Fascinated With Crustypunks

So I found this website - http://crustypunks.blogspot.com/ - online last night and I've spent hours reading it since then. It is a site started by an East Village photographer (I think) named Steven Hirsch to document the stories of the wandering groups of what have been labeled 'crustypunks' or gutter punks' by people around the country. These kids show up every summer in tomkins sq. Park in the east Village and set up there to panhandle in the days and 'party' at nights.

Most of their stories are quite similar. These kids basically run away from home in the teens after getting thrown out of their houses when their parents find them with hard drugs after years of fighting, or they come from really broken, messed up homes to begin with, where there is physical and/or sexual abuse. Some grew up in foster homes and never knew their parents or had any real family to speak of. They join these wandering bands of hobos, hop freight trains up north in summer and down south in winter and live a nomadic existence free of the cares that most of us with families and mortgages, jobs and deadlines.

They live really hard lives. Many are heroin addicts. The ones that don't do heroin are usually alcoholics. They get in lots of street fights - both with each-other and with locals. They get in trouble with the local police - tickets, arrests, constantly being hassled. They have few friends and many seem to be teetering on the edge of mental stability.

I love the fact that these sorts of subcultures seemingly spring up overnight in America. I love even more that amateur anthropologists like Steven Hirsch will see something interesting and new going on around them, camera in hand, and take it upon themselves to document it in a public fashion (damn I love the interwebs). It's a really well done site, because Hirsch captures the original voice of his subjects giving the reader a real sense of how a conversation (or rambling monologue) might go, while telling their life story, or recounting specific life events that have happened to these characters. And they are really are characters: each and every one could probably have a novel written about them or a movie made about them. The pictures the author takes are really good too - individual portraits that at a glance give you a real sense of who these kids are. As my friend Rena just put it, he does a very good job at presenting the good/idealistic vs. bad/realistic sides of these lives, and in a very short space.

I just remembered, when I was at my first Bonnaroo music festival in 2002 in the middle of tennessee, there was a crustypunk there who we saw wandering and we were making a huge bbq one afternoon and invited him over to dine with us. His name was Spider (they all have these sorts of street names given to them by fellow travelers) and he told us about his life. He wandered the country on freight trains - usually alone, occasionally with others. Everything he owned was in a single backpack and it wasn't even full. He spoke of the freedom he had from the materialism of America but also of being hungry a lot and never knowing where his next meal was coming from. Somethings basic things you can't break 'free' from I guess.

And here's an interview I just found with Steven Hirsch - Smart guy!

Anyway, fascinating stuff.