The corner of Main and Owen -- this is where Vegas’s biggest homeless shelter is located. It is in the northern end of the city, an area which is still much as Thompson described it in “Fear and Loathing…” – “a slum and a graveyard,” a “cheap shoddy limbo,” the kind of place, he says, “where you go if you need to score smack before midnight with no references.”
The men’s homeless shelter is on a dimly-lit strip. A four-mile drive from the Disneyland of the “Strip”, it might as well be in an alternate universe. Vagrants line the street on both sides of Main; some sit inside grubby tents smoking crack; others rest on plastic chairs chewing the fat; still others lay out in the hot desert night on rags and blankets.
The street lighting is poor, the scene lit yellowy black and framed by the distant neon grandeur of the big hotel casinos – the Sahara, the Mirage, the flying saucer tower of the Stratosphere.
Before we went there we swung by a service station with a McDonald’s inside and bought 30 hamburgers and packs of cigarettes to win over the vagrants. The battle for hearts and minds is tough on the streets and you need all the incentives you can lay your hands on.
We set up stall in front of the shelter. A young meth-head babbles away at our side, a stream of consciousness splurge except he’s not really conscious in a way that you or I would understand. He’s racing through the last year with us; how he got kicked out of Cambodia, how he was supposed to be teaching English but got sacked for getting high all day. He’s the kind of person you might run into in a seedy bar in Bangkok, whose on first-name terms with all the hookers and who bores the shit out of you all night with some tedious racist invective against the locals.
Back in the day, he’d probably have been considered an exemplary subject by the colonial administration and given 20 acres and a bevy of servant girls to rape at his convenience.
These days he has to pay for it, though he said the hookers and drugs were dirt cheap out there. Too cheap it seems, since one night he got so ripped on speed he ended up climbing the walls of the US embassy and telling the guards on the other side to take him back home so he could kill his uncle. After that they kicked him out. He’s from San Diego but he’s come to Vegas, he says, to “rob bitches” and take advantage of the cheap meth. I just hope they never give him his passport back.
Around half the homeless outside the shelter are black or latino, many of them want to register but thought they were ineligible.
A large proportion of America’s estimated 750,000 homeless have criminal records, and until recently many states prohibited former convicts from voting. Civil rights groups claim the restrictions were rooted in racism since the number of states passing laws stripping convicted criminals of the vote doubled in the years after suffrage was extended to blacks and, then as now, a disproportionately high volume of African-Americans went through the prison system.
Legal challenges in the 1990s have returned voting rights to ex-cons. With the exception of a handful of southern states, most places (including Nevada and Colorado) now allow former felons the vote.
It appears, however, that no-one has bothered to tell the people concerned. The most consistent response we heard when asking them to register was: “I’m a felon. I ain’t allowed to vote.”
Half way through the night we ran out of supplies so I drove the convertible back to the gas station for more hamburgers and smokes. On public radio George McGovern was being interviewed. Back in ’72 McGovern was the left-wing anti-war maverick that came from nowhere to take the Democrat ticket for the White House.
Sound like anyone you know?
He is the de facto tragic hero of Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72,” beaten in the presidential race by Nixon, a result which leaves the writer at the end of the book drowning his sorrows in the Loser’s Club in LaCienega Boulevard, Los Angeles. McGovern is telling the interviewer that the Nixon team refused to let the President take part in a televised debate; then complained about liberal bias in the media. Nearly four decades later the GOP are doing and saying exactly the same thing. Witness, for example, McCain’s lame attempts to avoid the first TV encounter with Obama by claiming he was needed in Washington to negotiate the Wall Street bailout, though even most Republicans didn’t pretend to need him there.
At the service station I sign up Henry, a softly spoken black man from Chicago, accompanied by “his woman,” a spaced-out crack head, and her brother, an old guy with a walking stick who has emphysema. Henry said he’s only been on the streets three weeks after he lost his job and couldn’t make the bills.
“Do you want a burger for your friend Henry?”
“Thank you brother. I got to look after him, ‘cos he can’t help himself, you see.”
There is a level of camaraderie among some of the homeless out here that is touching to see. Like Mark with Jeffrey (see the Great Bum Hunt begins), Henry’s acceptance of his role as guardian and breadwinner was straightforward and unaffected…Basic human morals surviving in spite of the shit and hopelessness.
I got back to tent city where Whoregyna was working miracles, pushing through the vagrants with her clipboard and New York drawl. “All you motherfuckers signed up? We got hamburgers and smokes. Menthol too, to take away that dog breath.
“Ah, Britcoq. How do you like this. Cambodia tweaker boy thinks you shag with all your clothes on and just slide the zipper down.” She leans closer. “It’s like he can look inside your mind.
“I told him you haven’t taken your breeches off since you came to America because you’re afraid of catching the obesity virus.”
