, even if you sure look only seventeen) -- but the doorman can’t, erm, legally confiscate the ID because that is the state seal, and that is your picture.
[They may quiz you, though, to be assholes. “So you had a birthday last month,” when your listed birthday would’ve been ten months ago. Or, “what’s your SSN?” back in the days when state licenses had SSNs on them -- now, if someone quizzed me on my DL#, I’d be all, “what? are you high? who the hell memorizes their frickin’ driver’s license number?” Although the one time I got quizzed -- and it was my own, legal, of-age ID, no less -- I was so annoyed I couldn’t help but snap, “what, can’t you read? it’s right there on the ID.” Sometimes a little attitude does help. Sometimes.]
There was a huge scam going on in VA that finally got broken up back in ‘02 or ‘03, I think it was; some quasi-lawyerly type was arranging for state IDs for illegal immigrants, by providing them with fake leases and fake bills sent to the address on the lease. All they had to do was walk in, use that to get fully-legal VA id, and then they could go work anywhere and not get caught for “not having legal US ID”... I think it was also being used by some to evade taxes in higher-taxed states, or evade car insurance rates in MD by having VA license/address, stuff like that. Needless to say, now if you want ID -- hell, even to renew when you already have valid, legal ID -- you have to provide birth certificate and/or passport, social security card, and at least one picture ID (student, current ID, military ID). I think if you’re new to the state the list includes the lease/house-sale info and a mailed bill, but all I know is when I had to renew my license in VA in ‘06, I had the valid license in hand and they still wanted all that other crap. Ridiculous, going more than a little overboard to make up for about thirty years of being one of the easier states to get a fake ID.
Mostly, depending on your job and your housing situation, you can get away with cash-only and no ID. When you rent an apartment, the landlord’s biggest issue isn’t who you are, but whether you can pay: showing a bank account statement, or a paycheck stub, is usually the most important requirements. (The slummier the landlord, the more they’ll cut down to the bare minimum.) If you don’t have either job or bank account, you sublet, or you move in with someone else who signs solely, or someone co-signs with you (as parents often do for a college student’s first apartment, while still a student and thus unemployed). Most jobs require ID... but there are plenty of ways to job-hop around that, since some of the industries with faster turn-over won’t balk at “getting the paperwork later” so long as they have the warm body now.
Here’s how that works: you walk into a restaurant, fill out the application with whatever info you have (or choose to make up, whatever). Rattle off a few places you’ve worked (this is the one place they will spot you lying, though; kitchens and bartenders are good at bench tests and it’s hard to fake restaurant knowledge), or drop the right phrases, blah blah blah, and then agree to start on X date. Let’s say it’s the next day. When you come back in is usually when they’ll say, “we need to do the tax paperwork.” If you’re lucky, they’ll either forget, or you’ve started at the lunch rush and they’re busy anyway and could use you right now (or you push that point by saying so cheerfully, “how about I help get past this rush, first?”), or they may not even have the paperwork-level manager on the premises so you’ll get told you need to “do it first thing tomorrow.”
Technically, mind you, you’re not supposed to work a job without a very particular piece of paperwork completed, and it’s not the tax information. Contrary to most assumptions, the tax info paperwork can wait a bit, in that it really only needs to be done for the business’ purposes of doing your deductions on your paycheck for you; if incomplete, they’ll go with the default and you’ll get hit with the most taxes removed per your paycheck’s bracket, sans deductions. (If readers already know this, sorry, figured I should include for any non-USA folks.) What is mandatory before one can legally “start working” is the piece of paper that validates that you are legal to work in the US (including born-citizen, naturalized, green card, work visa, other visa, etc), and that you’ve provided X forms of ID from column one, and Y forms of ID from column two. For a US citizen, this is usually satisfied by providing a driver’s license (or walker’s license) and a SSN. The company will xerox both, attach the copy to the form, the company’s manager or HR person will sign and date to verify that they witnessed the originals and returned them to you, and then it all gets sealed up and sent off to some office, uhm, somewhere.
Which means: if you provided fake ID, or ID that’s flagged in the system... you probably have about two weeks’ worth of employment before that letter arrives, gets opened, logged, and entered, and your flag (or lack thereof) shows up -- and the company gets called and you get nailed (or canned). Again, other forms of ID also work, in various combinations: bills mailed to your house, a lease/mortgage (I think), validated birth certificate, college ID, military ID, and a few other things I can’t recall. I do believe that up until a few years ago, a passport trumped everything -- that is, with a passport, you didn’t need to have the rest. I’m not sure that’s still true.
