The Hobo Diet

After graduating from college, I decided tospend five weeks living as a homeless man in Sin City.So on New Year's Eve, I boarded anairplane and flew to Vegas to be homeless (and, yes, I noted theirony). All I had on me was a backpack with one change of clothes,a cheap blanket, and some pens and notepads. The first person I saw as a "homeless man" was a cop.Actually, there were three of them , and they quickly pointed out thatI was on the street and that I needed to hop the long fence borderingthe casinos to get out of traffic. In the process of doing so, Iunwittingly cut my hand open on the fence and was immediatelysurrounded by police and paramedics. Two ambulance rides and twelvestitches later, I found myself outside a hospital miles away from "TheStrip" with no money, no insurance, and no identity. Over the next five weeks I slept in shelters and in druginfested lots, worked day labor jobs for minimum wage only to lose themoney at the casinos, and met an array of interesting individualsranging from Tiger Todd, motivational speaker to the homeless, toBlack, a very high and horny gangster with a gray glass eye and aseemingly endless supply of cocaine. That said, the overwhelmingmajority of people I met living in the shelters and on the streets werecompassionate, interesting, often inspirational individuals. Check out The Hobo Diet: Eat Less Walk More, and Try Not to Die. It's like reading a firsthand account of homelessness if it were produced by Vh1, only with a lot less lists and a lot more drugs.