I was a stray dog once, for a little over than a month. A cast out, left to fend for myself without a home to crawl to when the dark fell or the rains came.

They call it being homeless; and it's almost a magic word in our society. I say magic because it conjures an illusion – a media warped, guilt drenched, sometimes sentimentalized illusion that holds no more reality than the stories of the Brother's Grimm.

The streets are not the sole domain of babbling old men and women, pushing shopping carts filled with assorted useless items. Oh, you'll find those men and women – and indeed they do often have shopping carts. But the items they transport are by no means useless. Most often it's aluminum cans, a silver treasure picked laboriously piece by piece from the streets and alleys of Chicago. Sometimes they find copper or cast aluminum – a real strike. It goes for substantially more than the low grade cans.

These men and women are not lazy. They cover miles and miles in their treasure hunting.

"Why don't you hit the day labor places?" I asked one grizzled veteran of the can game. I talked to him often. He was always quick to share a smoke or a can of Old Style if he had one – knowing that I'd return the favor when I was on the ups and he was on the downs. I spent many a fine hour shooting the breeze and catching a buzz in an alley with a can hunter. Most often they were just stunned to meet a youngish white man who wasn't afraid them, didn't think they were nuts, and expressed genuine curiosity about their lives.

He waved my question away. "Not worth my time" he explained. "No papers. All gone. Damn house burnt to the ground in '82 and the insurance butt-fucked me. 'Sides, half the time they got no work, other half they give it to the young folk, or the regulars, or the people with clean clothes!" He laughed at his own wit. "Nah. Better to do what I do. I got my routine. Sometimes the pickin's are good, sometimes they aint. But what the hell. I'm keepin' my city clean."

And this was true. He and his peers did indeed keep the city clean. You're hard pressed to find a beer or pop can on Chicago streets – and not because of the diligence of the city's employees. It's because of the can hunters – who have found a niche in the market no one else wants.

The streets are not filled with hateful, violent dope addicts who will kill you for a dollar. Oh, the dope addicts are there – they're everywhere in the poorer sections of the city. Sometimes they are one and the same as the can hunters, more often they stay a bit straighter and work the day labor places. When it's nice out they sleep in the park or under an overpass or in whatever little hole they can stake out. When it's nasty, they may have to share their stash to earn a bunk, or even waste precious dope and food money on an overpriced shit hole like the Hotel Elinor. They – like everyone – do what they can.

I count some of the kindest people I have ever met among the dope addicts. In my erratic tenure at the day labor companies of Chicago, I worked with many of them. Most of them are quite attentive employees. They want to do a good job and get the elusive "return ticket" that will guarantee them another day's worth of dope.

Heroin is the drug of choice in Chicago. It's called "blowz". A ten dollar crack rock is smoked in an hour, and the buzz fades fast, and usually sends the addict back onto the street for another. Ten dollars worth of blowz will do a careful snorter the entire evening, with a bit left over to take the sick off the next morning. At the minimum wage, daily doled jobs provided by the companies, this allows careful junkies the ability to have a small room, groceries and keep their habits in line. "You don't want to splurge." I was informed. "All you're gonna do is get your tolerance up and kill your buzz in the long run. Plus – you keep it in line? When a dry spell in work or blowz hits, hell, you aint that dog sick waitin' for it to blow over."

In my time as a stray dog, I was often given food by these junkies. Cigarettes. A couple of bucks for a beer. A joint. Enough quarters to do a load of clothes at the free dry laundromat.

Why? Rational self interest, of course. Living on this level of the market is a study in cycles – very fast cycles – up and downs, good times and bad. When they were down and I was up, they knew I'd return the favor. And, once again, I cast no judgement upon them. I talked to them. I was interested in their lives and they were interested in mine.

Conversation is an art, and a skill. A good conversationalist has a place in the market.

You're probably wondering what the hell I was doing on the street in the first place. Why didn't I just call up the family and have them send me a bus ticket and get the hell out of there? That's a long and arduous, ugly story, so I'll break it into the basics:

I met a woman. I moved to Chicago to be with the woman. We had a child. Suddenly it seemed that my purpose had been served and I was no longer the necessity I had once been. While I worked a steady job, I was tolerated. When I got laid off and hit the temp circuit – with it's random nature and built in uncertainties – I became a liability.

Things got nasty. Things moved to an ugly head. I spent three days in Cook County Jail over a screaming match because I burnt a fucking steak.

That was it. I left.

Two problems presented themselves. I had no family in Chicago, few friends since the lay off, and nowhere to go. It was either head to the homestead, or stand on the streets.

And there was the baby. There was my Lily.

