homeless stories page 6Message: 1
Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2002 10:40:30 -0500
From: William Tinker <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Hpn] Love on the streets - Homeless couple finds tenderness in the TenderloinJane Ganahl, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, February 10, 2002
She calls him "baby," and he steers her gently around foul-smelling puddles on Tenderloin sidewalks. Between handholding, furtive kisses and walking - endlessly - arm-in-arm, there is rarely an inch of air between them. They have nothing, but they think it's everything. Edward and Caroline Hicks are in love.” We got to know each other at our lowest point," says Edward, a tall sturdy tree of a man at 49, smiling down at tiny Caroline. "It can only get better from here."
Edward and Caroline are homeless.
Whereas many couples fight over who has to cook dinner, who gets to control the remote and who forgot to pay the cable TV bill, Edward and Caroline wonder where their next meal is coming from and where they will sleep that night. Just married Dec. 3, under other circumstances, they might be on a honeymoon, not standing in line for shelter space.
And yet they exude the serene grace and joy of storybook newlyweds.
"People come up to us all the time and ask, how do you do it?" Caroline, 39, says with a laugh. "And it's hard sometimes, to keep it going when you live like we do. But there's no big secret. Just love and respect - a lot of respect."
First encounters
We first meet the couple in line for lunch at St. Anthony's Dining Room. A boisterous crowd surrounds them, but they're off to one side, leaning against the wall, wrapped up in each other. They agreed to share their story with strangers because "we've learned a lot from this experience. And it might help others to hear it - other homeless couples or families," Edward says. They met three years ago in the Mission District, and both were using drugs. "Everything," Caroline says with a shrug. "Heroin, cocaine, crack." Both had jobs - Edward as a truck driver, Caroline as a cashier. But their money was funneled into their escalating habits, and eventually they both wound up on the streets.
"Using was tearing our relationship apart," says Caroline. "I told him something had to give."
They looked into detox facilities, but discovered that they would have to split up for a month to go into his and hers programs. "We couldn't bear to be apart that long," says Edward, squeezing her hand. "So we just went through it together."
Wasn't that grueling?
"Yeah," he says, smiling gently. "It was. But we found our higher power, and found strength in each other."
After lunch at St. Anthony's, they begin the trek to the General Assistance office at Eighth and Mission, where they must check in with their caseworkers before they get their monthly checks of around $300 each. Looking through a chain-link fence, they see a man and a woman climbing through some rubble in an empty lot.
"See who that is?" Caroline says, nudging Edward and mentioning the name of a former drug crony. "They're going down there to smoke crack." She pauses and shudders. "Man, I'm so glad those days are over," she says. They take a number at the G.A. office and settle in for the long wait. While they wait, they cuddle. "This is our first time being homeless," says Edward, stroking Caroline's hair. "And I have to commend San Francisco. They give you a chance to get your life back together. You just have to follow the rules and take advantage of the opportunities that you're offered. I just wish we'd reached out sooner." Caroline adds: "We're hoping to be able to get a residential hotel this week. We're watching our money."
Finding shelter
Currently, they're staying at night at the Ella Hill Hutch shelter, at McAllister and Webster. It's a coed shelter with different areas for the two sexes. Even married couples cannot sleep together. But this one has figured out a system for being able to have at least a little bit of intimacy.
Edward arrives early at the shelter (they -don't allow people to come in until 10 p.m.) and volunteers to help set up the foam mattresses and blankets on the floor. He does so in order to place his mattress and Caroline's within touching distance.
One -can't help but ask how, then, are they able to enjoy conjugality?
"It's been two weeks," says Caroline.
"I think people put too much emphasis on the physical part of love anyway," Edward says solemnly. "This situation we've been in has been a blessing in a way; it's allowed me to get to know her better as a person."
When they first lost their residences, the couple spent time on the street, sleeping in doorways with only blankets warding off the winter night chill. But Edward was worried that Caroline's health, already in jeopardy, might suffer. So they play by the strict rules to be able to use the shelter.
"I'm HIV-positive," she says matter-of-factly. "And I'm doing great. But he worries about me."
In order to use the shelter, residents are awakened at 6 a.m. and -can't come back until 10 p.m. This means a lot of time to pound the pavement. "Sometimes we go to the waiting room at S.F. General and watch TV," says Caroline. "Sunday he watched the football playoffs, and I slept in the chair next to him until they kicked us out. We also go to the Main Library and read and rent a movie, but you can only do that once a week."