Let’s say you managed to evade the entire paperwork issue for almost two weeks, by constantly “forgetting” to bring it with you to work. Or, if you claim to have just moved, “not being able to find” your SSN card or your old military ID or whatevah excuse you’re using. While there are places that may clue in, pretty quickly (or may have clued in previously based on who referred you), and then offer in an oblique way to pay you in cash (ie, “under the table”), most companies want to at least make the effort to appear above-board. You hit about two weeks (since the most common pay period is, well, two weeks), and they’re going to say, “we can’t keep you working here if you can’t give us the proof of your right to work in this country.”
Then, you put up a stink, and say, geez, it’s not like I haven’t been looking!, or, I’m still unpacking!, etc. What you want is not to quit, but for them to fire you... because in the US, you cannot fire someone and not have their paycheck on hand, right then. Essentially, your ‘final paycheck’ must be in a back account by midnight of the same day as your firing (or at least in your hot little hands, if you didn’t have direct deposit). That means, when you ask what’ll happen if you can’t provide the paperwork, and they say, “we’ll have to let you go,” you ask: “wait, are you firing me?” When they agree, you say, “well, fine, be that way. I’ll just take my pay for the last week/two-weeks/x days and move along.”
A’course, this does require you job-hop quickly, these days, and are in a city with enough restaurants and low unemployment that kitchens will have high enough turnover and plenty of spaces to fill. (It happens, though the overall economy will affect the ease of finding such kitchens.) Back when things weren’t as computerized, the lag might be longer; I worked at a restaurant once with someone whose SSN was flagged as being wanted for bank robbery (!!!) and he’d been at the restaurant for nearly two months before his paperwork went through and the FBI got the red light pinpointing his location. Unfortunately, if you do use fake ID info, this is a major, major violation, and you’re not looking at the local cops to come sniffing around, nor will the company just say, “your paperwork got rejected and we’re letting you go.” Nooooo, the FBI will probably come around to ask you questions, and if you’d provided a passport (or are not a US citizen but claimed to be one), instead it’ll be the Diplomatic Secret Services (no kidding) who’ll show up, and then you are most definitely the proverbial toast. You might bolt at that point, but while you might be able to slip precinct when it comes to local cops, both the FBI and the DSS are international, and neither of them take illegal citizenship paperwork as a lighthearted joke.
Now, just don’t ask me how I know any of this, okay? Let’s just say it’s all in the name of solid research. (Even though it’s a damn good chance if you interview anyone from the FBI or the DSS that they’ll laugh and say, “oh, maybe you could’ve managed that a decade ago, but now? ... our turn-around time is a lot faster.)
Anyway, that’s one way to stay under the radar, sans legal ID (or at least being forced to show it, or explain why you don’t have it).
A ‘scene’ of any sort -- beyond just “we hang out at Dupont Circle most of the time” -- means that you have to have a place for people to gather (an old radio hall, a bar, a warehouse, an upstairs office), something for them to do once they get there (drink, dance, listen to music, play pool), and the money to pay for it (charge cover, charge cover + drinks, no cover but drink prices increase, charge by band, etc). There’s also the cost of whatever folks are doing -- pool tables aren’t cheap, buddy, and nor is any band once it’s figured out it’s got a decent following (meaning, can be certain of at least X number of attendees who will pay to see the band, as opposed to “Y number of people show up when we play free at the park on Thursdays”). To establish, organize, manage, and maintain any of these scene-focusing venues, you have to have resources... and that’s probably one more reason that the majority of “guest night” managers, of “collection show” organizers, of “travelling rave” hosts, all the way up to established brickfront bars and clubs, are all pulling so hard from the middle class. Those are the folks with the background resources, who have contacts with resources as well (and potential investors among family, too, which I ran into once or twice, where a business-parent was bankrolling the affair but expected to see numbers, using it as an inventive and practical way to give the kid real-life management and business experience), and have education/access to education to get the basic skills and/or improve on current skills.
(As my own investor told me years later, “to make cash, you must have cash. It’s that simple.” It really is.)
To clarify some of the terms in that paragraph: a guest night (called different things in different cities, though the concept seems to exist in a lot of places) is when the bar has, say, a standard of being Just Another Dance Club. On certain nights, though -- maybe every other Friday, or the first Tuesday of every month, or every Monday, whatever -- a ‘guest manager’ will take it over, usually bringing along their own DJ and music, and who does their own advertising to pull in a specific sub-culture that might otherwise avoid/disregard the bar. I used to swing by and visit friends on the goth nights at a bar in Boston, which from looking at the bar’s upcoming band roll and “top hits” from the DJ lists, was usually somewhere between college indie and mainstream top 40... yet every other wednesday it would be decorated lavishly, and the goth music pumping, and the goths coming out of the woodwork to stand around, dressed for that night’s theme, complimenting each other and preening but generally having a good time (an spending a huge amount at the bar, of course). I believe the manager paid the club a percentage of the take, but in turn got a percentage of the bar’s take, so it was in the guest manager’s best interest to not only get in warm bodies but also encourage them to drink, too. My brother used to run nights like that at several clubs in NYC, as well, so I know the basic economics though I never had any interest in actually doing it. Too much work, plus, too much dealing with people. Ugh!
