No Wallet, No Underwear!
A day off the grid in Brooklyn
Hello everyone,
Welcome to Issue #197 of CAFÉ ANNE!
Look what we woke up to this morning. The entire city, buried in cocaine!
There was zero traffic—just folks walking their dogs down the middle of the street. We got a foot last night, and another foot is on the way. Happy snow day everybody!
Second, thanks to everyone who entered the first CAFÉ ANNE recipe contest. As requested, readers invented many exciting dishes incorporating pure granulated caffeine powder.
I’m currently testing the recipes out on Substack the Cockroach Intern and will announce a winner in next week’s issue. But for a sneak preview, here is one of three recipes submitted by my “friend” Aharon, whose discovery of caffeine powder available by the kilo online is what inspired the contest in the first place:
TurboGarbage Plate
3 Unhinged bars, crumbled
1 Mamdani Special, lightly gnawed, white sauce only
Instagram wagyu chopped cheese from Prospect Park Deli, reheated
Combine the above in a large metal bowl until just mixed
Garnish with 4-6 heaping handfuls of pure caffeine powder
Blend in Vitamix or equivalent, on lowest setting, 3-8 seconds
Serve in dry bubble tea (tapioca only) cups, with straw
Discard mixing bowl at once
Thanks Aharon!
In other news, I was delighted to learn, thanks to reader Philly in Sunnyside, that Curtis Sliwa has finally launched a Substack. The topic of his first issue? Electronic Dance Music, of course!
Alas, there are no new paid subscribers to thank this week. Which is no fun. As promised, CAFÉ ANNE will always be 100% free, but without reader support, it cannot survive. And what good is a free but non-existent newsletter? The sad story: while total subscriptions grew 20% last year, the number of paid subscribers actually fell a bit, perhaps because I wasn’t pestering you enough.
Well consider this a pester! If you’ve been enjoying this blog for a while, this is an excellent time to enjoy the thrill of paying for what you are already reading for free. And I promise: if you subscribe and then feel sorry, it will be sorry in a good way!
I am very excited for this week’s issue, of course. We’ve got a Brooklyn walk with Uriel the Archangel, a man on a mission to—well, you’ll see. Please enjoy.
Regards!
Anne
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No Wallet, No Underwear! A Day Off the Grid in Brooklyn
I was hanging out at my meditation center after class last week when a jolly-looking fellow burst through the door. “Am I interrupting?” he asked.
Blue-eyed and red-faced from the cold, he announced he was walking across the country, stopping by places like meditation centers, yoga studios and cannabis shops—and documenting his adventures on TikTok.
I started asking a million questions, of course, and learned that Uriel was from Alaska where he worked as an electrician. Now, he was traveling with no cash, no ID and no bank account—living entirely off bartering and trading. Having started his marathon walk in Wisconsin last summer, he was out to spread a message, and enjoying his adventures along the way. He’d been stabbed in the eye in Buffalo!
He gave me a copper ring off his finger and gifted a fellow meditator a necklace. He was about to leave when I felt that familiar urge. “Can we meet up tomorrow so I can tag along?” I asked.
He’d planned on heading to Baltimore, he said, but he’d be happy to spend another day in NYC.
“Where are you sleeping tonight?” I wondered. It was a cold evening in the middle of February.
“I sleep wherever I’m at,” he said. “When I’m staying in a city, I usually sleep in the park.”
We gave him a box of cookies and he disappeared into the night.
I got a text the next morning from a strange number: “Is this the cute blonde that wanted to observe me today?” It was Uriel.
He’d spent the night riding the Q train. “If you sleep sitting up, they can’t give you a ticket—that’s the trick,” he told me when I called.
Upon waking, he’d gone to the nearest Planet Fitness and created a new email address to get a free day pass and take a shower—a tactic he’s used many times.
We met an hour later in Downtown Brooklyn. I suggested we explore a retail strip so I could observe him sharing his message. Flatbush Avenue seemed like a good place to start. “There’s lots of weed shops and all kinds of nonsense,” I said. “And if you see a place you’d like to eat, let me know.”
“Usually, I don’t eat a lot in the morning,” said Uriel. “But you could eat, and maybe show me a place to get a stiff Irish coffee.”
“With booze in it?” I said. It was 10 am.
“Yes, with whisky!”
We headed south on Flatbush.
“How are you feeling this morning?” I asked.
“I’m great—great every morning!” he said.
“Why are you great every morning?”
“Because I never feel bad anymore,” he said. “No, no, no, not at all.”
And then I heard all about his cleansing, fasting and meditation routine which allows him to connect him with his inner guidance—which tells him exactly where to go and what to do next. “And then, you know, fear, doubt, sadness don’t really apply anymore,” he said.
