The Bible I stashed in Central Park. It made it to Maine

My Grandpa was a hardcore Boston catholic. He would bless himself every time we drove by a church. If an ambulance passed he would say a prayer, every time. He believed in the last rights as if it was the only thing required to get into heaven. His brother, my Uncle Stanley, worked for the Archdiocese of Boston as some kind of bishop or important figure in the Boston Catholic Church. All my aunts and uncles went to Boston Catholic schools like St. Marys and they had the war stories about it. The Ten Commandments was posted up at our house and I had pictures of Christ in my room as a little kid.

Faith wasn’t there only for comfort, it was something grounding me in a whirlwind. An anchor in a life that was already tumultuous.

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As a young child I was dealing with things beyond my control.

I suffered from night terrors, waking up screaming and running around the house many times a night, all while completely asleep. I also had ADD or SUBTRACT or some other kind of weird acronym that meant my shit was all fucked up. My mind was a stormy sea I couldn’t sail alone.

So as a child I prayed.

At night. Out loud. To Christ. I prayed for him to help me think like a normal person. To show me what that was like. To cut through the darkness that lived in my own nervous system.

I was a young lost boy reaching out with everything in his heart toward the savior of all humanity.

In proverbs it says “…those who seek me early shall find me.” That was the quote on the picture in my bedroom. As an adult I’m not even sure what that means. As a kid it meant everything. It meant that even though I was just a child, broken and afraid and running through my house in my sleep, I had a man in my corner who could cut through the dark.

I had a savior.

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As I got into my teenage years my mother encouraged me to study whatever I wanted. She was doing the same herself… she had gone from working as a waitress to studying her way into becoming a registered nurse, as well as tackling computer programming on the side to help the disabled who used machines to live. She was always studying something... Recently it had been Daoism. A younger man at the college she attended had been chatting her up and he showed her the Dao.

She stopped going to church around that time. She didn’t say too much about why. Something about the direction the leadership was taking, the youth programs, some interpersonal drama in the political side of things.

Those things didn’t affect me.

So I would walk to the church in our town all by myself. An awkward teenager with long black hair and black metal shirts, walking alone to go worship. Christ had saved me as a kid and I knew he would always be there for me.

What I didn’t know was that Mom would soon pass.

The faith I had been building until then would be the only thing that carried me through everything after that. The Catholic family, full of alcoholics, wanted nothing to do with me after she was gone. Even when I was homeless. Even when I reached out for help they would laugh in my face. So I learned not to ask people for help.

Christ was there for me every single night.

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During the darkest nights of my life he carried me.

I remember walking down an urban street alone at two in the morning one time. I had gotten lost in a bad area of New Bedford…. long story. When I turned a corner there were five or six guys with weapons in their hands. Bats. Large pieces of wood… Knives….I’m sure some had guns.

Time froze. The city froze. We all froze….

And then an angelic thought of a voice suggested “Just walk through them.”

Like God telling Lot’s wife not to look back as Babylon fell; I followed the order. And there must have been angels on all sides of me because this group of guys looking to kill someone… split like the Red Sea. I walked through them in slow motion.

Just as I cleared the group time sped back up like an analog tape rewinding and the whole group started laughing and screeching about how they almost killed me and stuffed me in a trunk.

I kept walking.

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Another time, on Miami Beach, I had to call out to God to save a life.

I was watching the sunrise at five thirty in the morning on South Beach. A little treat you get when you’re a beach bum who sleeps in the sand…

I noticed a seagull flying in a way that made no sense. It was tethered to something that subjected it to flying in an arc and then slamming into the ground, repeatedly. Like a kite that won’t stay in the air.

The Seagull was tangled in a fisherman’s wire.

I ran over and dropped to my knees next to it the next time it fell. I grabbed the wire with both hands.

And I prayed harder than I had prayed in years and it felt like pure light shot out of my chest….

“God give me strength”

I was asking for strength to break fishing wire with my bare hands. The wire snapped like a twig.

I’m still not sure if fishing wire is meant to snap that way and my prayer was unnecessary. Or if God gave me so much strength in that moment I could have broken steel. I don’t know. What I know is the seagull was free.

He was also mad.

Before he took off he turned around and bit me. As if to say “…fucking humans >.<”

God has a sense of humor.

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I once broke my arm in New York City, riding an e-bike in the Flatiron district. I had ordered my coffee to the wrong Dunkins via my phone and was rushing over to there correct one when someone opened a car door and I slammed into it. I went down hard and fractured my elbow. People told me I should have sued but I knew I was partially at fault for riding like a cowboy. My first instinct wasn’t how much money can I get from this, it was to ask God what I had done wrong. That’s why I didn’t care when the dude drove off.

Even with the busted elbow that hurt more than anything I made a delivery. It put a little cash in my pocket, and I had literally started from zero that day. Then I hit dunkins’ again for iced coffee and some donuts before I went to the hospital.

I was sitting on the ground in central park west, passing out from the pain, drinking my iced coffee, and praying…. and eating donuts.

God answered.

With the hospital. With the surgeon who advised me, just after building an older lady’s hand, to take the pain and avoid a cast. With the kung fu techniques I had learned about bone mending….

With the illegal African immigrants who worked alongside me as bike couriers in New York City.

They would would see me trying to pack an order with one arm in a sling and would came over without being asked. Pack the order. Lashed the it to my bike. Made sure I was good to go.

Then they left. Didn’t wait for a thank you. Just went and did their own thing.

God sent those men as angels.

God healed my broken arm.

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When I was freezing in Boston living under the bridge I prayed… what can I do, where should I go… and God sent a friend who cared enough to get me a cheap flight to Miami Beach where I could be safe and warm.

When a man came to rob me in my sleep on Miami Beach God sent a snake to bite him and defend me.

When I was at the absolute end of my rope, starting to talk to myself, starting to walk with a limp, getting dirty and hopeless and lost… I turned toward Christ and asked him what I should do. And I felt God tell me to be open. To be vulnerable. To stop hiding. To be the broken child I actually was and trust that the world would be gentle with me.

I obeyed.

And God sent a rescue helicopter filled with a million smiling faces and dropped an escape ladder in front of me.

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God couldn’t do anything for me that I wasn’t ready for. A miracle couldn’t save me when I wasn’t ready for a miracle. I don’t know how or why that makes sense. I just feel I know it. He kept me safe and he waited. And when I was finally ready… when I finally let go… he moved.

That’s what walking with Christ is like.

Not comfort. Not easy answers. Not a life without bears and spiders and broken arms and gangs with bats.

Just obedience to voice carrying you through the dark.

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I am a boy who walks with Christ.

I always have been. From the hands and knees prayers of a four year old in Massachusetts to the waterfall in Central Park where I washed my face every morning. From the cement ledge under bridge to sands of Miami. From the tarp to Maine.

He was there every single night.

And if you are suffering right now, if you are on your own version of The Ice Wall, if the dark is close and the cold is real and you don’t know what to do, I want to invite you to do what I did.

Pray to Christ.

He’s been walking with you the whole time.

Now you can walk with him.

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*Stephen James Campbell writes every Wednesday on Substack. He can be found on Instagram at @stephen_james_campbell.*

Walking the runway of life

The first runway I ever walked was in a homeless shelter.

I was one of the residents. They were trying to get us all to do something good for ourselves and they asked me to lead the whole thing to show the other guys how it’s done. I had never walked a fashion show before but the shelter administration had assumed it was just in my blood.

lets fucking go

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Let me tell you about the shelters.

It was a new thing I was trying. In Boston shelters were for guys having heart attacks in the middle of the street in the middle of the night. Or for people overdosing in the mornings. I was never that kind of homeless. I was on the raised cement ledge under the bridge, not in the sidewalk tent cities. Boston shelters never felt like they were for me. Too many weird rules and too much drug use. Too much that got in the way of actually trying to make income, and being seen there would ruin my career. Better to camp.

Miami didn’t really have shelters either. There were numbers posted for social services but I could never bring myself to call them. I had spent years on the streets with tarps and raccoons and kung fu and somehow accepting that level of help felt like admitting something I couldn’t.

New York City broke me. The city beat the fuck out of me. It’s the hardest city in the world to stay clean. In the fall of 2022 I was camping in a park on 57th and 9th, religiously hopping the gate at eight PM. After a day of bike deliveries I would find a spot near the enclosed kids playground with the matted floor and put my back against the cement wall so no one could really see me from the street. A solid squat for the most part. People would swing through to lowkey hookup every once in a while and they would definitely notice me, but they would keep it moving.

At some point someone explained to me how intake works for the shelter system in NYC. That I could go there and have a bed and a shower. Since my back was figuratively and literally against a wall, I went for it.

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Here is what I want you to know about the shelters in New York. The city takes in everyone, high barrier or low barrier or no barrier. There is no applying to a shelter in New York City, you are automatically granted a bed if you are an American. That means they take everyone. They even work around getting you help if you're not American. Thats a blessing and a curse.

I’ve met some of the most extraordinary human beings going in and out of those places. Men with names like Red and Snow or G and their stories would stun you. Guys who in the middle of a conversation would say quietly… “story of my life”… and you would understand everything about they meant.

The shelters in New York are violent. More violent than the streets honestly. The worst fights I’ve ever been in were in shelters; Beaten up, fighting multiple people, lying bloody on the floor from an attack…. and shooters. These were shelter activities.

