BENEATH MARKET Street, in San Francisco, live half a dozen teenage runaways who pool the day’s panhandling coins to buy the evening’s cheapest bag of heroin. Some date each other, some write poetry, some have sleeping bags and many have dogs, so that when you visit their squat, you have the sensation you are also visiting a dog shelter turned loose—there’s howling, as if with newfound freedom, and something feral, which is also what the teens emanate. In fact, the kids call themselves the Road Dawgz, and many of them hop trains, like Randi, who left Fresno and her parents by hopping a midnight freight.
I was twenty-three, and my job—I got paid actual money to do this—was to ask kids who lived on the street (or in this case, beneath it) to write poems. What did I know, at twenty-three, about asking someone close to my own age, who was addicted to meth and heroin, to tell me about their life? I didn’t know squat.
“Diddly-squat” is an old American term, originated by carnival workers who needed a secret word for money (a few nickels and dimes) to attract discreet gamblers along their traveling route. They’d say “diddly squat” as a code for coins. “Diddly” stuck, because it meant, in essence, “very little.” It meant “the least.”
To find the would-be poets, I’d wait along Market Street, the heels of the morning’s commuters clicking against the sidewalk, swinging out of Peet’s Coffee to drop coins into Randi’s panhandling cup.
“Thank you!” she would belt, her sweetness clear, but also her exhaustion, hangover, the wetness of