This, it turns out, was the message he aimed to spread on his walk across the country. He’d stopped by several pot shops and bars the night before, sharing his story and handing out free jewelry. He’d scored many free drinks and weed in return. “The energy always comes back,” he said. “No matter if it’s directly from that person or not. That’s just the way it works.”
Take that time he asked the wrong guy for a cigarette and got stabbed in the eye, for example. Bleeding from the knife wound but no fan of hospitals, Uriel stumbled into a vintage clothing shop. “The guy bought my jacket off me for 40 bucks and gave me a replacement jacket worth at least that much,” he said. “So then I had money, and bought super glue, and sealed it up.”
“There are rules about the way I travel,” he continued. “I can’t ask for money or anything like that. It has to be an energy exchange.”
“You’re surfing the generosity of the universe,” I ventured.
“Yes!” he nodded. “And it ends up being a mutual energy amplification for both of us, just having the interaction. That’s kind of what it’s about, and now I’m trying to spread it, and it’s been working really well!”
Another rule: he won’t pay for public transit. In his four-week stay in New York City, for example, he’d been buzzed through the turnstile many times by token booth clerks after telling his story. He also traveled from New York to Salem and back by boarding Amtrak without a ticket and sweeting-talking the conductor—though he sometimes got kicked off when the shift changed. “There’s a lot of ticket Nazis on Amtrak,” he sighed.
“I’ve gotten rides from six cops on my journey,” he added. “What I do is walk down the interstate, which you’re not allowed to do, and then when they come, you play stupid, like, ‘I didn’t know, I won’t do this anymore!’ and they give you a ride.”
I wanted to observe Uriel share his message at local shops, but we’d already walked a mile down Flatbush, and his intuition hadn’t steered him into any of hundreds of storefronts we’d passed. I suggested we stop at Hungry Ghost, a café. “They won’t have whisky coffee,” I warned.
“Don’t worry about it!” he said cheerfully.
He continued his travelogue over a breve. He landed in New York just before Christmas, he said, and established a little routine. Most nights he slept on the subway, in a park or a graveyard—Brooklyn’s Cypress Hills Cemetery was a favorite. He woke early to meditate and hug a tree before finding someplace warm to upload videos to his 5,000 TikTok followers.
Other chores: laundry (he enjoyed a free wash at a Bronx laundromat where the attendant gave him a jacket) and redistributing food donations to the homeless. He also sources copper wire for the jewelry he gives away, sometimes by chatting up a local electrician. But more often, he’ll visit Michaels, the national hobby store chain, and help himself to the merchandise.
“It’s called ‘making a withdrawal,’ because it’s run by corporate,” he said. “All these banks and stuff—all these places boil down to one power entity owning and taking all your money.”
“So you steal,” I said.
“Oh yeah!” he said. “But like I said, it’s called a withdrawal.”
His phrasing made me laugh and laugh, and he laughed too.
More rules: he won’t sleep at a homeless shelter because he doesn’t want to take a bed from someone who needs one. But he will stop in for meals and to share his message with street folks.
We finished our coffee and continued south through Prospect Park. As we trudged through the snow, I asked how he pays for his cell-phone service.
He doesn’t, of course. He recently met a “baddie” (a bad-ass girl) at a Verizon store who hooked him up with an iPhone 6 gathering dust in the back room. “She got it working and then she got me three months of service,” he said.
“Are you that charming?” I said.
“Hahaha,” he laughed. “You decide!”
I wanted to see the contents of his giant backpack, so we found a picnic table and he unpacked the entire thing. It took a long time!
True to his warning, it was mostly dirty laundry, including 32 pairs of socks he’d collected along the way—which surprised even him.
But there was a lot more, including toiletries, five jars of dried spices, jewelry making supplies, three limes, a cheap sleeping bag (”someone just gave it to me on the road”), twine, detergent sheets, a squeeze-bottle honey bear (”withdrawal from Target”), two butternut squashes and a big canister of rolled oats.
That last item did it. “Okay, you’re weird!” I said, when he pulled out the oats. “Nothing struck me as truly weird until now.”
Uriel smoked the half cigarette discovered at the bottom of his pack before we resumed our walk, this time down Seventh Avenue in Park Slope. It was lunchtime, so we found a table at the Purity Diner. Uriel ordered a vegetable omelet and related some of his back story.
He is 45 and his birth name is Nathan Huffman. He grew up in Anchorage, hunting and fishing. His mom was a hospital baker and dad was a fishing guide. He studied psychology for two years and worked as a commercial fisherman before going to tech school and getting his electrician’s license. He was soon earning six figures working for ConocoPhillips, married his long-time girlfriend in 2010 and had two kids. But the marriage went sour.
“I got one of them divorces, I had to go,” he said. After losing the custody battle for his children (now ages five and nine), he moved to North Dakota and resumed work as an oil field electrician. “And that’s when I got three DUIs in three months, and the cops were chasing me for a while, and then I finally went to jail because I was sick of running from them,” he said.