So I never stayed long. If I was especially dirty from the streets or so haggard I couldn’t function I’d check in for a couple of days, maybe a couple months. Eventually being around the drug use and violence would always get to me. Never mind the rules which actually made it easier for me to manage the logistics of my job living in the tarp in Central Park. Facts.

That’s not to say the New York City shelter system isn’t helping people. It is the only actual sanctuary city in the USA that guarantees any American shelter anytime. There are some real heroes working in those buildings, dedicating their time to lifting up the homies. Unfortunately it’s become a broken system in ways that prevent the function of being a stepping stone for many. Regardless of that though, NYC is rescuing people from the streets every day.

But yeah, I did a fashion show for them.

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When I was still camping in midtown in the closed parks, a fashion model friend from the city mentioned an opportunity to me. A professional runway show for a local artist during fashion week. I decided to audition and it went well. They wanted me and gave me a date to come back to walk with the other models.

So, needing to prep to be a model but still literally living on the streets… I checked back into the shelters. I figured might as well try to make it work from in there. I needed a base to exercise from so I could sweat and clear my skin. I also needed to sculpt the model the physique. I worked my bike courier shifts and crammed the fashion show preparation into my schedule for the next few weeks.

That’s when I saw that the shelter was also doing a fashion show and the rest is history… fashion week in the city. Technically the first runway I ever walked was in a men’s homeless shelter. I usually only told people about the second one.

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First, The shelter runway.

Picture a group of men who have been through real things, the kind that leave marks, being asked to walk a runway inside the place where they sleep. Some of them nervous. Some of them skeptical. All of them with a story. Most hoping they can get some extra food out of the whole thing.

And then me, the leader. Definitely the one who had spent the most time camping in the woods with bears and spiders.

And we did it. We walked that runway together. Suits on our bodies and smiles on our faces. We looked like we ran the place.

Something happened in that room that I didn’t expect… people started smiling, actually smiling. And cheering. And dancing…. Like for a few minutes the weight of suffering in the world was lifted and we were just people doing something fun and exciting and human and wonderful together.

I’ll never forget that.

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The day of the professional fashion show they called us for 8AM. I showed up on time ready to go. I didn’t realize I wouldn’t be walking the runway until 6PM.

So I waited…. ten hours. With models who were not homeless and probably had no idea I was heading back to a shelter that night. Or maybe they did know. This was New York City bro.

When I saw the photos from that day I was appalled at how miserable I looked compared to the other models. I didn’t realize it at the time… I thought I looked normal. This was normal to me.

That’s one of the cruelest things homelessness does to you. Normality of the situation creates an acceptance so deep you stop being able to see yourself the way other people see you. Anyone who knew me during that period would say the same thing when they ran into me… “you look so sad, Stephen.” And I was like whaat? I was fine. To me surviving was being fine.

Actually though…it was not. I was a runway model during fashion week in the city but my life was in shambles.

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The professional show was a different world entirely from the shelter.

Blazer. Shoes. Lights. A real runway. Well known designers and a Manhattan audience. The whole production. I walked it as best I could and we killed it.

Afterward everyone was in a post show glow. It was fun. Genuinely fun. One of those rare moments when the performance of normalcy and actual normalcy met somewhere in the middle and I couldn’t tell the difference. Like the other show.

And then it ended.

And I walked out into Midtown Manhattan.

Past the park on 57th and 10th where I sometimes slept. Past the gate I knew how to hop. Past the spot where I put my back against the fence and listened for anyone coming in at night.

I thought about going to the shelter. I thought about sleeping in the park. I weighed them against each other the way you weigh two garbage options in life.

I decided on pizza and donuts.

I walked off a professional fashion show in New York City as a model and got pizza and donuts alone. I sat somewhere in midtown and ate them and for a little while that was everything.

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The runway in the shelter and the one under the lights… On paper they couldn’t be more different. One was a bunch of homeless men walking across a room while people cheered. The other was a professional production with designers and photographers and an audience.

They felt the same though. Both times were fun and photogenic and we all were just hanging out.

That’s what I was looking for on both runways.

Not a career or a way out of The Ice Wall.

Just a few minutes of feeling like a person.

Pizza and donuts helped.

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*Stephen James Campbell writes every Wednesday on Substack. He can be found on Instagram at @stephen_james_campbell.*

Photo: NYFW/DFW SS24 — Designer: Hector R Miranda @hrmnewyork — Photography: @maksimgoldguber

the rules that ruled me

This is for anyone living on the streets. Which in reality, is all of us.

It’s the list of rules that kept me safe when everything around me was falling apart. I wrote these down around 2020 and they became the bumpers on the side of the bowling alley of life.

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Rule One: Don’t let anyone use you. But share resources when you can.

You would think this meant other homeless people and to a large extent it does, but this was a rule against everybody. When you’re suffering a major situation the vulnerability levels are high. Unfortunately some people see that as leverage to get what they want.

People like creepy college professors who found out you were homeless and thought that if they helped you out a little bit they could take you to sex parties.

People like men who also live on the street who want you to promote their illegal cologne trade.

Millionaires who want to use you to get laid.

Stuff like that… There’s more trivial things like money and assistance and time. But over dependance is dehumanizing and unsustainable. When someone is using you they are pulling you down The Ice Wall, definitely not helping you up it.

The second half of this rule is important as a reminder. Share what you have when you can…to stay human. To be holy.

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Rule Two: No one uses, accesses, or touches your phone. Ever. For any reason.

The phone functions like another organ. Perhaps a good analogy would be like a life raft. Like I’m lost in the sea of society; drowning in suffering and homelessness, but this phone connects me to a digital lifeline of modern life sustaining energy. All life sustaining material became channeled through it. I literally remember a singular moment when I was homeless on Miami Beach, where I was like “I will use this phone 24/seven as much as possible as my main source of income as well as socializing and studying.” It would become my café and my library and my workspace because all those things had been stripped away.

The phone got me random freelance jobs, lifeline connections, networking… the difference between eating or scrounging. Most nights I fell asleep clutching the phone to my chest. Like back to the sand eyes peeled for vagrants and arms clutching the phone. Even when I lost my wallet, which happened a few times, my phone stayed relatively safe on the streets…. by Gods grace alone we make it through.

I once met a Christian in Washington DC who told me he had been swindled. Someone had asked to listen to music on his phone and then they just walked away with it. That was it. Bro dedass gave his phone away.

If somebody asks to make a phone call on your phone they are scamming you. If somebody asks to watch a video don’t do it. If they ask you to text someone on their behalf….. don’t. You can let them know where they can get a free phone… people used to call it an Obama phone. There are a thousand ways to make a free phone call that don’t involve touching mine.

Letting someone touch your phone is like letting them touch one of your organs. You need boundaries with the things keeping you alive. You need rules.

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Rule Three: No hard drugs. At all.

This one is crucial. This is the line Caesar crossed when he said “The die is cast”…..This. is. Sparta….You can take our lives but you can never take our freedom.

Hard drugs destroy people every single day on the streets. You think being in a homeless tailspin is bad until you see what hard drugs do to someone. It’s not a tailspin anymore. It’s an acceleration toward the ground with explosions and overdosing and death and the kind of darkness that attracts more darkness. You walk a knife’s edge on the street. Hard drugs will rip you off that edge and drop you somewhere so deep that even a rescue helicopter full of a million people couldn’t reach you.

Hold the line…. obey the rules.

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Rule Four: No road dogs.

For the uninitiated a road dog is someone who is homeless with you. A road dog has your back through everything… at least that’s the idea. More than a friend or a partner. Full on ride or die type shit. As Vin Diesel said “Family.”

To me road dogs are dead weight. They are stones tied to your leg ensuring that you keep drowning.

If somebody is truly your friend they will help you out of homelessness. They will dig into you and tell you the things you’re doing wrong. They will give you a couch to sleep on. Road dogs aren’t like that. Road dogs will often block you from situations that could actually help you. That’s just the nature of desperation… nobody gets help unless we all get help. Road dogs are in just as desperate a situation as you so anything they say could be pulling you further down rather than up.

I’ve seen a lot of people locked into the streets with road dog relationships. It becomes us against the world rather than maybe the world is a gentle and healing place and I should stay open and vulnerable to others…

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Rule Five: Be very comfortable leaving a situation without notice. You don’t owe anything to anyone.

The art of the Irish exit.

If something is going wrong; get out. When the going gets tough the tough get going. Sleep with your shoes on in case your spot gets blown up in the night. Just stand up and walk away and don’t say shit.

If you find yourself in a group of people and they try to press you into something with guilt or peer pressure just walk away without saying anything to anyone. If they follow you, run.

Stay out of trouble.

My friend Sean from Miami Beach, AKA Cocaine Cowboy, would sometimes start crashing out and I would sense he was about to get arrested. I would just walk away… The timing was often so perfect that I would catch the vibe, walk away, and as I looked back the cops would be swooping in on him.

I don’t owe you anything bro. But I’ll see you in the morning and we can climb The Ice Wall together.

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Rule Six: Keep yourself hydrated, clean, well fed, and presentable.

Because nobody is doing that for you.

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Rule Seven: Laugh, joke, and enjoy your life every day.

Too easy to forget in survival mode. Essential for survival.

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Rule Eight: No stealing.

A lot of people on the street steal. They’ll say things like it’s OK to steal from corporations. Those kinds of ethics are a slippery slope of self justification. Eventually someone like that will steal from other people as well.

A thief is a thief.

