Some of the friends we met along the way. Photos by the author

This month I spent four days living undercover among the beggars, drunks and junkies of the Berlin underground.

I’d fancied exploring Berlin’s welfare food giveaways for a long time. I always thought the food there couldn't be any worse than the stuff I cook at home, plus it's free and you get to be around pretty interesting people. I heard there were wild sex and drugs parties so I was really into the assignment. In the end I got a little bit more than I bargained for.

Like most Berliners of my age, most of my wardrobe already looks like bum couture, so I just had to pick the jacket with the most rips, the sweater with the most holes and the trousers with the most grease stains and the most obvious sewed up crotch. I had a bumbag where I hid my camera phone wrapped up in a dirty sock.

Finally, I downloaded and printed the guide to shelters and food pantries from www.ofw-leitfaden.de. I found out there's shitloads of resources for the homeless on the internet, and if you go to www.homeless.org you can participate in discussion forums where bums do online begging.

MONDAY
My first goal was to find John and Shelley, two of the city’s most famous beggars. If you ever happen to meet them and let them bum some cigarettes you'll hear the most amazing stories about life on the road, dealing LSD to rock stars and politicians, running off with underage wives and partying. But I’m not going to go on about them any more, especially since I couldn’t fucking find them. Instead I started drinking some Sternburg Export beer from Depot 35, a Berlin “bar” that's just a window where you can buy half-litre beers for 50 cents from a man with a big moustache until very late into the night. Even though it's located in a heavily gentrified area and surrounded by hip cafes, the presence of cheap booze attracts swarms of crusty punks and unemployed. This is where I found my first friends.

After waving around a fresh pack of cigarettes in the air I attracted a couple of Berliners, Henry and Lötze, who told me the story of how they got to be homeless. It was a story I would hear a thousand times during the next few days:

“When the wall came down, many companies closed and for many people who've never had to look for employment or lost their job before it was too late to learn the new rules. I went straight on the dole and I’ve been there ever since, getting drunk every day of my life and hoping the new welfare system doesn’t fuck me around too much.”

During attempts to keep interested in their drunken babbling, I sensed some homoerotic undertones in the way those two interacted. I kind of ignored it for a while but later on I would regret not having paid more attention to those signals.

I left Henry and Lötze to pay a visit to a couple more celebrity bums I had heard about but didn’t know personally. We knocked on the door of the guy living in a van in the empty carpark in the corner of Linienstrasse and Alte Schonhauserstrasse but he wasn’t home. Still, fuck it, my friends said. There’s no lock on the door so we snooped around his shack. He had a dining table with some old food, a bucket full of porn magazines and a grill in his patio. Some buckets under water leaks served as a dishwasher and washing machine. The socks in the prehistoric washing machine were covered in tiny worms for some reason. Smelled really bad.

As me and my two fruity friends chatted and drank more beer we travelled to the 24 hour 1 Euro pizza place in Schlesisches Tor, where this old methadone addict hangs out 24 hours a day and charms anyone up for it. He was staying up all night so he could go early tomorrow to the hospital for his fix. I invited him for a cup of coffee and he was so grateful he grabbed me and hugged me a little too tightly for my liking.

He asked me to open my mouth, and he stared at my molars for a long while. Then he repeated the hug thing kissing me on the mouth this time. I became paralysed and could not really stop him as he came back for a third strike while mumbling something about tits being completely unimportant to him and sticking his tongue in my mouth. As he started shaking and grabbing a little too hard I totally freaked out and I ran to the toilet to rinse my mouth.

By this time I noticed it was 5 AM so I escaped them, got into a random apartment block and slept in the top flight of stairs that leads to the roof.

Tuesday
Feeling great after three hours of sleep, I went to look for some charity pantries my friends had told me about. The first one had only dirty apples (with nowhere to wash them) and some raw pumpkin you could take home. In another room there was bread and people peeling potatoes. I tried to grab some bread but they wouldn’t let me. I was too tired to try to figure out why so I just sat and watched all the beggars playing cards for hours in their mismatched charity outfits. Anyway I was luckier at the church in Wranglerstrasse. A cute black nun sat me down and gave me as much chicken bone soup and old bread as I wanted without asking me anything. We were treated like little kids in kindergarten, which is a lot nicer when you’re really embarrassed and on your last knees than having to figure out who to ask for food and if you need a social security ID or whatever.