That was the turning point. “Right after that, I lived on a farm, and that’s where I grew an organic garden and I started becoming spiritual, awakened,” he said. “I fasted, cleansed and meditated, and started seeing things a lot differently.”
Now home-free (a term he prefers to homeless), he donated his BMW to a local family and changed his name to Uriel, the archangel of enlightenment and wisdom. He declared himself a sovereign citizen—someone who declines to recognize government authority.
He has vivid memories of the night last August when he found a spot in a Wisconsin park under a weeping willow and burned his passport, state ID, electrician’s license, Social Security card and birth certificate. “It felt liberating,” he said.
“Were you high?” I asked.
“The question is not if I’m high,” he said. “It’s when am I not high?”
“Do you even have a wallet?” I said. “You don’t even have a wallet! Maybe that will be my headline.”
“No wallet,” he said, “no underwear!”
I paid the bill and we resumed our walk down Seventh Avenue, scanning for suitable storefronts. “It can be an Irish pub, cannabis dispensary store, massage therapy, acupuncture, anything that’s along the lines of the spiritual,” he said. “Or it could just be a Starbucks with a spiritual-looking clerk.”
The idea of living totally off the grid has its appeal. “Can anyone do what you’re doing?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, “if you fast, cleanse and meditate. That’s why, literally, I don’t have to depend on anything. Even in the direst circumstances, a synchronicity will happen where I’ll end up okay. I don’t have to worry about anything, like, where am I gonna get coffee in the morning? Where am I gonna use the bathroom? I just walk.”
“Do you think many people want what you have?” I asked.
“Maybe when they see the benefits of it,” he said. “The benefits are, like, I get to help people everywhere I go.”
We walked another ten blocks before he stopped at an upscale tattoo parlor. “I think I found a spot!” he said.
We went in and he gave the attendant a spiel much like he’d delivered the night before at my meditation center. “Hi!” he greeted the front desk attendant. “So I’m walking across the country. I’m from Alaska. I’m on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. I’m supposed to just drop in here, because I support tattoos, because of the culture with them and things like that. Plus, I’m very spiritual, so I’m supposed to give you a necklace. It’s made out of copper. It helps your spiritual energy. Are you a tattoo artist?”
“No, I’m just managing,” said the attendant, accepting the necklace. “Were you thinking of getting tattooed or anything like that today?”
This led to a long discussion with the shop’s artist, Dave, about a full-back design featuring angel wings and the Tree of Life.
Before leaving, Uriel gave the artist a ring. “I’m supposed to give you this,” he said. “Copper makes your spiritual energy go up.”
The artist thanked him and noted that his rates start at $200 an hour.
“What do you think?” I asked Uriel when we resumed our walk. “Did you spread your message there?”
“What was accomplished there was just making contact with the tattoo scene,” said Uriel. “It’s a little different from some of the other scenes.”
I asked how he was getting to Baltimore.
“Either by Amtrak trains or talking somebody into letting me on the FlixBus, or I will hitch-hike,” he said.
“You think you can talk yourself onto the FlixBus?” I said.
He smiled. “I haven’t done it yet, but I can’t wait to try!”
Over the next few days, I followed Uriel on TikTok as he reported from cemeteries, train stations, bars and cafes in Philadelphia. It occurred to me that he wasn’t walking across the country at all. He was bopping around the East Coast by whatever means handy, and the universe happened to be providing trains. But the walking tale made for a good story—one he likely believes.
Before we parted, he’d urged me to stay in touch. “I will answer you back,” he said. “And I can send you content for your piece. Just to show you not only that I exist, but I’m still walking out here.”
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“It’s important to call your friends on the phone so you can clean your house.”
—Charlie Bardey
CAFÉ ANNE, a free weekly newsletter about NYC, is created by Brooklyn journalist Anne Kadet. Subscribe to get the latest issue every Monday.
I love how these stories just fall in your lap. The universe knows you’re always on the lookout.
Great that Uriel is happy as a nomad. Sad for his kids. And BTW as long as you drink alcohol and smoke weed you are not cleansed. 🤣 But Uriel has his own definitions that work well for him.
You are a consummate storyteller Anne. The artifice we can create in our minds to explain something in an utterly absurd way is a gift and a curse I suppose. If we only spend time with ourselves (or a fashioned social media feed nowadays), I assume we are doomed to get distorted into something quite unlikely and certainly inconsistent. When someone tells me "you gotta listen to X", I am overwhelmed to throw them a lifeline. I love all of your writing. I will send you a OTG soon. The takeaway from today is "But the walking tale made for a good story—one he likely believes." -- a person committed to the craft of writing is wedded to the em dash :)