Never mind the fact that if you do steal you can get beat up, stabbed, killed, or ostracized from an area where you might have connections. Don’t be Aladdin because there is no genie. Don’t be Robin Hood because there is no group of Merry Men coming to your rescue. There is only street justice and you do not want to be on the wrong side of it.

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Rule Nine: No self pity.

You have to take time to understand your situation. But you cannot feel sorry for yourself. You have to climb The Ice Wall, not succumb to sliding down it.

I’ve seen the guys who retire to homelessness. Who stop fighting and just accept it as their permanent address. Don’t be that guy.

Rage against the darkness. Rage against The Ice Wall.

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Rule Ten: Do not feel that homelessness is permanent.

This one was always more of an idea than a rule. A way of holding onto hope when The Ice Wall stretched out in every direction as far as I could see.

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So thats the rules

I would always make more or cut others depending on my circumstances but these were the ones that always remained. They left me alive. They kept me clean. They kept me human.

My faith in Christ existed outside of these rules. It was something I practiced always and in every moment, through every dark night. These rules were something different. They were the practical daily framework that kept me standing while the faith kept me breathing.

Together they got me here.

So if you’ve been kicked out to the streets… make up some rules for yourself.

You’ll never know where they’ll bring you.

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*Stephen James Campbell writes every Wednesday on Substack. He can be found on Instagram at @stephen_james_campbell.*

The monster. Central Park.

Oscar the Grouch was the muppet chosen to exhibit the homeless. He is an angry faced, sharp speaking, weird looking being that lives in, eats, and hangs out with the trash. Something so foreign to others that he was a monster among monsters.

Heres how that happens to a muppet… or a person.

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My first night on the streets;

Early twenties, homeless and alone, downtown Boston… right near the State House. I didn’t know where to sleep as a homeless person. I figured at this point there were no rules so I just laid down in a random bush.

It felt weird…. because it was weird.

People looked at me like I was weird, but in a way I had never felt before… Like I was something that didn’t belong in their world. Like my life was a bad joke. A suburban youth gone so far astray that he was becoming a monster.

I couldn’t understand why other people had a place to live and I didn’t. What was I doing wrong? Why was I a bad dog? How did I become Frankenstein…. Im freaking Dracula over here except more like Mike Wazowski or James P. Sullivan. Just a good person whose situation is misunderstood….. monster nonetheless.

Scar face got that name from a knife attack. Voldemort was never loved. The Joker experienced trauma… The world that wasn’t theirs shaped them into monsters.

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Here is what homelessness does to your body.

You get dirty. There are ways around it like gym showers, walking baby wipe baths, throwing your clothes away before they start to smell, and staying away from normal people so they can’t sense what you are. But the grime stacks up on you. City grime especially. It gets into your DNA. After just few hours of street life you can smell yourself and you know other people can too and there is nothing you can do about it.

You stop sleeping regularly. Every spot has a threat. Under a bridge drunk people fuck with you. On the beach people try to rob in your sleep. In a park someone might come to assault you in the night. In a shelter the violence is worse than the streets. Your nervous system learns that sleep is dangerous. That relaxation is dangerous. That letting your guard down gets you hurt.

So you don’t let your guard down.

You wake up ready to fight every time you wake up. Your body is on a hair trigger 24/7. Since where you slept wasn’t a bedroom there is no staying there after six or seven in the morning. Sick, injured, tired…it doesn’t matter. No time for healing. Just wake up and start walking and keep walking.

Now the monster’s got a limp.

Your skin starts to look bad because all you’ve been eating is cheap fast food and literal garbage. You get the thousand mile stare mixed with over attention to detail in case of threat…. paradoxical perceptions.

You can try wearing nicer clothes to make a good impression on the world around you... But if you hold onto them for more than a couple of days they start to smell and now you’re just a con man who’s obviously homeless wearing a costume that doesn’t fit.

Try pulling out of that tailspin in modern day America… You're better off succumbing to living with Oscar the Grouch. “Have a rotten day!”

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Here is what homelessness does to your mind.

You start talking to yourself because there’s nobody else. At first it’s just processing things like where to go or what to do. But after enough time alone… after enough days where the only conversations you have are transactional or non existent… the internal monologue starts leaking out. The Monsters vocal signature is incoherent sounds coming from a human being. In CVS we all know not to walk down the aisle with the schizo guy mumbling about where to sleep.

On the streets survival eats up all your creative output, such that all you can consider is how to live past each moment. Every cognitive resource you have goes into today. Where will I sleep tonight… where will I eat…how do I stay safe…. how do I stay clean enough to keep this job. There is nothing left for tomorrow. Nothing left for considering next week. Nothing left for dreaming or planning or hoping. The future just stops existing as a concept. There is only right now and right now is hard AF. If you want to help someone who is becoming The Monster while sliding down The Ice Wall… lending them your mind will help. It’s like a clean processor that can assist in overcoming some of the basic ideas that a monster faces. Things like simple hygiene plans or helpful tips on navigating bureaucratic processes.

It’s amazing how buskers manage to keep up their craft in the face of such pressure. It makes their art even sweeter knowing their lives pressures and how they so eloquently dance with them through the expression of music.

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On the street you start to accept less for yourself. Eating in restaurants, fun social outings, doors that lock…. this are things for housers not monsters.

I had a friend who was homeless in New York City and also did bike courier work. He had a membership to Equinox, a high end gym in Manhattan. He would say it was because being around those people was part of healing from the streets. It was the way he prevented the haggard from settling into him. A lot of people made fun of him for that and bullied him. Nobody that bullied him was actually homeless like we were though… I understood his perspective. I understood his healing process. I saw his kung fu technique and the way it applied to the way he was living. He was using the nice gym to keep the monsters at bay.

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Something surprising about street monsters is the hidden kindness.

People who have absolutely nothing will give each other every thing they have at any given moment. A warm sheet in the rain from their own bedding. The absolute last dollar in their pocket. A word of human decency from someone who has nothing to give except their decency. Oscar the Grouch loves things the way they are… imperfect and broken. Gross and smelly. He doesn’t judge the desolate impoverished state of homelessness and he genuinely helps others, just with an edge. “…just because you're trash doesn't mean you can't do great things. It is called 'garbage can', not 'garbage cannot'."

…And the people who make it through that, the ones who get rescued off the street by social workers or start successful fundraisers or who get sober or just find their way back to stability by the grace of God alone… they keep something with them. Something the streets couldn’t touch.

Something deep. Something indestructible.

Faith. Love. Kindness. Humanity.

You might think hatred would be the indestructible thing. That after enough time being treated like a monster a person would fill up with rage and stay perma broken. But you don’t really have time for forever hatred when you’re in survival mode. Hatred is a luxury. It takes energy. Every bit of energy you have is already spoken for.

What survives the streets is something stronger than hatred.

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Here is something I know about suffering.

When you are in such a desperate situation that you have been stripped of everything…. that is when the light shines through. That is when there is nothing left but room for God’s love.

The monster was never really there.

Just a scared sacred person strangely sleeping in a bush... near the State House.

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*Stephen James Campbell writes every Wednesday on Substack. He can be found on Instagram at @stephen_james_campbell.*

My walk to the woods home, Boston. The gallery that almost nobody saw

Homelessness is a disease.

You can catch it like a cold and have it over quick or it can be chronic and totally debilitating. For me it progressed to the second kind. Type two homelessness. I didn’t know it would progress to that when I was young. In my twenties homelessness had romance to it. That young train hopper with swag kind of romance. I never asked for it but I figured if that was the only card I had… might as well learn to play it.

So that’s what I did.

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My father’s name was James Micheal Campbell A.K.A. Jimmy.

He was a creature of Boston in the 70’s ; disco, cocaine, and The Combat Zone. For those who don’t know, The Combat Zone was what they called a neighborhood in downtown Boston that was left over from a wilder era. Violence and pornographic theaters and the kind of nightlife that movies like The Departed are made from. My father loved it. He was a pioneer of the Combat Zone culture.

My mother saw all of that and did what a good mother does. She moved to the suburbs. Somewhere safer. Somewhere over the rainbow where pretty little bluebirds fly and The Combat Zone couldn’t reach.

She gave me a different life. I am grateful for that every day.

Here’s the irony. I ended up working for the arts organizations in Boston that helped eliminate the Combat Zone entirely. Emerson College acquired The Paramount Theater from The city of Boston on the condition that it help to eliminate the Combat Zone and its culture. I was one of the people who worked there.

Sorry, Dad.

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Let’s back up the story and do some splanin’…

I managed to get a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theater Studies through a period of relative stability. During college I was only street homeless for one semester… living out of a small red Toyota which at the time felt like a minor inconvenience. Homelessness was a romantic struggle…. at least that was the face of the card I played.

After graduation my career didn’t kick off immediately. I was street homeless for a stretch in early 2012. I pulled out of that tailspin by staying on couches and freelancing in the Boston theater scene. Local artists thought I was a cool homeless in that bohemian way and they were willing to put me up when I had work. I was climbing The Ice Wall of instability. I knew the infinite pit of haggard street life was below me but the gear I had felt good enough to hold the line.

For a while it was.

I eventually managed to rent a bedroom in a place called The Heartbeat Collective. A bunch of open minded people vibing and living communally… I loved it. The only problem was the building was getting demolished in two months to make way for condos. The landlord rented me the room cheap knowing that. I took it anyway because two months of stability was better than none.

When the two months ended I didn’t have first and last saved. There was a gap in stability coming, I could feel it the horizon. The overarching plot line of suffering on the streets was knocking at my door once again.