The street where the church stands is a very hectic bum hotspot, with a café kind of place where you can hang out and get advice and a shelter. A lot of them just stand in the corner of the Kaiser’s supermarket and spend the whole day going in and out of it for more beers.

I just stayed with them all day in the same corner doing nothing and talking about pensions, football, and how we miss good old communism. The ratio of men to women is always incredibly disproportionate, in all of this area there’s only one chick and she looks and talks like Jabba the Hutt. She rolls her joints with the crappiest looking weed I’ve ever seen, just showing more proof that these people always get the worst of everything. A few of the guys tell me they’re going to a shelter and that I can stay there too. They promise me it has clean sheets and some soup and everything. Sweet. But I notice a certain eagerness in their offer that’s kind of scary. I get it now. My clothes and hair might look as bad as theirs, but my post-teenage skin is mostly smooth and hairless like a woman’s, and free of diseases, burns or scars. I realise they’re sizing me up for a raping. Yikes.

When it starts getting cold and we head for the shelter, I feel like I’m heading for my own doom. Doom in my bum. But there’s no turning back now, I don’t want my editor to call me a coward. The place is a big room with around 10 bunkbeds, a bit like those in army movies. For some reason, when the lights go off the smell of their rotten feet and crusty bodies starts to intensify and of course, I cannot sleep. It’s not only the threat of rape that keeps me on my toes, but also a symphony of disgusting snores, people mumbling quite loudly in their sleep and the creaky sound of those with very, very uneasy sleep. I think I can feel tension between my hosts as they talk among themselves about who is going to give it a try first, and my beliefs are confirmed when the bigger of them, a bearded, ponytailed Ossi humbly asks me if he can sleep in the same bed as me. He’s very cold and can’t sleep he says. He can offer me some Rohypnol or some Xanax in exchange. I’m not freaking out as bad as I thought I would be, and I turn his offer down. I’m alone for the rest of the night.

Wednesday
This is my last day, and, the threat of homosexual rape aside, I’m quite beginning to enjoy it. Of course, it’s not real bum life that I’m living since I know my bed is awaiting me lovingly at home, and my experience is way more adventurous that normal homeless every day. Normal bums have a very fixed routine and territory they rarely drift out of. The Irish brothers, who are the most dynamic I’ve met so far, are always around the same 4 streets. In the corner of Brunnenstrasse with Kastanienallee there’s an old lady with a Sid Vicious tattoo on the back of her hand who sits there without changing her unhealthy pose all day and all night. The crews at supermarkets are always exactly the same people, drinking the same beer. I spend the morning searching for a cheap cup of coffee, and after much exploration I find a crappy bakery that sells a crappy cup for 70 cents, which I still find abusive. It’s no wonder all those people on welfare would rather be drunk all the time than apply themselves to find work, since a cup of coffee is normally 1 euro and you can buy five half-litre beers for the same money at Netto supermarkets.

My last destination was Bahnhof Zoo, which was the mythical heroin addicts meeting point in the 80s immortalised in Christiane F. Apparently the police pretty much cleaned the place in the end of the 80s, but it’s still the scariest outcast meeting point in the whole city. There’s more shelters, social assistance and food pantries around the area than in the rest of Berlin put together. There’s even a cute little syringe and condom vending machine. The Bahnhof mission serves pretty good sandwiches and cake with a minimum of fuss to a very varied clientele—from teenage to elder prostitutes, from crusty punks to hot girls in fancily-dyed Mohawks who were probably just trying to imitate their heroes from the 80s. OK, I have to admit, there was only one teenage whore, but she was so cute and full of life she totally broke my heart. She looked like any other German teenager, with the pastel blue jacket, blonde piggytails and pink makeup, only very thin and unhealthy looking. I was not in the mood to make friends any more, but her and the older hookers with wigs seemed pretty fun to hang out with.

That night I biked half the city under the rain to another shelter only to find the information on the internet was wrong again, and there was only a big Mercedes-Benz building there. Oh well. I wonder how many people freeze to death every year while looking for the damn place. Maybe they need to update the website.

HUMPTON B. DUMPTON