Today, when they get to the library, the VCR is already in use, so they read newspapers and magazines to pass the time. "I used to make a good living driving trucks," Edward says, "and I plan to do that again once we're on our feet and have an address that I can put on employment forms."
When it's finally time to bed down for the night, Edward does his volunteer chore of lining up the mattresses, so his and Caroline's can be head-to-head.
"It's no Sealy Posturpedic, but it'll do," he says with a laugh. As the lights go out, their faces meet in no-man's-land for a goodnight kiss, one that lingers with the swooniness of teenagers watching the sunset. When they are told to pull their mattresses farther apart, they do so quickly and gladly, just happy to be in each other’s proximity.
Post script: Edward calls a week later with the good news. He and Caroline have saved enough money to be able to get themselves a room in a residential hotel on O'Farrell Street for as long as they can pay the rent. "It -ain't the Ritz," he says, "but it feels like home."E-mail Jane Ganahl at jganahl@sfchronicle. NOSPAMcom.
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle************************************************
Message: 1
Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2002 17:17:28 -0500
From: William Tinker <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Hpn] Voice mail program helping homeless find jobs in OrlandoRocky Mountain News Voice mail program helping homeless find jobs in Orlando
By DAVID DAMRONLately, Tim Kelly sleeps on Edgewater Drive covered by a crochet blanket and carpet scraps next to Fresh Start Ministries. He spends most days trying to tap back into disability benefits, which he hasn't been receiving since he no longer has an address, and lining up diabetes insulin.
Fresh from serving time on an assault charge, the 36-year-old Nebraskan says he wants to turn his life around and go to a trade school. But with a learning disability, a criminal record and no home or phone, it's tough.
Kelly could be a poster boy for Ripple Effect, which provides clothing and other services to the homeless, and the voicemail program it's trying to import to Orlando. It would allow Kelly and others with no homes or telephones to receive and leave phone messages with potential employers and landlords or social service agencies.
Here's how it has worked in other parts of the country: Homeless individuals are given a voicemail line, which they can access by dialing and using a personal code. They can leave and receive messages. In addition to using the lines to make appointments for job interviews or inquiring about benefits, they can also stay in touch with caseworkers. Ripple Effect would pay to set up the lines and handle the phone bills, usually based on the number of clients with mailboxes. No switchboard or message-takers are needed.
The Seattle originators claim the system allows some homeless people to secure work or housing in a third of the time it normally takes. It could help someone like Kelly clear hurdles in the medical and benefits system. Recently, he said, federal courthouse officials wouldn't let him into the Social Security Office because he had lost all of his identification, he said.
The program, called Community Voice Mail, began in 1991 and is in almost 40 U.S. cities. Local Ripple Effect nonprofit founder Kelly Caruso is spearheading the Orlando drive. "If these people have the ability to be contacted, sometimes that makes all the difference," said Caruso, pointing out that most prospective employers who return calls to a homeless shelter hang up, she said.
"This has the whole stigma removed from the picture."
It would also eliminate lost or missed messages. Even vital information from family, friends or doctors can get lost at busy shelters. Or a stressed staff may record a message only to have the homeless person not return for several weeks, or ever. Some other local agencies, including Goodwill Industries and Orlando Union Rescue Mission, take messages for clients on a limited basis. But officials there say they welcome any help. People using Goodwill's Hello Line shot up dramatically after the economy tanked and again after Sept. 11, to as many as 2,550 incoming calls this year, said Goodwill spokeswoman Cheryl Baum. "We only have so many 1/8phone 3/8 lines," she said.
Only one other community in Florida has the voicemail system: Pinellas County. The goal is to get all area agencies to plug into it, said coordinator Edward Perry, and nearly 70 have, he said. St. Petersburg taxpayers, as well as private, county and federal dollars pay for the system, which includes a monthly phone bill of about $1,400.
The community also offers a more costly 800-line for people who don't have access to a phone to tap into the voicemail system.
Caruso said she hopes donations and a pledge of $15,000 from the system's founders can offset start-up costs of $30,000. She would like to see it up and running this year. A fundraiser in December netted $4,000. Virginia Slavin lives at the Coalition for the Homeless shelter and sometimes the agency runs out of free bus passes. So working the phones or setting and confirming appointments can help her untangle her own disability benefits.