So I did what I always did.

I took to the woods.

-----

I didn’t have a tarp yet… I hadn’t learned that lesson. So I had a tent. I was figuring out how to scope out a suitable spot. How to stay hidden. How to survive.

And I had a job to go to in the morning.

Emerson College had offered me a full time position in audio and rigging at their resident theater company called Office of the Arts. We hosted professional productions from all over the world like Sleeping Beauty by Colla Marionette Italy, Waiting for Godot by Gare St. Lazare Players Ireland, and La Belle et la Bête by Lemieux Pilon 4D Quebec. We did a production of Servant of Two Masters by Yale Repertory that is probably the greatest piece of modern theater I have ever seen. It was a dream job for a theater graduate. A fairytale of an office, all open minded artists engaging in professional projects. They respected my freelance work backstage enough to offer me a full time job in their office.

Nobody there knew I was living in the woods.

I had two lockers at the college. One near the office and one in the college gym. I kept stage blacks in the gym locker to have an excuse to go there. My entire life fit inside the lockers and the tent. In the mornings I would come in from the woods, change, and show up to work like a regular person. At night I would ride the train to the bus to my stop and walk the dark woods to my hidden tent camp.

I was living like Henry David Thoreau except Henry David Thoreau wasn’t hanging lights for Emerson College in the mornings.

I had a routine. On my walk back to the woods each night I would do street art. Like tags and little pieces on the sidewalk and light poles along the passage from the bus stop to the entrance of the woods. Over time it became like a small gallery. A secret one that almost nobody saw.

-----

I had friends during this time. A small circle I trusted enough to tell the truth to. When you’re in your twenties your friends think being homeless with a dream job is coolest thing ever. Nobody was worried. Everyone thought it was an adventure. So that’s the card I played.

My close friends would come to visit my tent. We would do street art together and I would exhibit how I live. How the camp was far enough from the road to be hidden but not so deep in the trenches that we were at risk of other ruffians trying to get all up in the spot. How to stay warm at night and how to pack things up in the mornings. A journalist friend I had met in Boston took interest in my situation and wanted to do a piece on me.

Why not.

So we met at after work one day in Back Bay and rode the orange line out to Jamaica Plain. A quick bus ride through Roslandale and into Dorchester. For the unfamiliar; it was a skip, a hop, and a jump through an urban environment to an oasis of a forest. A large dense gathering of woods surrounded by the city of Boston. There we exhibited the street art gallery sidewalk path and made our way into the magical woods. She loved the art, the vibes, the freedom mixed with a sense of survival. To her this wasn’t a hobo camp…it was the living incarnation of that rockstar freewill attitude that makes a young women shiver. I quickly realized this evening wasn’t about a journalism piece... she hadn’t even been taking notes or recording words. I had planned for survival, she had planned for romance. We met somewhere in the middle and had an unforgettable evening. I thought about dating her and how that could work with my tent home. She wasn’t interested in titles like that so we ended our escapade amicablly.

It kind of hurt that when I was homeless and women wanted to sleep with me but didn’t wanted to be my girlfriend. So after a couple times of that mistake I decided to remain celibate until I found a wife. That line held for many years and saved me from some sketchy stuff on the streets. Stories for another Wednesday.

-----

I continued working at Emerson College, alongside companies like Les 7 Doigts de la Main AKA The 7 fingers Canada. They were an acrobatic offshoot of Cirque du Soleil that presents acrobats as authentic human beings rather than stock characters… they came through and I worked their productions. The work and people were amazing. The artists were these traveling personalities that were like athletic shining lights. They would work out for two and a half hours before every performance and if it was a double that day they would work out for literally five hours and do their performances. All with good humor and presence of mind. The stories from the traveling company members were lit. My life around the work was just as acrobatic as their routines…. but more like how living in a tent in the woods requires acrobatics. I would do my kung fu workouts backstage while they were warming up onstage. During performances they would do bits with the crew. Once the show was over we would shout down the stage, put out the ghost light, and I’d peace out to the woods.

Eventually that steady income gave me enough to move out of the tent and into burner housing, that is to say, a neighborhood of people who loved Burning Man. An artist community in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston where I rented a cheap room. It was unstable the way all artist housing is unstable. But it was a room in a cool place with interesting individuals.

It held The Ice Wall at bay.

-----

I think about that stuff sometimes, in ways I didn’t realize back then…

A young man trying to build something real while the ground kept disappearing beneath him.

A father who loved The Combat Zone, and the mother who escaped it.

A son who ended up working for the organizations that tore it down.

There’s something in that triangle that I’m still working out.

Maybe that’s what the writing is for.

-----

*Stephen James Campbell writes every Wednesday on Substack. He can be found on Instagram at @stephen_james_campbell.*

Millionaire. Homeless dude. Private jet.

Brian was my friend.

I have to say that first because everything that follows might make you think this is a story about wealth and excess and the crazy things that happen when a homeless man meets a millionaire. It is those things. But more its the story of a friendship between two men with almost nothing in common who somehow recognized each other immediately.

I met Brian in February of 2021 on Miami Beach. I had been there a few months by then… sleeping on Love Island or in a clearing I’d found inside a stack of beach chairs, sometimes on the cement under awnings when it rained. I had flowers in my hair and love in my heart. The saltwater kept me clean. The sand kept me rested. I would wake up in the mornings with crabs staring at me and it would put me in a good mood.

That was life.

-----

My new friend Sean A.K.A. Cocaine Cowboy told me he had sponsors. People who believed in his art and his performative chaos enough to fund it. I wasn’t sure if this was true or if it was just the kind of story a street artist tells to feel legitimate. And then one day he introduced me to Brian.

Brian was a wealth manager from New Jersey who worked at a successful firm. He had recently received a career changing bonus to the tune of millions. That money hit him like gasoline hits a fire. I met him at the launchpad of a rocket he had been building for twenty years. We met when his countdown reached zero.

Brian came to Miami Beach on vacation with his wife and kids. He wore expensive golf sun glasses and shorts, a polo shirt, nice shoes and a big smile. $300 haircut and white veneers. A look in his eyes that said I don’t give a fuck about anything anymore.

His wife and kids had gone back to Jersey. Brian had decided to stay on South Beach and hang out with Cocaine Cowboy. This was where his head was at.

-----

When he met me what he found was someone with flowers in their hair who woke up happy because of morning crustaceans.

There’s something about successful men looking for adventure that always attracted them to me. They feel like I have something they don’t. Like they can osmosis some kind of free spirit just by being near me long enough. Brian was a successful financial advisor with his own house and a beautiful family and he could do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. All that and he wanted to be living like me. I told him we should Freaky Friday.

We talked for hours that first day. He told me about his life, what it felt like to have nice nice money instead of just nice money, and what that was doing to him. How he hated working in finance and everything that came with it. I told him what it was like to sleep on the sand and watch the sun come up over the ocean every morning.

A rainstorm was on the radar so I had to say my goodbye and secure myself for the night. We exchanged numbers. Later he texted me asking if I could help him find a watch he’d lost to someone on the street. I told him “I can’t help you dude. It’s raining. If I move three feet in either direction my whole world gets soaked and it’s over.” He texted back that he was sorry. That he hadn’t realized.

I think that was the moment Brian understood who I actually was.

-----

Over the next week us three kept hanging out. Brian and Sean were out on South Beach doing performance art. Sean insisted on getting cash from Brian for artistic purposes, and they used it to nail twenty dollar bills to trash cans, hide money in spots where homeless people scrounged for bottles, and throw money at seagulls. One seagull picked up a bill and flew away with it. Cocaine Cowboy and the wealth manager laughing like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

Brian’s wife didn’t exactly like any of this. She thought everything he was doing was crazy. She didn’t want him spending weeks in Miami with a street artist and a homeless man. She was just trying to do the normal thing. I don’t blame her. I think she went along with it because Brian was doing so well and she loved him and sometimes love means letting someone burn for a while and hoping they come back.

Brian delighted in my company such that he mentioned wanting to hire me as his personal assistant. I told him honestly something like was out of my reach while being homeless. He thought about it then offered me a Hail Mary pass.

He was traveling up to Beaufort, South Carolina, for a work related personal adventure involving new connections and new golf courses. I could come if I wanted. Get off the beach. Talk more about the job. See what was possible.

A random millionaire wealth manager from Jersey found me in my haggard homeless state on Miami Beach and decided he wanted to hire me as his personal assistant.

Why not.

-----

Brian was a man on fire. And he was bleeding money.

He was sponsoring golfers and was working out at high end gyms that tailored to celebrity athletes. Brian had purchased a shuttered movie theater in his hometown to renovate into a video game lounge so his kids could be the most popular kids in high school. He was buying wedding rings for people who worked for him. He was renting offices at the Sheraton in Jersey for employees he didn’t have. He was looking at acquiring cannabis farms on the West Coast through large pools of investors.

He loved private jets.

There something about a PJ that makes it the piece de resistance for the wealthy. To common folk like myself it was just a plane ride. Like the survival traveling I had gotten up to for the years prior, this small plane was just another distraction from the instability of my homeless life.

To Brian this was actually the biggest deal ever. This was his first private jet flight and he wanted me to occupy a special place of recognition during the ceremony. Brian, me, and some members of his Jersey golf club. Flying down to Beaufort South Carolina where he had just joined another exclusive club that cost over a hundred thousand dollars just to sign up.

