Rather large black woman, dancing on the train, while high AF on something, Blue Line train, on a Friday night. The Blue Line goes from downtown L.A. to Long Beach, passing through Skid Row, South Central, Watts, Compton, and other places that are not well known from rap songs. Things can get a bit weird on that train in the evenings. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos.
As most of you know, I've struggled in and out of homelessness for about 20 years now. I first became homeless in 1987, while working at the American Freestyle Assiciation (AFA). My female roommate moved out of the two bedroom apartment we shared while I was off working at an AFA comp, and disappeared, right before rent was due. Since I made about $600 to $700 a month at the time, I couldn't make the next $800 payment for the rent, and had to move out. I lived in the AFA trailer, parked on the street, outside the AFA office, in a Huntington Beach business park, sleeping on top of the folded quarterpipe, for three weeks. I got a couple of paychecks, and found a crazy old guy renting shared rooms in his house for $150 a month. He was creepy, but the other roommates were cool, and that worked for several months. About 4 years later, I saw my roommate who bailed in a phone sex ad in the back of Hustler magazine. I thought about calling her to say, "Hi," but I didn't want to pay $3.95 a minute. So I put her nude ad in one of my zines. Since freestylers knew who she was, that was a popular zine.
But my real battle with homelessness began in 1999. I left a good paying, Hollywood lighting tech job because of a hernia. I saved up about $3,500, took time off, and planned to get surgery over that summer, then go back and work freelance. But my insurance kept having issues, and I never could see the doctor for the initial visit. Unable to do the heavy lifting, I looked for another job. I started driving a taxi, primarily in the Huntington Beach area. In two months, I couldn't afford my apartment anymore, and moved out. that sucked, because I was living three blocks form the ocean in downtown H.B., on 15th street. On the bright side, without doing a bunch of heavy lifting, the hernia mellowed out eventually, and rarely bothers me now.
Message on a table, in a cheap motel room, in Richmond, Virginia. This one always made me laugh. I got this room several times when I stayed there. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotosSo I put my stuff in storage, and lived in my taxi for about six months, working 7 days a week. A change in the taxi industry came along, our company got the John Wayne airport contract, and for three weeks, I made really good money. Working seven 17 hour days a week, I put $1,800 in my pocket the first week, then it ratcheted down from there. By week four, when the company got fully staffed with drivers, I was back to $350 a week. I was able to rent a room, and went to another company and just worked weekends through late 2000. But that move to taxi driving, actually the hernia, began the downward spiral.
My driver's license got suspended right before Christmas in 2000, apparently due to a clerical error at the DMV. Around the same time, my own car, a Datsun 280ZX, got towed for parking tickets, and impounded, and shit went downhill from there. I couldn't afford ot get the car back. It's been a crazy struggle to just make a living ever since.
I don't do drugs, recreational or prescription, and I was a pretty average social drinker back then, and just gave up drinking when I was driving the taxi. Depression has been an issue much of my life, so I have battled that at times. But I've just struggled to make a decent living since late 1999. A lot of outside pressure got put on my life starting shortly after 9/11, and I thought my talking about conspiracies got me labeled a "suspicious person." People got paranoid about everyone back then. That outside pressure snowballed into utter ridiculousness, and is still an issue today. I have some idea why it may have began, but can't go into it.
Taxi driving from 2003-2007 was going downhill, due to the switch from CB radios to computer dispatching, and it got harder and harder to pay the $550 to $600 a WEEK taxi lease, and then another $300 to $350 a WEEK for gas. The taxi companies just put more and more taxis on the road, so there was more and more competition for each ride. I gained over 150 pounds, had three bouts of bad cellulitis, and walked away from taxi driving the Sunday after Thanksgiving, 2007. I was prety sure I was going to die soon, my health was so bad. But I didn't. My attempts to start find a better way to earn a living just didn't work out. I worked a minimum wage job while homeless in 2002-3, and knew that was the dumbest thing in the world to do. You never get off the streets, unless someone offers a free room for several months, or something like that. I thought about trying stand-up comedy, and selling stickers at a swap meet booth, but couldn't get either one going.
After a year on the streets, I took my family's offer to fly me to North Carolina for "a while." That was the biggest mistake of my life. That's when I lost all my video footage, a good Mac laptop, my video camera, and everything from my life in BMX. I got stuck in NC, and couldn't find ANY job, except another year of taxi driving in 2011-12, while living in the taxi again. Sleeping in a mini-van on an 80 degree, humid, evening sucks balls. I was miserable.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle graffiti piece just off of Hollywood Boulevard, in Hollywood. 2021. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos I flat out hated North Carolina. It may be great for some people, it sucked for me. But, I did start my first BMX blogs there, since I was bored out of my skull. First was FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales, stories from my short stint working there in 1986. I followed that with Freestyle BMX Tales (the original verison, here's version 3), and I've been blogging ever since.