"I could really use it," the 44-year-old Nashville native said. "I could do all the phone calls myself."February 2, 2002
2002 © The E.W. Scripps Co.*****************************************************************
The Humanist, Jan-Feb 2002 v62 i1 p20 (4)
The art of homelessness: a number of articles have been written by a handful of decent writers on the subject of homelessness, but no one to my knowledge has covered this gross national tragedy by purposely walking in the shoes of the vagabond. Buffalo Latham.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2002 American Humanist Association
The art of homelessness: a number of articles have been written by a handful of decent writers on the subject of homelessness, but no one to my knowledge has covered this gross national tragedy by purposely walking in the shoes of the vagabond. So when the opportunity presented itself, I felt I should become my own subject and walk the streets and alleys and parks and parking lots of Miami-Dade, Florida, as one of the homeless. And let my notebooks tell the story.
The lyric "If I go crazy will you still call me Superman?" rings my drums. I turn it up till my headphones literally vibrate. When I asked this question of my love she'd emphatically said, "No!" And so, empty hand clutching a burst heart I departed with just two wrinkled five dollar bills in my fold and everything I owned stuffed into my World War II French army backpack and black canvas satchel. A man of the world I take to the stage, exchanging a fine woman, a comfortable home, and decent employ for a walk-on part as an actor in a quiet war where goals and dreams fall hard like rain. I kick myself to the curb, hitting the streets of Miami in the face of a potential downpour.
And with no direction and almost no money, I walk down past the glitter and glamour of South Beach, past fat cats and cute chicks dressed to the nines who stare disconcertedly at bums digging through trash cans for a morsel of discarded meat. I go down, down over the train tracks and back behind a series of tall empty buildings and find a shelter with a hand painted sign on an alley-side wall that reads, "Camilla House, dedicated to homeless everywhere." But the place--paid for by a mandatory tax imposed in 1993 on the city's restaurants and bars that raises $7 million annually--is closed. On the sidewalk under an awning in front, the "doomed and depraved" lay down and out on pieces of damp cardboard salvaged from industrial dumpsters. One guy, not much younger than me, lifts his head when he sees me and says, suggestively, "Pull up a piece of cardboard and get comfortable. This place don't open till Monday." Then he lays his head back down into dream.
Looking at him I remember an old Chinese proverb that went something like, "With only a bowl of rice to eat and my bended arm for a pillow, still I find comfort in these things." I think how less than twelve hours ago comfort for me was my dry apartment where my love would be waiting with open arms and a warm bed, food in the fridge, television to entertain, candlelight dinners, and the company of good friends. And now comfort is a dry piece of cardboard to sleep on, two burgers for two dollars from Burger King, and this belief that what I'm doing by living this reality will someday serve a higher purpose.
Then I think what horrible things could happen to me in this dirty and dangerous place and I start to pace. I see that, in comparison to others, I have too much. Too much weight in my heart staggering my movements and too much weight on my back. I look bent and broken--easy pickings for the five glossy-eyed, toothless men who just at that moment decide to relieve me of my heavy load.
They come at me like starved dogs on a lame animal. I almost laugh at the irony of being beaten and robbed in front of a shelter. However, seeing the seriousness of my situation and, after taking several shots to the head and body, I decide that fighting it out is futile and make a break for it. I put a death grip on my satchel and charge through the bunch knocking the smallest of them down on the rain soaked street and escape back out into a humid Miami night. The beach, I find, is a fine place for sleeping. The moon beams gleam off the black waters of the Atlantic. As I lie down beside its quiet side, I feel my fears sink into its deepest depths; my mind finds peace, my body rest.
And then, of course, this being south Florida, it rains again. I wake up wet. All around me are dozens of others down and out in the sands. They too come awake, and we all go shuffling off into this surreal evening.
That reminds me how this whole thing began. Back when I lived in Richmond, Virginia, I would walk to work every morning past dozens of healthy looking men standing around outside this brick building. They would shake cups for change and mooch cigarettes. It was annoying.