When we got there Brian acted like a Yankee and they did not like that. We stayed in a house on the golf property owned by a famous Boston hockey player and Brian had burned a hole in the rug with a cigarette by accident. He smoked weed openly on the course and chatted about cannabis with locals. He took a homeless man for his first 18 rounds ever. All that got him banned him for life. The club he had paid a hundred thousand dollars to join dropped him without a second thought. No refunds. Just exiled. Because they didn’t like his attitude.

That was exclusive Beaufort golf clubs.

-----

On the flight back to Jersey it was just the two of us. A private jet. Just me and Brian…. “Don’t tell my wife I got banned from the gold club”

I kept thinking… I am straight homeless right now and I am on a private jet.

Some things are strange.

-----

Back in Jersey Brian put me up in a cheap hotel and let me drive his BMW. He joked about giving it to me. I drove around New Jersey in this car that could literally drive itself, cops not giving me a second look, and thought about how insane life is.

But the truth is it wasn’t freedom to me. It was a costume. I didn’t have a place to live. I didn’t have savings. I had no stability. What I had was Brian… this miraculous wild angel of a person… and a borrowed BMW and a hotel room that wasn’t mine.

The streets is the streets no matter how you dress it up.

Brian made a lot of promises including houses for multiple people like his in laws, a homeless family they were close with, and me. He was a man of enormous promises and complicated delivery. A wealth manager who wanted to be an artist. A man on a rocket who hadn’t quite figured out his trajectory.

Around July of 2021 he implied that he probably couldn’t get me a place to live. That he needed time with his family. I said that was fine. And then I heard myself say out loud “I have to go back to the streets.”

Which was true. Except it had always been true. Even with the private jet. Even with the BMW. The Ice Wall had just temporarily disguised itself as something else.

-----

By October we were still in touch but living in two different worlds. I had a tent camp in Boston, a good one… well hidden. Raccoons tried to break in one night because I’d broken my no food rule and brought hot tamales and the racoons could smell them from miles away.

There was a puddle inside the tent I had to navigate around while sleeping.

Brian called. Hey dude how’s it going.

I told him. He apologized. He wanted to come up and visit and we went to a casino. Not my choice. The casino was uninteresting and by that point I was beginning to seriously question what our friendship was.

I loved him like a brother. But sometimes you have to have boundaries with your brother to keep yourself safe. Even if he is an eccentric millionaire.

-----

A few months later I got the news that Brian had died unexpectedly.

This kind of thing happens to men who suddenly become multimillionaires. So much energy dumped into a lifetime all at once… so irregular… that a person can sometimes just skyrocket into outer space and never come back. On some real Rocket Man type shit.

I was homeless when I found out. There was no way for me to get to the ceremonies in his honor. I’m not sure his blood relatives would have wanted me there anyway. I was just the homeless man from Miami Beach. The one with flowers in his hair.

But Brian called me his brother. And I called him mine.

-----

I think about him sometimes when something wild happens. When the universe does something so unlikely and strange that the only explanation is God smiling. Brian would have loved all of it; the Humans of New York video, the fundraiser, Maine, the Substack. He would have been texting me every day.

He was a man who saw things in people that other people missed. He saw something in Sean. He saw something in me.

I hope wherever he is now there are no golf clubs banning him for burning holes in rugs. I hope he found the freedom he was looking for. I hope he knows he was loved by everyone for who he was.

God bless you Brian.

-----

*Stephen James Campbell writes every Wednesday on Substack. He can be found on Instagram at @stephen_james_campbell.*

The cup. The razor. The baby wipes. Former street shaving kit. Current bathroom resident. Small steps.

(This article was written one week post homelessness)

George Carlin said a house is just a place to keep your stuff.

I wouldn’t know… I just got one.

One month ago I was keeping stuff in a trash bag under a tarp in Central Park South. Now I live in a large dry box full of concepts I don’t fully comprehend. I am doing my best at being completely lost, and this is my field guide.

-----

**Concept #1: Clothes**

Apparently you keep them.

I know. Shocking.

For long stretches of time my clothing based plan of attack was to wear something, throw it away, then find something new. In the city “street thrifting” as it can be gracefully called yields results for the bold. There are piles of hip clothes in the East Village, you can find every day casual on the streets at 23rd and Sixth, in the Upper East Side you can find street suits, and in Midtown you can score random street accessories like scarves. The city provides. You wear it once, you move on. Find another pile to go through.

Housed people (“housers” henceforth) have these enormous machines that sit right inside their homes… and what these machines do is dump water on your clothes so you can keep wearing them forever. This is called a washer and dryer and apparently I don’t throw those away either.

You keep the clothes forever.

I am still processing this.

-----

**Concept #2: The Kitchen**

A kitchen is a fancy room dedicated to alchemy.

In my previous life, food worked like this: you found it, you ate it, you moved on. The deli guy had a bacon egg and cheese for cheap. McDonalds had McGriddles for a dollar in the morning. The Dunkin trash can had whatever was left from the day. Simple. Clean. Efficient.

Now I have this room with a refrigerator; a large cold box that keeps food alive for days. A stove; a hot box that turns raw things into food. Counters; flat surfaces I apparently use for something. Apparently these all work together to produce a meal.

I stood in my kitchen for ten minutes the other day just looking at it. I began crying over the totality of my situation… then I hit my head on the chandelier. So I cried on the floor…. Stupid houses.

There’s nowhere to order a bacon egg and cheese in here. There’s no deli guy. There’s no dumpster. There’s just this cold box full of ingredients staring at me waiting for me to have a plan.

I don’t have a plan.

I bought packaged mushrooms last week and I’m still working up to them.

-----

**Concept #3: Nobody Is Going To Steal Your Stuff**

This one is taking the longest to settle in.

I still take my wallet and my phone with me to the shower. I leave them within eyesight, as if there’s a stranger in my hallway just waiting for the moment I look away. Same thing when I sleep. On the streets I slept with my phone on my chest, gripping it at night. Years of sleeping with my shoes on and my wallet in my pocket in case I had to rumble at midnight.

My body doesn’t know it can let go yet.

I also still wake up at 5 AM convinced that a bunch of people are about to start walking through my bedroom. My instinct is to immediately stuff all my possessions into my backpack and be ready to move. Instead I lie there in my actual bed staring at my actual ceiling trying to explain to my nervous system that we actually live here now.

My nervous system is not convinced.

The other night in my bedroom, something dangerous tried to attack me.

It was my curtains.

-----

**Concept #4: Curtains**

I own curtains now.

I need you to understand how strange that is. Curtains, I own them. They live in my dry box.

Curtains would never fit in a backpack. Never mind the rods. For years if it didn’t fit in a backpack it didn’t exist. And now I’m supposed to just own things that couldn’t possibly be carried anywhere? What am I, a movie star?

I also own a rug.

I’m going to need a minute for that one.

-----

**Concept #5: The Shower**

For years I kept myself clean with baby wipes. This is more of an art form than people realize. You develop a system. I would call it a gypsy shower. Sometimes the only way to do it is to walk down the street in full public view and just wipe down specific parts of your body as you go. Walking down 23rd, I would wipe down the arms and throw the baby wipes away at the trashcan. Then turn up 22nd Street and do the face. Stop at the trashcan outside the Flatiron Building and quickly wipe the private parts hoping nobody saw.

They definitely saw. Better than smelling bad though.

The baby wipes that made it all the way from New York to Maine are now just sitting in my bathroom looking confused. I don’t have the heart to throw them away. They’ve been through a lot. They served honorably.

But now I have a shower.

A shower is essentially a continuously watery baby wipe that cleans your whole body at once and you don’t have to throw it away when you’re done. At least I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to throw the shower away when you’re done. I don’t know… maybe you are and I’m just not doing it right. How would I even know? There’s no manual for this.

I don’t have to shave using a Dunkin Donuts cup filled with lake water anymore.

I kept the cup though. It’s in the bathroom.

-----

**Concept #6: Neighbors**

On the streets, neighbors are dangerous. Neighbors are people who might hurt you, rob you, or drag you into their tailspin. The correct response to a neighbor on the streets is avoidance.

My new houser neighbor waves at me in the morning.

I wasn’t sure what was happening. A man across the way just raised his hand and moved it back and forth in my direction while making eye contact and smiling.

I stood still.

Eventually I moved my hand back and forth too.

He seemed satisfied with this. He wasn’t mad that I was there. I think we’re friends.

-----

**Concept #7: Shoes**

People own multiple pairs.

Multiple pairs….of shoes.

In my previous life it was one pair. When they got destroyed you found another pair. Old ones in the trashcan with the baby wipes. Efficient. Housers, on the other hand, have several pairs of shoes and they choose which ones to wear each day based on criteria I don’t fully understand.

I now own two pairs of shoes and the decision making process every morning is genuinely overwhelming.

Last Tuesday I went grocery shopping in the slippers. Didn’t realize until I was three aisles deep. I wondered if anyone could tell that I was new to this. I need a sign above my head that says “Student Houser.”

I bought groceries and didn’t have to jam everything into a backpack, getting weighed down for the rest of the day. I could leave a grocery store with dignity.

I think.

-----

**Concept #8: The Living Room**

I now have a living room and I’m confused because I’m still alive when i’m not in it. I was living before, under a tarp. I lived on a beach. I lived under a bridge. I lived on a cement bed outside a sketchy store with a palm leaf for a pillow.

But apparently none of that counted and now I need a whole dedicated room for living, and that room needs a table and a lamp… which I now own.

I do resign with the whole vacuum cleaner thing.