Tweaker boy meanwhile is busy doing squat thrusts beside her and babbling away as she leads some skinny old Mexican through the registration form.
The men’s homeless shelter is on a dimly-lit strip. A four-mile drive from the Disneyland of the “Strip”, it might as well be in an alternate universe. Vagrants line the street on both sides of Main; some sit inside grubby tents smoking crack; others rest on plastic chairs chewing the fat; still others lay out in the hot desert night on rags and blankets.
The street lighting is poor, the scene lit yellowy black and framed by the distant neon grandeur of the big hotel casinos – the Sahara, the Mirage, the flying saucer tower of the Stratosphere.
Before we went there we swung by a service station with a McDonald’s inside and bought 30 hamburgers and packs of cigarettes to win over the vagrants. The battle for hearts and minds is tough on the streets and you need all the incentives you can lay your hands on.
We set up stall in front of the shelter. A young meth-head babbles away at our side, a stream of consciousness splurge except he’s not really conscious in a way that you or I would understand. He’s racing through the last year with us; how he got kicked out of Cambodia, how he was supposed to be teaching English but got sacked for getting high all day. He’s the kind of person you might run into in a seedy bar in Bangkok, whose on first-name terms with all the hookers and who bores the shit out of you all night with some tedious racist invective against the locals.
Back in the day, he’d probably have been considered an exemplary subject by the colonial administration and given 20 acres and a bevy of servant girls to rape at his convenience.
These days he has to pay for it, though he said the hookers and drugs were dirt cheap out there. Too cheap it seems, since one night he got so ripped on speed he ended up climbing the walls of the US embassy and telling the guards on the other side to take him back home so he could kill his uncle. After that they kicked him out. He’s from San Diego but he’s come to Vegas, he says, to “rob bitches” and take advantage of the cheap meth. I just hope they never give him his passport back.
Around half the homeless outside the shelter are black or latino, many of them want to register but thought they were ineligible.
A large proportion of America’s estimated 750,000 homeless have criminal records, and until recently many states prohibited former convicts from voting. Civil rights groups claim the restrictions were rooted in racism since the number of states passing laws stripping convicted criminals of the vote doubled in the years after suffrage was extended to blacks and, then as now, a disproportionately high volume of African-Americans went through the prison system.
Legal challenges in the 1990s have returned voting rights to ex-cons. With the exception of a handful of southern states, most places (including Nevada and Colorado) now allow former felons the vote.
It appears, however, that no-one has bothered to tell the people concerned. The most consistent response we heard when asking them to register was: “I’m a felon. I ain’t allowed to vote.”
Half way through the night we ran out of supplies so I drove the convertible back to the gas station for more hamburgers and smokes. On public radio George McGovern was being interviewed. Back in ’72 McGovern was the left-wing anti-war maverick that came from nowhere to take the Democrat ticket for the White House.
Sound like anyone you know?
He is the de facto tragic hero of Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72,” beaten in the presidential race by Nixon, a result which leaves the writer at the end of the book drowning his sorrows in the Loser’s Club in LaCienega Boulevard, Los Angeles. McGovern is telling the interviewer that the Nixon team refused to let the President take part in a televised debate; then complained about liberal bias in the media. Nearly four decades later the GOP are doing and saying exactly the same thing. Witness, for example, McCain’s lame attempts to avoid the first TV encounter with Obama by claiming he was needed in Washington to negotiate the Wall Street bailout, though even most Republicans didn’t pretend to need him there.
At the service station I sign up Henry, a softly spoken black man from Chicago, accompanied by “his woman,” a spaced-out crack head, and her brother, an old guy with a walking stick who has emphysema. Henry said he’s only been on the streets three weeks after he lost his job and couldn’t make the bills.
“Do you want a burger for your friend Henry?”
“Thank you brother. I got to look after him, ‘cos he can’t help himself, you see.”
There is a level of camaraderie among some of the homeless out here that is touching to see. Like Mark with Jeffrey (see the Great Bum Hunt begins), Henry’s acceptance of his role as guardian and breadwinner was straightforward and unaffected…Basic human morals surviving in spite of the shit and hopelessness.
I got back to tent city where Whoregyna was working miracles, pushing through the vagrants with her clipboard and New York drawl. “All you motherfuckers signed up? We got hamburgers and smokes. Menthol too, to take away that dog breath.
“Ah, Britcoq. How do you like this. Cambodia tweaker boy thinks you shag with all your clothes on and just slide the zipper down.” She leans closer. “It’s like he can look inside your mind.
“I told him you haven’t taken your breeches off since you came to America because you’re afraid of catching the obesity virus.”
Tweaker boy meanwhile is busy doing squat thrusts beside her and babbling away as she leads some skinny old Mexican through the registration form.
By the end of the night 20 vagrants have signed up.
1 comment:
Hey man am lovin this...you gonna blow open the impact consultancy..will email ya
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