KEY POINTS:
From a wooden bench halfway up Airedale St, looking down on city slickers below, two of Auckland's rough sleepers spoke to the Herald yesterday.
Their response to Auckland City Council plans to ban rough sleepers from city streets was - like their soft speech and gentle movements - reserved and calm. Ban street sleeping, they said. It was the council's right and they had no problem with it.
But Garry and Lewis - each asked that their real names not be used - said if their beds were cleared away, all they asked for were alternative places to lay their heads.
Their lives, while presently very similar, had begun differently and would probably diverge again, they said.
In 1981 Lewis was living in a "boys' home". He fell in with a trouble-making group, and ran away. He was 14, and had slept rough ever since. He said he had no complaints.
Garry had let a gambling addiction rob him of his house, life and family three years ago. But with obvious pride he was yesterday clutching a letter from Housing New Zealand, promising him he was now on their waiting list. The neatly dressed and well spoken former tradesman said he was ready to re-enter the workforce.
He had not tried to claim a benefit during his three years on the streets: he had made the lifestyle choice knowing what he was getting himself into, he said.
"I thought gambling would pay the bills. And it did for a while."
His gambling addiction was just a variance on the reason almost all his fellow rough sleepers had shifted to the street, he said: addiction.
A painter and decorator with a wife, son, car and leased apartment, Garry had "discovered" SkyCity casino.
His marriage broke down, his son moved to Sydney and, when the final day of his apartment's lease came up, he took what possessions he hadn't sold, stuffed them into a back-pack, and slept rough for the first time - at Grafton's Outhwaite Park.
"I'd camped out, you know, bushed it, before. But this was different. But if you accept the consequences, you go with the flow. This is my doing. It's sort of my repentance.
"I gambled everything away. I made that decision. It's only cost me all my earthly things."
Life wasn't too hard on the street, the men said. Three meals each day could be had by alternating between the Auckland City Mission on Hobson St, and the Lifewise mission on Airedale St.
Showers, spare clothes and bedding could also be found at the missions.
What the missions didn't provide was a place to sleep, but their spots - outside a city church and a city sports club - were peaceful enough from about 1am onwards. It got cold in winter, but they had acclimatised, and concrete was made a far softer bed with a few layers of cardboard.
There was also the night shelter in Airedale St that offered a bed for $10.
Cigarettes and alcohol, or other addictions needed "as a way of passing the time", were paid for from benefit money. Or, if it came to that, crime.
For Lewis, this life was all he wanted. "I just want to be left alone. I'm happy."