A vacuum cleaner costs $125 and doesn’t fit in a backpack.

-----

**Concept #9: Sitting Down**

I can sit down anywhere in my home and nobody is going to tell me to move.

I know this. And yet...

I’m writing this on my living room floor because sitting on the floor feels safer than anything else. Somehow more familiar. More like something I understand and have practiced. There were no couches in my tarp in Central Park. There were no lamps and it certainly was not dry. I still expect someone to come over and tell me to keep it moving, that I can’t be here, that this space isn’t mine.

But it is mine. I live here. I pay rent. I can sit anywhere I want.

I’m might try the couch thing next week… just not there yet.

-----

Some days I feel like Mrs. Doubtfire. Like I’m a non-houser in a houser costume, hoping nobody notices. Praying that the normalcy of the situation will convert my actual self like a baptism and I’ll pop out the other side as someone who is stable… and knows which shoes to wear to the grocery store.

The baby wipes are still in the bathroom...

The Dunkin Donuts cup is still on the sink...

And last night I almost put a tarp down next to my bed, just to ease into things. Just to have something familiar while I figure out what comes next in the dry box.

I didn’t… but I thought about it.

That’s healing.

-----

*Stephen James Campbell writes every Wednesday on Substack. He can be found on Instagram at @stephen_james_campbell.*

Love Island, Miami Beach.

A snake bit someone to protect me while I was sleeping on Miami Beach.

Homeless down south is a completely different world from Boston homeless. Boston is brutal and cold and you are fighting the elements every single night. Miami is warm and serene and the cast of characters is something else entirely.

If Boston was a war, Miami Beach was a situation comedy. A dark one. After getting the rescue flight out from Under The Bridge I was ready for something with lighter vibes, like a beach. The salt water could bath me and the sand would be better than concrete.

-----

I had a major no friends on the streets rule. But I did take time to get to know people. To hear their stories. To occasionally share what I had. The people I did get close with always respected my boundaries and for that I thank them because it allowed us to build something like a friendship.

There was “Matthew”. A veteran with some kind of schizophrenia who practiced a form of street kung fu that I genuinely respected. I did not love his meth use or his drinking. But he gave thanks and praise to God and did his best to survive. How could I not respect that?

There was someone named after a bug. A person who told me openly and immediately that she had given up her name as a kid due to abuse.

Imagine having so little in this world that you don’t even have your own name.

There was someone named after a cat. A lovely person who lived openly on the streets of South Beach. One night it was pouring rain and I woke up freezing… actually shivering, which doesn’t happen often in Miami but it happens… and as I escaped the open beach I walked past where she was camping for the night on Collins ave in the cement cover outside the Walgreens near The Ritz. In that moment she reached under where she was sleeping, pulled out a warm dry sheet, and handed it to me without thinking. Instinctively. Like it was the most natural thing in the world. Later she didn’t even remember doing it. It was just automatic for her to take care of someone else.

Later she told me about her partner who also lived on the beach, someone I never met, who would hide in the bushes with a projector and have movie nights.

I got movie nights out there too. There’s a place called the Soundscape Garden that does an outdoor movie series for the public right near the ocean. A little park with a big flat wall for a screen. I would go there and act normal for a while and people would think I was normal. I saw It’s a Wonderful Life there.

There were Cuban guys on the beach who couldn’t speak English but who were wildly eccentric. There were people who were living on the streets because they were sex addicts and they wanted me to assist with street scams like selling cologne. There were strangers who would leave twenty dollar bills next to me while I slept because somehow they could tell that whoever I was, the cement bed outside the sketchy store with a small palm leaf for cover was never going to be enough to sustain a life.

-----

And then there was Cocaine Cowboy.

I heard the reputation before I met the man. His tag was all over the city. I pictured some guy from Texas with long hair and a wild energy. What I found was a totally regular looking guy who was a complete goofball. When he was calm he looked like he could be the CEO of a major wealth investment firm. By the way he acted you would think he was a total anarchist.

Paradoxically and simultaneously this was Sean.

I met him on the boardwalk that runs up and down South Beach. A public stretch where if you live on the street you take to the music and the lights of the hotels just to feel something normal for a while. He was wandering around in a fedora with high intensity energy and we connected immediately. The next day we hung out and I got photos of him walking into traffic with props, making scenes, tagging something right in front of everyone and then sprinting away. He had been arrested twenty five times when I met him. I literally watched him get surrounded by cops and taken away one afternoon like it was regular life.

He was also an artist who sculpted the world.

He named one creation Love Island.

-----

Love Island was a curated piece of land tucked into the backside of Miami Beach, where the protected dunes are. Mostly sand with beach grass. The kind of place most people walk past without looking.

I knew there were snakes in the grass and most people are very afraid of that. I had met a young devout Christian with classic long golden hair who slept right on the grass with the snakes. He claimed divine protection.

So when Cocaine Cowboy carved out Love Island I wasn’t afraid. I trusted God. What else can you do?

I fell asleep there alone one night.

I woke up to a man screaming next to me.

He had been bitten by a snake. I put the scene together pretty quickly; he had seen me sleeping, come over to see what he could grab, and the snake that had been resting next to me in the warm sand had bitten him.

To protect me.

That’s what I saw anyway. A snake, chilling in the dark on Love Island, deciding that the sleeping man next to it was not a threat and the man creeping toward it in the night was. And acting accordingly.

I thanked God. And I went back to sleep.

-----

Beauty and desperation side by side. Cat person handing me a warm sheet without thinking. Bug woman without a name.

Matthew praising God between swigs.

The Soundscape Garden and It’s a Wonderful Life on a big outdoor screen while I sat there homeless in the warm dark.

And a snake, sent by no one and everyone, holding the line while I slept.

God works in mysterious ways.

Sometimes He works in reptiles.

-----

*Stephen James Campbell writes every Wednesday on Substack. He can be found on Instagram at @stephen_james_campbell.*

Hallett Sanctuary. Central Park South. home.

Of all the pieces I could write, this is the one I owe the world. A documenting of a watershed moment, for history.

This is the story of how a large group of internet strangers came together in a moment of communal grace to rescue a man who had been stuck on an ice wall for twenty years. That man is me. And I’m writing this days after the last night I ever spent homeless.

At least I hope it was.

-----

By February of this year I had been street homeless for eight years straight.

Eight years. Whether it was Boston under a bridge, Miami on a beach, Central Park, that park on 57th and 10th, some sketchy situation in the Flatiron district, or a shelter where my life was up for grabs for anyone in a bad mood… eight years of that. And before those eight years, twenty years total of instability. I won’t get into what brought me back to the streets most recently. That’s a story for another Wednesday. What matters is that I was camping in Central Park and I was starting to break.

I had a spot and I’ll tell you where it was. Hallett Sanctuary, a sanctuary for animals. A safe place for things to grow. It has a gate that closes at sundown and if you jump it and walk the path you won’t run into many people. If you can find secret sacred places, nobody bothers you, for the most part.

So I was there with my tarp and the raccoons and the midnight mouse.

I was waking up multiple times a night ready to fight though… you have to be read.y. To run, to listen to the group 10 feet away who broke in the area but don’t know I’m there, to pull the tarp close so their flashlights won’t catch you. The tarp was a cloak of invisibility. I did honestly feel safer there than anywhere else I’d been… safe is relative.

I was throwing my clothes away every day and wiping myself down with baby wipes just to stay clean enough to make deliveries in the fancy buildings where the elevator opens directly into the penthouse. I was talking to myself on street corners. Saying things like “nobody cares about me” and “I don’t know what to do.” After eight straight years of haggard life I was starting to trip on the knife’s edge. Things were getting rusty and blunt.

The New York City grime stacks up on you. It’s the hardest city in the world to stay clean. And no matter how hard you work as a homeless bike courier full time you get slammed into less than minimum wage and The Ice Wall keeps giving. You can’t get your grip. Everything you have goes into survival.

Breaking point.

-----

So I prayed.

I felt like Job from the book of Job. God, what should I do? I will literally do anything. I am so sorry and I am so ready to just do what it takes.

And I felt something. A quiet answer. If Jesus was humble maybe I could be humble. Maybe I didn’t need to hide anymore and act like I had this handled. Maybe I couldn’t handle it. Maybe I should ask for help in ways I never had before. Maybe the person I thought I was wasn’t the person God wanted me to be.

I started taking notes. Brainstorming sessions on whatever scrap of paper I had. The only conclusion I could reach was this: be vulnerable. Be honest. Be authentic. No more turning away.

I had deleted a TikTok video in 2021 that got 50,000 views in a day because I was too embarrassed to let people see my situation. I had met MrBeast on Miami Beach… he offered to hang out on South Beach and I just declined because I was so locked in survival mode. I also genuinely had no idea who he was but thats another story.

The point is I had spent years hiding. Performing normalcy. Acting like I was just a cool guy passing through rather than a man sleeping under a tarp with raccoons.

I decided I was done with that.

I started talking to people. Showing people where I was living like it was just a normal thing to discuss. Like you talk about the Knicks and I talk about my tarp. Who cares. I would get coffee on the street, charge my phone with those rental charger things, carry this giant backpack full of fresh socks and underwear so I could throw them away every day and not smell like death when I took the elevator to the penthouse.

This was life. No more pretending otherwise.

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One afternoon I was sitting on a little monument in the Flatiron district looking at the building. The scaffolding had just come down from the renovations and it looked incredible. I was considering flights in my phone to LA or Miami or Boston or maybe Japan to teach English. Not because I wanted adventure but because I was surviving. The Ice Wall was giving and I was falling and I had no idea what to do. I was saying it out loud. No idea what to do. Like a crazy person. Like a man at the end.

