Homeless Hunger: A Man's Gotta Eat

[How I scammed my way into free CiCi's Pizza buffets in order to survive]

Dire Straights

Have you ever been in a situation where you had no choice but to adapt to your current settings lest you implode, starve, or die? Maybe you didn't face such extreme outcomes as these, but I can bet that at one point in your life you have been faced with a situation where in order to preserve your social status, dignity, self esteem or public perception, you chose to adapt to incredibly uncomfortable circumstances in order to preserve at least some facet of yourself. Its in our human nature, sink or swim. This looks very different from one person to the next, depending on the individual, but one common strand of humanity that we all share which transcends every era, denomination, ethnicity, race and creed is that all of us at some point can identify with intense pain, regardless of the cause, whether by our own omission or commission.

Hunger Pangs

A month into my inevitable homeless existence on the bleak junkie filled streets of Austin TX, after charity, kind deeds, and sympathetic handouts from other fellow homeless folks ran-out, it became clear that if I wanted to eat on a regular basis then I myself would have to adapt to my current predicament like I never had in my life.

Next time you have a week off from work, try this fun-filled experiment: don't eat for 4 days. Spoiler alert- unless you are shooting meth/heroin or are a grizzly bear hibernating during peak winter season in Alaska- you're not going to last long, which is something to be thankful for. Our bodies are not designed to go extended amounts of time without food lest we literally begin to breakdown mentally, physically and emotionally. The point is, when faced with the peculiar predicament of intense hunger, people will either find something to eat or die. Its in our DNA, for good reason.

Meth Diet

I had been on a 4 day meth binge roaming the streets of Austin when suddenly the frightening thought hit me like Lawrence Taylor hit Joe Theissman, "I am starving!" I had not eaten an ounce of food in 4 days, much less thought about it either, and now that I was coming down from the inevitable roller coaster that methamphetamine binges tend to provide, I was slowly starting to wake back up into reality. If you have never binged on meth, its not like boarding a 19 hour flight to Singapore where you gradually make your way up the runway, take off, coast for most of the trip, touch down, then head straight to starbucks to recap your journey. Essentially its like one second getting hit by a truck of uncontainable euphoria, which catapults you into a cataclysmic cosmos of nervous excitement, spins you around for days, then the next second it randomly drops you off on the corner where it all started, ceasing to exist. Seriously, if you're trying to avoid life at all costs, its a great alternative. Point being, now that my neurotransmitters, emotions, and entire being were not being held at a hostage style stand still, my natural existence could proceed, and the first thing on my mind was, "I have to eat, I feel like im literally going to starve to death."

For anyone who's ever been homeless, there's not a special card or token you get that you can trade for cash and prizes at the store of your choice when you get hungry, need something to drink, etc. This is the harsh reality of choosing to live on the streets. Regardless of the cause of my homelessness, hunger didn't really care, and I still had to eat one way or another. Since I was only a month deep into my "journey", I had convinced myself I was still lightyears above eating out of trash cans, another reality that would eventually come crashing down, so I reached into my resourceful junkie bag of tricks that I had accrued over the years and came up with a sure-fire way to appease my appetite.

Rundberg Lane

Rudberg lane has always been known as homeless haven. At any given point of the day you will see vast amounts of tents, encampments as well as open-air drug markets. Naturally, due to my propensity for schedule 1 substances, this is where I chose to make home. One night while fighting off hunger pangs I decided to make my way towards a CiCi's pizza less than 50 yards from my encampment, one of the rare times I actually had the $5.85 buffet fee. As I approached the store I noticed a large sign in the window that said, "Free Birthday buffet with new Cici's App!" As you can guess, the wheels of junkie resourcefulness started to churn in my ever scheming mind.

[CiCi's Pizza on Rundberg ln where I would regularly eat]

Upon careful inspection I came to realize that the Cici App actually had safeguards in place so people couldn't get a free buffet as they celebrated their ever daily recurring birthday, as i'm sure people had tried. If you signed up and put your birthday as "today" you would have to wait a fresh 365 in order to cash in. HOWEVER, if you put your birthday as YESTERDAY or any other previous day in the past 14 calendar days, the app would immediately let you cash in for your ever deserved free buffet. So, I did the dance, accepted the "Happy Birthday" from the employee, and sat and stuffed myself for an hour and a half.

Resourceful Thinking

Next day, I decided to do the same thing. But, as fate would have it, I encountered another roadblock. Somehow, the app algorithm was framed in a way that recorded your phones IMEI number specifically to prevent people from doing exactly what I was doing. But, as I came to know so intimately, when there's a will there's a way! Upon careful inspection as well as a little trial and error, I successfully discovered that if I erased the app, changed my email address and name on the redemption form, it would let me redeem as many buffets as I could. Jackpot anyone? Now, I know what you're thinking. Yes, I would be glad to show you how to do this as well. Just kidding.

[CiCi's pizza free buffet app I took full advantage of]

My strategy was simple. I plotted how many Cici's pizza's were on bus routes in my immediate vicinity, 4 to be exact, I became familiar with the shifts of each manager in order to raise obvious suspicion, then I would rotate stores on a daily basis. All told, I usually cashed in on this devious scam two to three times a week. I was caught red handed multiple times, they knew it, I knew it, but I guess they figured why try and kick someone when they were so destitute in life, or possibly they didn't want to cross that "the customer is always right" line. I'll never know. I would like to think that they were taking pity on me and helping me out, even when I was stealing from them right under their noses. I would like to think that if I were in their shoes I would do the same.

Harsh Reality

Despite my resourceful, at times ingenious, ways of surviving at all costs, the sad reality is that I had delegated myself to a life of constant stress, chaos, depravity and degradation. I was resolved to scamming pizza apps just to eat once every 3 days. Being a junkie in the midst of a full-blown addiction, I took pride in that accomplishment. I wore it like a badge of honor, especially when I was able to tell other homeless people how to follow through with it as well. It was if I had a purpose, moreover, it was something that I could tangibly control in my totally uncontrollable life. I carried much shame for this for a long time. I felt dirty, gross, and weak. I had a hard time even reminiscing on this memory due to the fact that it encompassed just how lost and troubled I was at that time in my life. However, through much emotional, mental, and spiritual recovery, I now have compassion for that homeless person, myself, who was just doing what he knew, or was willing to know at the time, in order to not go hungry. Yes, in the perfect world, what I was doing was wrong. In the perfect world, no one would be homeless and the inevitable grey areas that so many of us at times live in wouldn't exist. But, I don't live in a perfect world, I can't, and I would refuse to even if I could, because in this imperfection is where I have found myself, my calling, and my purpose for living.

Oh yeah, I also made amends to the Cici's locations I stole from, as well as their corporate office. They filed charges on me and now i'm going to prison because of it. Just kidding. EVERY single one of them smiled and told me, "I'm glad we could be a safe haven for you during such a tough time in your life. Thank you for your amends, go live your life young man." I can't even write this without crying. To my surprise, people aren't all that bad, which is encouraging, because that means I'm not all that bad myself.