Another thing about NC, I did get to see my niece and nephew grow up, which was cool, and I was there when my dad died. But North Carolina is not the place for me. In fact, I don't want to ever set foot in the entire state for the rest of my life. I started trying to sell my Sharpie Scribble Style drawings in late 2015, just to make a little money, while living with my mom, after my dad's death. I applied for over 140 local jobs, over a couple of years, and got one call back, but not hired. I'd never had that happen before. I got hired for every single job I ever applied for, up until age 28, so a dry spell like that told me it was pointless. Selling Sharpie drawings helped me make a few bucks, which somehow my mom always needed for an "emergency," often involving chocolate or her late QVC bills.
That was a toxic situation, and I bailed, and wound up living in a tent, in the woods, in Winston-Salem, NC. Yep, there's actually a city with two brands of cigarettes named after it. Actually three, it's nickname in "Camel City," and it was home to Reynolds Tobacco, now just Reynolds. I did start selling more drawings, and did a small art show, in Winston, while living in the woods. That sounds adventurous, but 20-30 bug bites a day, and getting a bug lodged in my ear for a month, proved otherwise. If you've never experienced a hardcore Carolina thunderstorm in a tent along in the woods... don't. It sucks. I've never seen lightning like they have in the Carolinas.
I escaped NC in August 2018, and had enough money to get a Greyhound to Richmond, Virginia. I landed there with about $3.50 in my pocket, I didn't know anyone, and I'd never been in that city before. I lived homeless, and in about three weeks heard from old BMX friend Steve Crandall, founder of FBM Bikes, and now TV announcer for BMX comps. Steve said to come meet him at Powers Bike Shop, outside of downtown. When I did, he handed me his old iPhone 5, with a cracked screen, and a bag of food, and a little money, as I recall. He and Chad Powers at the bike shop helped me quite a bit while in Richmond, and I used that little iPhone mostly to start taking photos. I've take a couple of thousand pics since, mostly of just weird stuff I saw on the streets, or of my #sharpiescribblestyle drawings as I made them.
I've decided to start sharing the funny, crazy, weird, and sometimes kind of cool photos, in a series I'm calling #SEstreetlife.
People have all kinds of ideas about homelessness, most of them quite a bit different from reality, if not completely wrong. There's been many years of demonization of homeless people in some of the press, and most people now seem to see every homeless person as a drunk or drug addicted, mentally ill, a complete failure, that has absolutely no chance of being a "normal person" in society again.
Yes, there are a lot of drunks, addicts and mentally ill people on the streets. But most addicts have homes to live in, most drunks have homes to live in, most mentally ill people have homes to live in. Think of all the well-housed train wrecks you know personally. Addiction and mental illness are prevalent on the streets, but those are not the main reasons people are homeless.
Public service announcement spray painted on the sidewalk, San Fernando Valley, 2020. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
The main reason people become homeless is lack of a strong family or friend support network, when they go through financial hardships. Most people get some help when they take some kind of big financial hit, something that happens to pretty much everyone, at some point. They have a place to stay, can borrow money, use someone's car a bit, borrow needed items, or whatever. The people who don't have that strong network of either friends or family, fall through the cracks. Most homeless people are never seen, and fall into homelessness, and bounce out, in a couple weeks, or maybe 2 or 3 months. Some fall deeper, and wind up being the people you see eventually on the streets. I'm one of those people. For now.
One of my "art studios." Working on my David Bowie drawing at a McDonald's in Richmond, 2019. #SEstreetlife, #steveemigphotos
There is no "typical" homeless person. Most of the people I meet, especially these days, had decent jobs and made decent money, at some point. Huge medical bills, bad divorces, house fires, car accidents, illnesses, and all kinds of similar paths lead people to the streets.
In my case, I work as much, probably more, while homeless, then I did when I had jobs (except taxi driving, that was 70-100 hours a week). While homeless, I've sold maybe 50 pieces of pretty cool Sharpie art, written hundreds of blog posts that actually get read, and done other creative work. I built a small, but solid, hardcore blog following, some of which I've sold drawings to.
Like I said, I've also taken thousands of photos along the way, of the weird stuff I see, and documented my journey. #SEstreetlife is me sharing some of those photos, on Pinterest, on Twitter, on Facebook, here in my blog. and I plan to start making NFT's for sale (Non Fungible Tokens), with some of these photos. Here are a few of my photos from the last three years. I've spent all but six months of that time homeless. These all happened because Steve Crandall gave me his old iPhone, and I really thank him for helping me out. Like every creative project, I have no idea where this will lead. That's part of the fun. Welcome to #SEstreetlife. My #SEstreetlife Pinterest board will have the biggest collection of these photos.
I've started a new personal blog, centered around my life on the streets, and the fight to make a decent living doing creative stuff, check it out:
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