That’s when this guy walked up and asked if he could put a microphone on me.

Why not.

His name was Brandon. And he talked to me in a way nobody had before. He was quietly shaking the truth out of me. It was fun but it was deep and he asked questions I didn’t expect. Brandon was fun. Like talking to Sherlock Holmes.

He walked away and I figured he probably wouldn’t even post it. Like who cares about this homeless guy honestly. I had apologized to him for a story that wasn’t “funner.”

A few days later he posted it.

I immediately looked away. I couldn’t look at it. I didn’t want to see it.

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And then the wave came.

First it was someone I knew. They saw my post and wanted me to know there’s opportunity there and many people want to start a fundraiser. Then it was hundreds of messages. Then thousands. People offering help, advice, love, resources. A friend started a fundraiser. My inbox was a literal flood I was swimming through.

I was like wtf is going on.

I was still there. Still in the park. Still tarping it with the raccoons. Still throwing my clothes away every morning. Still making deliveries. Still falling down The Ice Wall. But now thousands of people online were telling me they wanted to help pull me up and I was standing at the waterfall in Central Park where I washed my face every morning trying to understand what was happening.

Is this God? Is this real?

I started talking to strangers. A council formed. People who had seen the video and reached out with real specific help. Many had practical advice. Some just showed up with their whole hearts. My friend JJ told me the fundraiser was going to be successful and I should start thinking about what came next.

An opportunity came for a one bedroom apartment in Maine. One month guaranteed, option for a full lease after that. Quiet. Safe. Far from The Ice Wall. The internet council gave it the green light.

So I took it. Another Hail Mary pass. But this time it felt like when Tom Brady throws to Gronk and you know… this is it.

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May 19th was my 39th birthday.

I spent it in Halley Sanctuary in Central Park. In my tarp. With the raccoons and the midnight mouse. It was the last night I would ever spend homeless. I didn’t feel that with certainty yet. I just knew something was shifting. Something that had been locked away for twenty years was beginning to open.

I took a bus to Maine.

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Maine is quiet. Maine is dark at night. Maine is still in a way that New York City never is and my body didn’t know what to do with that.

The first night I woke up in terror. No memory of where I was. Ready to fight. My body had twenty years of violence in it that was equating as raw fear. Brain fog. Confusion. A man as a fighter with nothing left to fight.

I realized what was happening. I was detoxing. Detoxing fear. Detoxing being haggard. Detoxing being homeless. My body had been in a war for so long it didn’t recognize peace when it finally arrived.

I pushed through. Trust where you are. This was a rescue.

I was in a war. Years of it. Everything breaking all around me. Slowly losing ground… And then out of nowhere a rope dropped down in front of me. I looked up over The Ice Wall and there was a helicopter and inside the helicopter were one million people all smiling and waving at me.

I thought: what the fuck is going on…

It was Brandon and JJ and every person who donated or reached out or prayed or just watched that video and felt something real. All of it was God in action. Moving through ordinary people doing extraordinary things for a stranger they’d never met.

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There’s something I need to say before I close this article…

I had made a decision alone in late March, sitting on a street corner talking to myself, to stop hiding. To be vulnerable. To tell the truth about my life even if it cost me my dignity. That decision, made quietly, before any camera found me, is what everything else grew from.

If you are suffering right now and hiding it, please hear me.

Don’t hide. Pray. Talk to people. Look for help. Don’t lose hope and don’t get all balled up thinking the world is forgetting you. I spent twenty years in varying degrees of homelessness and eight years straight on the streets and I only this year decided to stop hiding.

And when I did the rest is what you already know.

The world isn’t just a dark scary place.

It can be nice and gentle and supportive.

And sometimes, if you keep climbing even when the ice keeps giving….

a helicopter shows up.

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*Stephen James Campbell writes every Wednesday on Substack. He can be found on Instagram at @stephen_james_campbell.*

Tarp home. Chatham, NY. That bike cost me my last $100.

When a bear breathes, you don’t just hear it, you feel it.

I learned this the interesting way.

I was open tarp camping in literal pitch black darkness somewhere in the woods of Chatham, New York. A quaint little upstate town surrounded by farming communities and a park called Crellin Community Park, which had seemed like a great place to set up camp. Two bears apparently felt the same way as they had decided to come visit me that night. At first I heard something big coming from the distance. Then I felt it breathe. I knew they were coming toward me by the way the sounds were increasing. I started taking inventory of what I had around. Any food? No. Never. That was a hardcore rule. They didn’t sound aggravated so I was guessing they weren’t pissed off.

It was too dark to get up though. And they were too close.

Even if I wanted to run there was no chance I could see anything. I would literally run into a tree, or trip and fall, or maybe run straight into the bear. So I did the only logical thing I could think of.

I fell the fuck asleep.

Like I literally just laid down and forced myself to sleep through sheer panic logic. I’m not sure how I did it. Maybe the moment just resolved itself into that conclusion on its own. Anyway… it seemed to work. I slept for maybe twenty or thirty minutes, maybe even an hour. When I woke up I reached for my phone and opened TikTok.

TikTok made a pretty jarring sound that emanated through the woods.

This startled the bears who had apparently been sleeping right next to me, maybe just a few feet away. They got up in a huff, decided I was no longer worth taking a nap with, and wandered back off into the dark. I felt their breathing less and less as they disappeared into the trees.

I thanked God for keeping me safe. And then I went back to sleep.

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This was during Covid. After Boston. After Miami. I was homeless… still. I was starved of any viable career options by entire industries shutting down overnight. With no safety net and no support structure I resorted back to the only thing I knew how to do. Survive. Climb The Ice Wall some more.

Since traveling was super cheap at the time I was taking to survival traveling. Just trying to locate a city or area that had any options for work. I figured upstate New York might have farms that needed labor. Something like that… I had this little phone that I don’t even remember how I kept charged in the woods, but I did. A local coffee shop supplied the power, maybe.

So here is how the operation went.

I got off at the Hudson train station. Walked a couple miles to the Walmart. Bought a bike with the last of my money. Then biked fifteen miles into Chatham and set up camp at Crellin Community Park.

Any plan is better than no plan. That’s the Art of War. Sun Tzu also says if you know your enemy and you know yourself you can fear not the result of a thousand battles. I’m not sure I fully understood myself or my enemy at that point… but I was certainly aware of how desperate my situation was.

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Before the bears there were the spiders.

I was settling in for the night when out of nowhere a few spiders began jumping near me and on me. “Jumping spiders…are they poisonous??” I turned on my phone for just a moment… the light illuminated a large group of them. I decided after that there would be no more light. Then thirty, maybe fifty of them, just appeared and started jumping all over me in the pitch black dark. All I could do was pray to God and ask him to keep me safe and help me relax. And eventually the jumping spiders gave way and left. I don’t know what they were doing. Some kind of jumping spider circus across the forest floor. They didn’t care about me at all. They just had some crazy shit to do like anyone else.

After the spiders came the bears.

After the bears came the morning.

I woke up under my tarp with the bike, ready to try to apply for a job in upstate New York again.

-----

I love tarps.

A tarp is always the way to go in place of a tent. A tent has poles, it’s heavy, and you have to carry all of it. A tarp is just a piece of fabric. But more importantly a tent is a trap. If someone is attacking you in the night, or if there’s a fire, or any kind of emergency, you have to find the exit, unzip it while praying the zipper isn’t jammed again. You’re also dealing with the structure of the thing potentially collapsing around you….. no good. With a tarp you just get up and run. Nothing is stopping you. Ever.

It may feel more dangerous because nature has open access to you.

But I am the guy who had fifty jumping spiders crawling on him and two bears sleeping next to him, and I am telling you open tarp is the way to go.

-----

The farm job search did not go well.

I was honing in on organic farms that needed labor. A couple of people in the area liked me. I even told them the reality of my situation honestly.

They thought it was quaint.

They did not, however, have opportunities that included both a job and a place to live. Nothing was catching. The Ice Wall was giving way beneath me again, and once it gave fully I had to get out and get back to an urban environment in order to recalibrate.

So I did what any reasonable person would do.

I packed up my shabby camp in the woods, biked back to Walmart, and returned the bike.

They were not happy about it. The bike was obviously used hard and stashed in the woods under a tarp for 3 days. But that was my last hundred dollars and I needed it back. I got my money and grabbed a train out.

Later I reflected on what I was trying to do out there VS what actually happened.

My plan was to find a farm job and get stable. God’s plan was apparently for me to face the darkness alone in the woods, get covered in jumping spiders, have two bears decide to take a nap next to me, nearly blow the whole thing by opening TikTok, and then return a used bike to a Walmart in upstate New York with absolutely no shame.

Who knows how the big man works.

But I’ll tell you this… I woke up every single morning out there, packed up my tarp, got on that bike, and went looking for a way to climb to stability.

The Ice Wall kept giving.

I kept climbing.

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*Stephen James Campbell writes every Wednesday on Substack. He can be found on Instagram at @stephen_james_campbell.*

The streets were my dojo

Hung Gar kung fu is a form of martial arts from southern China. Tiger, crane, and iron fist. Its root is low kicks and strong strikes.

Notice I didn’t mention blocking... Hung Gar embraces offense as the best defense. Attack and don’t ever stop attacking and push as hard as you can at all times, but be chill about it. Like a tiger crane.