I remember leaving, and screaming at my ex:

"You can't fucking take my daughter away from me! I will live like a goddam stray dog on the street before I let you exile me from her life! Like a stray dog on the street, you bitch!"

What it comes down to is a certain stiff necked hillbilly pride. Match that pride with the love I hold for my daughter and you have a potentially lethal combination.

And that's how it happened.

One of the finest human beings I have ever known is a junkie. Dope addict would be a better word. He likes everything. Heroin, coke, weed, booze, cigarettes, coffee...if it alters the body or mind, he'll give it a go.

His name is Will, and he saved my life. He's a true gentleman and a virtuous human being.

Will is a huge black guy – 6'4 and 250 lbs...pure muscle. He was a star athlete in high school, and a very diverse one at that. Basketball, football, baseball – he played them all. But track and field was where he shined. He was an Olympic hopeful.

But then one day, in his senior year, he threw it all away. He had long been involved with a Chicago gang called The Vicelords, who used him as "muscle" and never expected him to sling on the corner as his peers did. All they wanted was his appearance, his reputation, and his "allegiance."

Then he got into an argument over a girl. Shots were fired. A young man went into the ground, and Will went to prison at age 17.

His mother sold her house to afford a good attorney. His age kept him out of the chair, and the attorney kept him out of life imprisonment. He did 11 years and emerged from the State's hospitality far worse than he went in – almost 30, addicted, scarred, and with no chance of regaining what he once could have been.

But he was never bitter. He never blamed anyone other than himself for his life. He did not rail at the system. He did not blame "the white man." When I first gathered the courage to ask him what he spent time in the pen for, he responded, with no trace of irony: "Being a stupid motherfucker."

Will wanted one thing: to enjoy the rest of his life, to neither harm anyone or be harmed. He found a stable, hardworking woman and married her. He found a job in a warehouse and did his damndest to do it to the best of his ability. That's where we first met.

When you work as a temp, you learn very quickly about elitism and the simple minded prejudices that arise when a group believes themselves to be a part of this imaginary elite.

As temps, we were treated as decidedly second class by most of the regular workers. Much of this was simply laziness: regular workers saw a chance to make someone else do their normal routine and seized that chance. Some of it can be attributed to the formerly powerless finding a drop of power and grabbing at it; almost as a novelty. But most of it was pure, unadulterated prejudice and pre-conception: day laborers were the dregs of society. Crack heads, junkies, probably illiterate, most likely thieves who needed to be watched closely and shown no trust.

Never mind that the temps worked their asses off. Never mind that we just stuck to the job, tried to get the day to pass and get the hell home. Never mind that many of the temps were retired servicemen or seniors on pensions or SSI and were just out to get a few extra bucks in their pockets. Prejudice and preconception are powerful traps, and few escape them.

But Will was different. Maybe because he had worked his share of temp jobs after being released from prison. Maybe because he knew what it was like to be looked down on for a situation rather than any real failing. But I think – to hell with that, I know – that it went deeper than that. Will was unprejudiced. Will liked people. All kinds of people. He liked to talk about things. He liked to be challenged rather than agreed with. He appreciated hard work and he appreciated people with knowledge that he lacked and wanted them to impart that knowledge to him.

I lucked out by being assigned to help him. We loaded trucks all day long, heavy boxes of trade goods from all over the world. It was always heavy and the routine was always the same. You set up a rhythm and you knock the trucks out, one by one, moving down a line of dock doors like a machine.

The only thing you can do is talk.

I talk. I love to talk. Send me to hell and I'll try to strike up a conversation with the Devil. Stick me in a room with people who's language I don't speak and I'll try and communicate with hand signals.

So we got to know each other. This was when the troubles were really starting up at home, and I told him about it. He commiserated. His wife was a hard headed, argumentative type as well. We'd sneak out behind the warehouse and smoke a joint on lunch break, and bitch about women; about the heat; about the fifteen trucks we had left to load. It was a bright spot in my life at the time. Will is an honest, direct, almost painfully blunt person. He talked about his time in prison. He talked about the drugs he enjoyed with no shame or excuse making. It delighted him that I simply shrugged and told him he had every right to live his life the way he wanted. I briefly explained anarchism to him. He just nodded and said "Makes sense."

When the temp job ended, I was genuinely sad to go. I figured I would never see my friend again.

Little did we know that his job was about to end as well. September 11 damn near shut O'Hare down; and the warehouse he worked for depended on the airport for a large chunk of it's business. When the business dried up, so did Will's job. When I met him again, he'd be living on unemployment.

But he was still willing to take in a stray dog.

July 16, 2002