A collection show (what else could I call it? no idea) is when it’s not a normal band venue, like playing bands at the local community center, or at a church’s attached theater during its off-hours, or like at my city’s old radio music hall (before a major club bought the property and turned it into something really fancy). The organizer in that case must be the go-between for the landlord and the actual crew manning the event, but doesn’t have a club’s or bar’s resources like door, kitchen, or bar staff, let alone coat check. Most often the only way to make the event financially manageable is to either pack in as many low-demand, upcoming local bands as possible for a decent price (”ten bands for ten bucks”, “five bands for five bucks,” that sort of thing) although usually with some lip service paid to the idea that all bands would appeal to similar groups -- or, alternately (and most commonly) to do it as a fundraiser of some sort.
One church in the city was particularly amenable to hosting multi-band nights, so long as the cover price was something like “two dollars and two cans”... at the end of the night, whomever was standing around (friends, band members, relatives, whatever) would get roped into loading up a car or two with all the cans so they could be ferried to the shelter of the church’s or organizer’s choice. I always thought it was somehow kinda cannibalistic in a rather amusing/ironic way: I knew for a fact that some of those kids had shoplifted those cans, and there was also the chance some of those kids would be later eating the soup made from those cans! Peculiar, but hey, it gave folks a place to hang out and listen to music and see friends, and we weren’t on a street corner. Plus, bands often went for that because playing in a similar-venue with similar-style bands meant you’d get exposure to more people who might arrive for another band but stay for you. A lot of bigger names came up that way, through the ranks at the six-hour multi-band el cheapo in-a-church-basement kind of affairs.
Travelling rave shows -- those organizers (or a combined group of folks) renting massive empty warehouses at the Navy Yard for one night to host an all-night rave... that was just beginning to show up in the city about the time I left. (Right along with MDMA, E, X, whatever your decade calls it, which was a backbone of the rave scene.) That brings up another point of the economic element of drugs, that -- in the few instances in stories I’ve read that mention drug use amongst city folk -- often get ignored. It’s not just the drugs you do with the people you know, but also the impact drugs have on what you do.
That’s tangential to this, but could be relevant, and it sure was to the bar/club managers I knew. The problem with MDMA, from a bar’s perspective, is that it dehydrates you severely, and that most people avoid mixing it with alcohol (which will subdue the drug’s effects, if not compress them almost completely), so you have a large group of people swarming a dance club, who are dancing all night... and only drinking water. (It was a real sign of the new drug’s impact when the bars I frequented suddenly changed their policies from “water is free” to “a buck for a glass of water” if not more!) A dance club, a bar, does not make its money in its cover price: that’s usually just enough to cover the basic operating expenses. The real money is in the bar tabs people pay. Clubs with live music are more like movie theaters, where the $10 cost is based on the assumption that no one will buy food; any food sold, then, is profit/loss over and above the operational cost. A restaurant, like a bar, is the opposite: even assuming there’s an entry fee (or for a restaurant, a minimum table take is calculated and assumed, even if not actually ‘charged’), the money is in the services provided by the establishment itself, not in what it routes to you -- that is, dinner is a self-produced element; a hosted band is a routed element. The operating costs of the first is much higher than the second, but the potential profit margin of the first is also higher than the second.
Man, I hope that makes sense to folks reading. If not, let me know and I’ll clarify where needed. Or just write this off as a crash course in scene-business ventures.
all the parts ▪ dear [not just urban fantasy] author part I ▪ dear [not just urban fantasy] author part II ▪ dear [not just urban fantasy] author part III ▪ permanent record, pt I: edginess, and street fighting ▪ permanent record, pt II: guns, knives, and making it hurt
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 19 Jan 2008 12:56 am (UTC)The paperwork timing thing is still true, but it is getting closer to having nearly instant checks rather than taking two weeks for things to get to a breaking point. At least for those businesses that want to check. At their option businesses can now check in an online system to see if a name and SSN match. That cannot be a basis for denying employment (according to the disclaimers (http://www.socialsecurity.gov/employer/ssnvs_handbk.htm#fails) they put on the front end), but I wonder how it will work in the real world...