There is also an esoteric aspect of internal cultivation that most people never “get to” in their pursuit of traditional Chinese Kung Fu, even after years of study.

Anyway…

Let me tell you about street kung fu.

Street kung fu is basically the same shit, but it’s different.

You learn it by living on the streets… but even then you’re not guaranteed to learn it. Sometimes you’re just at the whim of it. Street kung fu is more of a knife’s edge than any other form of martial arts. It is a formidable sport, and the people playing it are world class athletes. A great enemy on the streets is the lack of recovery time, so if kung fu bad… injury blossoms.

There are guidelines… The Art of War, The Yellow Emperor’s classic, Steal this Book…… and the best one….. The New Testament of Jesus Christ.

Ultimate kung fu is different than what people think.

-----

When I was still in my semi-paradise state as a kid, my mom was alive and providing for me and I could just do whatever. I took up all kinds of sports, karate and stuff. But it wasn’t until life threw me The Ice Wall curveball that I understood what kung fu really was.

Around 25 years old I met a man who decided he would teach me Ancient Chinese Gong Fu. My time studying with him… about four years straight, changed everything.

The Hung Gar lineage I studied can trace itself back through Shaolin. The names aren’t important. The ideas are.

The basic punches and kicks will get you through any scary situation. The forms will activate your energy systems. But it’s truly the mindset of the Hung Gar practitioner that allows them to handle serious pressure. And street kung fu practitioners… they can handle anything. Anywhere, anytime, right now. When you combine these two things something seemingly awesome happens.

However that was never really my focus. I’m just trying to survive this crazy world. If I present something as cool it’s because I feel like that’s what people want. I’m masking what I’m actually doing, which is survival. That’s what a lot of my life has been about. Looking like a cool guy while quietly freaking out and hoping nobody notices I’m slipping down The Ice Wall.

Kung Fu was the blade of the grappling axe into The Ice Wall that kept me from slipping down into the forever void.

-----

My time studying Hung Gar kung fu was not any different in life as far as instability and homelessness goes, unfortunately… But it did deepen my understanding of street kung fu in ways I couldn’t have anticipated.

There were definitely later times where I had to fight for my life on the street. I was robbed in my sleep. I would go from sleeping to fighting quite often. I defiantly had to fight multiple people at once, or sometimes intimidate people who wanted to assault me in strange ways. I had to protect weak people who I had gotten to know. Here is the truest thing street survival:

If you stand up and look tough, nobody’s really gonna mess with you.

And when you do actually have to throw down, if you’re ready and your kung fu is true, you can just run away. Push as hard as you can mentally physically spiritually to not be in a place where someone has to get hurt. Be that strong. Train that hard. Be relaxed as you conquer the greatest enemies. When you have to throw down it should be as easy as ice cream.

Ultimate Kung Fu.

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The Ice Wall of suffering and homelessness can also be likened to falling down an infinite pit. Nowhere to gain any ground…. Any attempts at righting yourself result in worse results…you keep slipping or falling further…some people would freak out and flail their limbs. But for me… embrace the fall… like a professional diver. A spiritual sky diver. The art of falling. The art of being in a tailspin. That’s why one of the most important rules was to not make friends on the streets. Because if we’re both in a tailspin and we mix it… it becomes an ultimate tailspin.

Street kung fu, dude.

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A lot of kung fu masters feel they are the best because they hold the most knowledge or technique.

I disagree.

I feel a master is always learning… from the mastery of everyone and everything around them, including nature and God.

Christ was the ultimate kung fu master.

He was the most humble. And humility requires the most strength. Think about how hard it is to get jumped and mocked and killed… and to forgive everyone. Never holding anything against anyone. Only asking for their forgiveness. He was so kung fu they wrote a book about him that has lasted 2000 years.

Christ saved countless souls with his kung fu. And it wasn’t punches, kicks, or forms that did it.

It was the truth.

And that’s the realest kung fu anyone can possess.

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*Stephen James Campbell writes every Wednesday on Substack. He can be found on Instagram at @stephen_james_campbell.*

This photo was taken in Boston during the time I write about in this piece

Boston has weird iconography.

There’s this giant milk bottle near the waterfront. Crab restaurants and a little pedestrian bridge that most people walk across without thinking twice, probably on their way to dine in the fashion of the times. That bridge is different for me though… I lived under it.

The ledge was about ten solid cement feet up, overlooking the pedestrian walkway below. I would climb up there every night and arrange myself. I propped cardboard up on one side to block anyone from seeing me, and behind me, stretching back into the dark, a cavern of industrial cables and pipes that went on forever. I literally never went back there. I stayed within three feet of the edge because if I took one wrong step into that industrial wasteland, it would have been over. That was the geometry of my “bedroom.” Three feet of ledge between the public and the void.

And then the wind would come.

Boston winter is brutal dude. It doesn’t knock. It comes through at night and decimates everything. It blew my whole setup apart like it was nothing, like I was nothing, and I’m up there ten feet in the air reassembling life in the dark with numb cement hands while people walk underneath and have absolutely no idea.

This was during Covid. The theaters had shut down immediately when it hit, and all the backstage work I’d been building toward in Boston just evaporated overnight. When they started coming back online I tried to hold on…

…tried sleeping in the Arboretum, tried sleeping in downtown Crossing, tried showing up to work backstage for professional international artists like I was just a regular guy who had a regular place to go home to afterward.

Nobody knew. FR nobody knew.

I was this haggard dude who’d been sleeping under a bridge with people urinating on the wall ten feet below me, wind destroying my nest every other night, and I’m showing up to run the backstage of these productions and holding it together. I don’t fully understand how I did it. What I know is that it broke my heart.

-----

Food was the Starbucks dumpster at the end of the alley near the bridge.

I had a method. I would wander over looking lost… like just some lost dude, nothing to see here. Sometimes I’d pick up a piece of trash off the ground like I was being a good citizen and throwing it away, and then suddenly I’d be all up in the dumpster, ripping bags open, grabbing whatever looked like it was full of carbs, and moving. Fast. You get good at this. That’s the thing about homelessness nobody knows… you get good at it, and getting good at it is one of the most demoralizing things that can happen to a person.

Here’s a detail that stayed with me: my brother had a boyfriend who worked at that Starbucks. We’d never been introduced. I don’t think my brother was thrilled about me being homeless…I wasn’t thrilled about it either. But there I was, in the dumpster, pulling out the leftovers of a place where someone who almost knew me worked, eating in the dark under a bridge, trying not to think too hard about any of it.

You can’t think too hard about any of it. That’s another thing nobody knows. Survival and reflection cannot exist at the same time. Immediately it’s survival. Someday you can think about it…

-----

There was a street camp on another part of the bridge. Five or six tents. People I could see from my ledge.

I don’t go over there.

Partly it was the drugs. There was a lot of drug use in that camp and I had rules… hard ones, the kind I’d written down and lived by like scripture. One of them was no hard drugs, not ever, not when people were pushing it, not when the darkness was so much that you understood exactly why a person would want to stop feeling things. I held that line with the help of Christ.

But the other reason is harder to admit. I kept my distance partly because I am very good at being homeless. Its a collection of instincts and disciplines and hard rules that accumulate over years of surviving, and sometimes that package can be a little intimidating to people who are in a different kind of tailspin. I didn’t want to make them uncomfortable. So I stayed on my ledge and they stayed in their tents and we all survived separately in the same cold.

I felt bad about that.

If you don’t have rules on the streets you’re done.

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One cold night I was sleeping on cardboard over a warm steam vent downtown. A security guard had kicked me off one about two blocks over and I had settled into a new one. He was just doing his job. A woman came and just laid down next to me on the cardboard. She seemed kind. She was deep in something crazy, clearly, but she was nice. I dipped quick because I can’t afford the complication, but I thought about her afterward. I hope she found her way.

That’s the thing about street homelessness. You meet people whose stories would shatter you forever if you heard them. Stories of others I don’t know if I can ever fully tell.

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I sent one of my only friends a video of the bridge I was living under.

She couldn’t believe it.

She offered to buy me a flight to Florida. Flights were about forty dollars during Covid because nobody was going anywhere and the airlines were desperate. She said I could be a snowbird. I figured I could use the ocean to bathe and sleep on the sand and at least I wouldn’t be dirty or frozen. So I took the offer.

I had no idea what I was doing. I was so deep in survival mode that the concept of a plan had become almost meaningless. This was not a vacation. This was a Hail Mary pass thrown into the dark by someone who cared about me, and I caught it because it was the only thing coming my way. Sometimes you just have to play the cards you’re given.

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I stepped off a bus in Miami Beach.

After Boston. After the bridge and the ledge and the wind and the dumpster and the cold. After all of that I stepped off a bus and I looked up.

Black ocean. White sand.

I walked to the water.

I don’t know what I was feeling. Relief... desperate awe. Something that doesn’t have a name… I had been frozen and haggard and invisible and perched on a ledge three feet from the void, and now there was warm salt water around my feet. The ocean didn’t care who I was or where I’d been or how I’d gotten there.

It just healed me.

That’s what I remember most about that night. The ocean receiving me like a mother embraces her child.

God works in ways I will spend the rest of my life trying to understand.

Sometimes He works in forty dollar flights and black oceans and the kindness of a friend who sees a video of a bridge and decides that’s not where you belong.

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*Stephen James Campbell writes every Wednesday on Substack. He can be found on Instagram at @stephen_james_campbell.*