The 'streeties' of Lower Queen: life on the edge in the centre of the city

Monday, 9 July 2018

'Go and sleep on your own country's streets,' passersby tell Takaya Mimubu. 'Nah bro, I am,' he replies.

Auckland Council has announced it will count the city's rough sleepers, to fully grasp the scale of homelessness. We took to the streets to learn about those on society's edge in the city's centre, whose current way of life the council hopes to eliminate.

In the space of 20 minutes on a Thursday mid-morning, a Queen St rubbish bin attracts three different men. Each leans in to rummage, and emerge triumphant with something edible.

The first man hefts an old-fashioned backpack and wears no shoes. His name is O'Dwyer and he crosses the nearest intersection diagonally, then plonks himself down beside the ASB Bank.

O'Dwyer throws his bin sandwiches high into the air – they soar and then splat onto Queen St.

Takaya Mimubu is 25-years old and has been homeless for about four years, mainly sleeping on Auckland's Queen St.

A hundred metres up the street there's a fat blue caterpillar beneath a bus stop bench. It's a person in a sleeping bag, the opening pulled snugly over their head. Behind the bus stop is an older rough sleeper called Kevin who we'd spied convulsing beside a school two weeks ago; he'd said he'd been smoking synthetic cannabis at the time.

Long-time rough sleeper O'Dwyer tossed sandwiches retrieved from a bin into the middle of Queen Street on Thursday morning.

* High number of homeless Aucklanders staying off streets after being given homes

* Homeless man dies on the Auckland cemetery bench he called home**

A hundred metres down the street is a single mattress in an alcove next to McDonald's. Two women sit there, one says she's homeless, the other says she's housed 'but still likes hanging out', and they're calling out to a gaggle of rough sleepers across the street. Neither want to talk to us, but one obligingly shouts 'oi! TK!' – to summon 'the homeless Japanese guy' she says is always keen for a chat.

TK, whose full name is Takaya Mimubu, saunters over with a smile. The two women move on, and another woman approaches the mattress. She pulls down her trousers and squats on the pink fabric, apparently about to urinate. She cackles as we walk away with TK, back towards the rubbish bin.

TK is 25 years old and his parents were born in Japan. He, however, was born in Auckland's North Shore Hospital. His Asiatic features draw comments from passersby, expressing their disapproval of an apparent foreigner begging in New Zealand.

'Go and sleep on your own country's streets,' says one man.

'Nah bro, I am,' replies TK, in his Kiwi-as accent. TK looks a bit hipster-homeless, lacking the gnarled skin and regulation bushy beard of most older rough sleepers in the city, one arm inked with sakura blossoms and a rising sun. He says he's been on the streets for four years, more or less, and recently got back to Auckland after a stint hitch-hiking around the South Island that ended badly at a Golden Bay toilet.

'I was sleeping in the public toilets for a week or two, then these streety people came. With a gun – like, 'bang bang',' he explains.

Takaya Mimubu dosses down in any nest he can find: 'if you're late, your spot's gone,' he says.

'I was like 'eeeh? Are you serious?''

He trails off, as he's prone to doing mid-speech, but regains traction with 'so, I had to go to court in Nelson for possession of an offensive weapon'. The weapon was his kiwifruit knife, he laughs, 'from the $2 shop, bro'.

TK made it back to Auckland and currently hops between the mounds of blankets and cardboard left by other rough sleepers that dot Queen St.

'Everyone has their own spot, but the first one who gets there gets to sleep there,' he says. 'If you're late, your spot's gone.'

Each morning he wakes up hacking: 'It feels like my tube – you know, what the oxygen runs through – has tightened,' he says. 'You cough heaps on the street. You get sick 'cause you're not handling the temperature.'

TK has an infected foot. It's purple and pink and hot with a red spot on the sole, he says, and it hurts to take his shoe off. TK doesn't like begging but did ask around for moisturiser and new socks recently, which he says are helping soothe his beleaguered feet.

Despite the poor health, TK is upbeat. He's popular with other rough sleepers – he calls them 'streeties' – bumping fists with about half a dozen walking by in the short time we're speaking. He's working on keeping himself clean and says he befriended staff at one Queen St cafe, who let him wash in their bathroom.

TK's happiest when in the position to donate a cigarette, rather than bludge one for himself. He reckons others get a similar buzz from giving food or money to homeless people; 'it makes you feel good to do something for someone else,' he says.

Streeties are the 'angels' of downtown Auckland, according to TK. Lost phones, for instance, might get picked up by the homeless and later reunited with their owners. That happened just last weekend, he says, when a woman rang a phone he'd found and he arranged to meet her to hand it over. He says he was given $40 for his troubles.

O'Dwyer follows the sun around downtown Auckland.

'We want to be appreciated,' he nods, absent mindedly. 'But street people can't be appreciated just by sitting there, so we try to throw respect. I love helping other people. Pretty much I try to make the day better for the people, make them feel good.'

TK thinks his mum 'lives in Japan now' and says his dad and stepmother 'are somewhere in New Zealand'. He calls his dad each Monday.

O'Dwyer spends a lot of time on Auckland's Queen St.

'Dad wants me to have a place to stay and get a job…,' TK trails off again. He doesn't want to talk about family and is vague about how he ended up homeless in the first place.

'I'm off,' he announces, suddenly but cheerily. 'Gotta hustle for cigs, catch up with my mates, keep that good flow going.'

The man who threw his sandwiches into the middle of the road is still sitting outside the ASB – just across Wellesley St – and has been brushing his teeth for some time.

He introduces himself grandly as 'O'Dwyer', after spitting his toothpaste froth into a stained coffee cup. He wonders if we'd be interested in knowing he's a distant cousin of a former mayor of New York.

There was, in fact, a New York Mayor named William O'Dwyer in the late 1940s.

O'Dwyer of Queen St empties his froth onto the footpath, then scoops it back into the coffee cup. 'One must be tidy,' he says.

When asked why he chucked the sandwiches, he says he'd wanted to feed the pigeons. He says the sandwiches had meat in them and that he'd been a vegetarian for decades. Buses ran over rectangles of bread and mince, squashing them into the road.

O'Dwyer grew up on a vast station in Hawke's Bay, he says, and has been on and off the street since leaving school at age 15. He is now 52, with cracks in his heels a centimetre deep and a dirt-impregnated backpack carefully stitched together with twine. His mind wanders.

While explaining why he'd been trespassed from the police station – he'd dropped them off some bags of faeces he'd found under a bridge, he says, because 'it seemed odd the rats weren't eating the s…' – he jumped as through struck by epiphany.

'Hey! Has anything happened to the Statue of Liberty lately?' he asks, urgently.

'No? Oh … I just thought, you know, with what happened to the Twin Towers.'

Then he started outlining his daily routine: 'Doing research' at the library, chasing patches of sun down Queen St, and sleeping under assorted bridges.

Without warning, he heaves himself up and stumbles into the traffic to start scraping up the remnants of sandwich.

As we take our leave, O'Dwyer mutters that he wished 'some of those bloody birds got run over' while pecking away at his offering.