Ace Backwords - Surviving On The Streets: How to Go DOWN Without Going OUT

................................................................................................................................. 3

..................................................................................................................................... 5

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

..................................................................................................................... 21

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty One

Chapter Twenty Two

Chapter Twenty Three

Chapter Twenty Four

Chapter Twenty Five

Dedicated to all the homeless men and women - and their pets - who have survived a cold, wet winter sleeping outside. And especially to those who are out there right now. And also to all the people who helped them to make it through the night. And to my guru, Swami Muktananda.

Homeless. I'm sure many of you have seen the street people huddled around the city streets and wondered to yourself what their lives are really like.

I'm sure to some of you, it's your worst nightmare: to end up on Skid Row, to lose your home, the four walls that buffer you against the outer world. To lose all your treasured possessions. To lose your job, your security. To lose everything that you cling to. To become a loser. A bum. A lost soul in a twilight world with nothing.

To others it might be a cherished fantasy. To quit your job and hit the road like Kerouac. Like a rolling stone with no direction home. No responsibilities. Nothing to tie you down. Total freedom. A permanent vacation on the open road to adventure.

Between these two poles lies the reality of life on the streets.

It's a reality that may surprise you. Because it's a reality you can't begin to understand unless you've experienced it first-hand. In truth, most people thrown out on the streets are totally unprepared for the situations that they will be dealing with. Most of the lessons you learn, you will learn the same way I have, the hard way. That said, there's an inherent limitation to any book that professes to teach you how to survive on the streets, and how to survive the countless turbulent and unpredictable pitfalls that await you.

Nonetheless, I envision this book as something I might have benefited from reading back in the summer of 1974, when I was 17 years old and put my thumb out for the first time on that off-ramp at the beginning of Route 80 in New Jersey, and headed out into the big, of world, headed towards Godknowswhat.

I woke up, wiped the sleep out of my eyes, laid there in my damp sleeping bag for a while, easing myself into another strange day. I had been sleeping in the Berkeley hills in the woods for several years now. In many ways it was a beautiful way to live. But the cold, rainy, winter nights could be rough.

My sleeping bag was protected from the rain by a long plastic tarp wrapped around me like a burrito. It was a surreal way to wake up, to he there in my plastic cocoon, and see the morning sun creeping out from behind the dark clouds, the sunlight refracting between several layers of semi-transparent plastic inches above my face.

I laid inside my plastic burrito for awhile, taking hits from the bottle of day-old, cold coffee in my backpack. When you have nowhere to go and nothing to do, each moment takes on its own resonance. My sides were stiff from where I had slept on a rocky part of the ground. Finally, I had to get up and piss. So I pulled myself from my sleeping bag and carefully unpeeled myself from the layers of plastic, being careful not to spill onto my sleeping bag any of the excess pools of rainwater that had accumulated on the top of my tarp during the night.