BummerBy Melissa Dribben
Inquirer Staff Writer
Last Saturday, Temple University senior Steve Wood set out from his
parents' home in Washington Township, bought a $4.25 bus ticket to
Philadelphia, and headed for the streets.

Well rested after 10 hours of solid sleep in a warm bed, and carbed up on
his last supper of four slices of cold pizza, he thought he was prepared
for his mission: a week of class break living among the city's homeless.

Features editor of the Temple News, Wood, 21, had been planning this
since February, when he and his colleagues at the paper decided the
experience would give him great material for a series of articles.

"I wanted to try to get into their world, to delve into their culture, to
explore a world that everybody's around but not many know," he said. "I
wanted to put a face to the homeless."

Five days before beginning the experiment, he stopped shaving, to blend
in better. He had interviewed a homeless man who hangs around Temple to
get tips on panhandling and places to sleep.

In the last hours, he jotted down a few key phone numbers from his cell
phone contact list, took off his gold chain, and stuffed his backpack
with essentials: two pairs of socks; a toothbrush; a copy of Crime and
Punishment; a tape recorder; $10; a fuzzy blue baby blanket; and his
father's parting gift, a can of pepper spray. Then, at 6 p.m., he headed
out into the icy dusk, walking south on Broad Street.

"I went into this with a big heart," Wood said on Thursday during an
interview in the Reading Terminal Market, a short trudge from the spot in
the Market East train station where he has found shelter on a few Code
Blue nights.

"I had plans of sleeping under the stars in LOVE Park. I thought I'd be
buddy-buddy with people who'd give me the scoop. And I'd checked the
weather. Everything said there was a 10 percent chance of precipitation
and no temperatures below 40 degrees. It seemed very doable."

Five days in, foggy-headed from fatigue and subdued by hunger, he
admitted that whatever romantic notions he had about toughing it out
among society's dispossessed vanished about an hour after he'd locked the
door, leaving his cell phone, credit card, running water and central heat
behind.

"I got hungry," he said.

One of his first stops was the Ben Franklin Bridge, where he expected to
find homeless people who would teach him the ropes. "But no one was
there. There's a reason they sleep in shelters or in hideaways. It's
unbearable out there."

By midnight, Wood found a bench in LOVE Park and fell asleep for a half-
hour. "I woke up with chills like I'd never had before. I felt like I was
rattling," he said. "At that point, I was almost, 'All is lost.' "

He kept going, though. At 2 a.m., he found a Wawa market on Spring Garden
Street and, after staring at the cappuccino machine for a good long
while, bought a hot chocolate for $1.39. Only eight hours had passed
since he started, and he'd already blown a quarter of his budget for the
week.

He walked to the Art Museum, then back toward City Hall, and finally, at
4 a.m., followed some wayward souls into Market East, chose a patch of
wall, slumped to the floor, and fell into an anxious sleep.

Just before dawn, he was awoken by a genuinely homeless man screaming at
him. Nearby, a man was fighting with a teenage girl. The sleeping men and
women in the station tried to ignore the disturbance.

"Then suddenly, a woman come up to us, holding her neck. There's blood on
her hands. Her neck is slit." The woman, apparently, was not mortally
wounded, because she was cursing about the man and the teenage girl; she
walked out of the station, vowing to call the police.

"I was now shocked," Wood recalled.

In the aimless days and woozy nights that followed, he interviewed the
homeless and attended a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. He was rousted from
warm corners by police; labeled a bum by a security guard who caught him
brushing his teeth in the men's room at the Greyhound bus station;
solicited for sex by a transgender couple; taken in at a shelter where he
was fed chicken soup and treated to a Nicolas Cage double feature,
including Ghost Rider; and mysteriously handed 75 cents by a drug dealer.
He managed to read five pages of Crime and Punishment.

From the start, his parents tried to talk him out of the project.

"We really didn't like the idea," said his father, Mike, a 48-year-old
mortgage consultant. "Parts of Philly are worse than Iraq."

He knew, however, that there was little chance of dissuading his son.
"He's hard-working and very motivated, but also very stubborn."

The second oldest of their four children, Steve has always had a taste
for odd adventures, his mother, Mary, said. He and a high-school friend
once spent three days running from home to New York City, arriving on New
Year's Eve.

A special-education teacher, Mary, 47, said that when she realized her
son was actually going through with the project, "I had this feeling I've
never felt before. An empty, knotted feeling only a mother can feel. I'm
envisioning dread and doom."

She is grateful, she said, that he kept his promise to call every night
to reassure them he was all right.

Thursday at 6 p.m., with 48 hours to go, Wood was spent in every sense of
the word. His hair hanging greasy and limp and his last pair of dry socks
reeking from sweat, he took stock: "Right now, I have 16 cents and a
peanut-butter cracker. That's it."

Passing ATMs, he said, he felt yearning. Seeing passersby holding cups of
coffee, he felt resentful. Hearing homeless people complain about what
the city owes them, he loses patience.

"I don't want to be a junior-varsity social worker, but to some extent
they make their own bed. I feel bad for them, but a lot of them have a
sense of entitlement."

The chronic cold and lack of sleep were compounded by his worries about
staying safe and collecting information for his article (the first is
scheduled for publication on Tuesday). Exhausted and disoriented, he
said, he'd lost track of the days.

"But I know that I'm only one shower removed from being back to normal."