My problem when coming up with plausible scenarios is that I know where the holes are in the system (some from experience, some from reading), but I also know where it can go very, very wrong for someone giving the false information. So I always wondered if the 'Creatures that go Bump' would bother with faking it. Well it is food for thought, back to reading.
(Ack, bad spelling)
no subject
Date: 19 Jan 2008 03:50 am (UTC)Or you could come up with some work-around given the current speed of technology, perhaps by converting or transforming some method that used to be used into something that'd work now. (No, no idea what.)
Hrm, or a third: just make it a facet of your world that the govt is so backlogged with, uhm, paperwork or some major server issues that "everyone knows" any legal or tax stuff "just always takes forever". Now that one, I can see the average reader believing quite easily! ;-)
Messing with claiming citizenship -- if your story acknowledges the existence of the DSS and its ilk -- is a serious crime. However, just forging your name/info (as an existing citizen) is a completely different class.
no subject
Date: 19 Jan 2008 03:38 am (UTC)One question: Given, as you mentioned in a previous post, that the social workers and cops, etc, would a kid who ran away from social services (foster homes, group homes, whatever) be seen as the equivalent of a runaway from a family?
no subject
Date: 19 Jan 2008 08:00 am (UTC)The one thing I do know (mostly from reviewing court cases that involved foster children) is that such kids are wards of the state. Where a parent would have the rights/permissions, the state does, which means in situations where a kid must get parental permission -- to work at the age of 15, to get an abortion after rape, to have elective surgery -- the courts must rule for/against, on behalf of the state-as-parent. So I'd suspect that running away from the state would have worse repercussions than running away from private citizens.
I'd still suggest calling up the local social services office, though. I've found folks are always more than happy to discuss the little-known intricacies of their work, especially if you emphasize that you're sure Hollywood often gets it wrong, and it may be something tiny to most folks, but you'd prefer to have the right information. People really like knowing what they do (especially for those careers in which it's almost an NGO-like civil service role like cops, nurses, teachers, and state employees) has a chance to be represented realistically, instead of being exploited one more time.
no subject
Date: 22 Jan 2008 02:31 am (UTC)Or am I nitpicking here?
no subject
Date: 2 Feb 2008 10:29 am (UTC)Social workers were like guidance counselors: if you had family that could be found, chances were they'd tell you that if you were Just Worked Harder or could just shape up and Be A Better Kid then all the problems would go away and life would just be so peachy. Like hell, and rather than hear that BS one more time, easier to avoid them. (Along with the truancy officer, of course.) But I dunno about the kids avoiding social workers because they were also the kids' case worker...
I would think that likely a kid would take one of two tacks (possibly shifting the story depending on audience, at that). There's the "they're not really my parents, anyway, so why would I want to put up with their shit?" which isn't a runaway's attitude so much as a walk-out. Y'know, just packed up and said, "I'm outta here." The other might be to present one's self as almost pushed out (by the system, by the foster parents, whatever) and therefore on one's own just a bit younger than most.
I mean, if you're going to runaway from home, it's got to be a home that you're running from in the first place. If you're a foster kid -- from what I hear in the words/tone of adult friends who were fostered -- then it's never really a home, not even a miserable one that's held together purely by bills and the same last name. It's just a stopping place, so if you're only passing through, you just opt to pass through sooner.
There might be resentment, privately, on the part of any child who didn't have the option of a foster family but was forced to runaway to avoid an abusive situation... especially if the foster-escapee makes any off-handed comments about the foster-family being okay people, but still not the kid's parents/real-family. I'm sure you can see why.
no subject
Date: 2 Feb 2008 05:07 pm (UTC)Thanks. This will help. The kid in my story had a good reason for leaving. The fosters he had were reasonably nice people, but he was being driven crazy by being punished for things he didn't do, and additionally punished for lying about not doing them. (He was essentially causing 'poltergeist activity', but didn't realize he was doing so - so he'd get mad at someone, something of theirs would break, and he'd get punished even though he'd claim to have been at the other side of the room or in a different room - because things don't break by themselves, after all).
no subject
Date: 19 Jan 2008 04:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 19 Jan 2008 08:41 am (UTC)(That, and I cultivated the bizarre knack of being able to memorize the questions, which rather narrowed down the cards each additional time my sister & I would play.)
no subject
Date: 19 Jan 2008 02:30 pm (UTC)(I find myself wondering if you've ever read Kathe Koja's The Blue Mirror? It's a sort of runaway/slumming story, but has a different feel to it than others of the type [at least to my eye].)
no subject
Date: 2 Feb 2008 10:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2 Feb 2008 06:40 pm (UTC)And it's little. ;)
(I have no idea if you'd like it, but hey.)
no subject
Date: 19 Jan 2008 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2 Feb 2008 10:22 am (UTC)