If I was in their shoes, I'd thought, I'd go someplace warm, like Florida. I could reside on a beach or in the woods and live off the land, steal fish from the sea. Besides, what's the difference between being homeless and traveling? You keep clean by taking birdbaths in gas station and restaurant sinks. Fold your clothes to keep the crease, keep out the wrinkles. Have plastic bags to put wet and dirty clothes in and keep books and papers dry. You shower along a beach or under someone's backyard hose. You brush your teeth twice a day as the recommendation goes. And when you're as broke as a joke you steal shampoo and soap, even towels, early in the morning from a hotel cleaning lady's cart, which is always in the hallway and always unguarded. You wash your laundry in a sink, then lay it out on the grass in the sun and read a book or nap or fly a kite for fun. Because, like traveling, homelessness is a state of being, for most just a temporary thing ... I thought.
The reality, however, is seen not only in the meanness of the streets but the legions who occupy them. The Department of Children and Families, with the assistance of Florida's twenty local coalitions, began counting the homeless in the early 1990s and estimate that there are 57,000 in this state alone. Of these, 59 percent are Caucasian, 34 percent African American, 8 percent Hispanic, and 2 percent belong to "other populations." Seven percent are age sixty and older, 64 percent are age nineteen to fifty-six, and 29 percent are age eighteen or younger. Forty-six percent are in families, 21 percent are single women, 2-3 percent are women veterans, and 46 percent are single men. Twenty-five percent are mentally ill, 37 percent are alcohol- or drug-dependent, and 8 percent suffer from HIV or AIDS. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates three times more homeless people than counted because, as Hilda Fernandez of the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust told me, "Homeless people are hard to keep track of."
Soon I become hard to keep track of. But I find better digs at the Homeless Assistance Center (HAC) at Metro Mover School Board Station. For awhile, anyway. But the place makes me tired. There's constant noise: always someone's screaming child permeating my brain. And all those families, it's so sad to see: children deprived from the start because their parents, just kids themselves, got on the junk, cracked up on crack, and turned their lives to crap and now don't want to do anything for themselves. They live off assistance programs and food stamps--and have more babies to get more assistance, more food stamps. At the HAC I break curfew twice. There are consequences, and I decide it's time to leave.
In 2000, $70 million in federal allocations were dispersed to address homelessness nationwide:
* $38.4 million went to fifteen Housing and Urban Development (HUD) financed continuum of care systems for emergency shelter, transitional housing, homeless outreach, supportive housing for special needs populations, and permanent housing and support services.
* $6.2 million were Emergency Shelter Grant Dollars.
* $1.5 million went to services for the mentally ill homeless.
* $24 million went to Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS (HOPWA).
However, prevention and early intervention is where state programs focus their energies. For "those at immediate risk of homelessness due to natural and household disaster, loss of wages, and other conditions that cause sudden economic deprivation," the Florida Department of Children and Families offers financial assistance.
But money doesn't alleviate the whole problem, and it isn't easy to leave homelessness. In these days of living the life, I've been beaten up and robbed, fractured a foot, and lost my top front tooth. Now I look like a freak. So I go to Mt. Sinai Hospital and they fix my foot for free. But the woman behind the counter in the dentist's office tells me, "Homeless or not, it's $80 to see a doctor." Jackson Memorial Hospital's Dentistry School pulls teeth for free on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays--but it's first come, first served, and the line is long. According to Rachel Jenkins, an advanced registered nurse practitioner (ARNP), the Stanley C. Myers Community Health Center in Miami "is a place where you effectively receive more when you have less"; they triage people on an A-B-C-D scale with A indicating destitute people like me. However, for dental work you must first be a card-carrying member of the homeless for six months.
So I'm ugly now and I limp. I have no money to wash my clothes. I'm tired and weak and haven't eaten in days. I search for work but no one will pay me any more than an ear full of "I'm sorry."
"No comprehensive plan exists to alleviate homelessness," says Casey Conwell of the Miami Beach Police Department. I agree. So out here I'm forced to believe in chance, fate, and luck. And lucky me, walking the streets of South Beach, I find six dollars. I buy roll-up cigarettes, a burger, and a six-pack, then find a shady silent spot and get lost in stale-beer, mid-morning meditation. Six dollars or six cents--it's going to get spent.
So for awhile I'm back on the sands of South Beach, sleeping under the lifeguard towers; watching Garry, a Vietnam vet, patrol the beach night after night peering through five-dollar plastic K-Mart "night vision" binoculars while talking to no one on a plastic cell phone; waking up to some old man grinning as he offers to pay me twenty dollars to blow me. "You just have to lay there and pretend my mouth is your girlfriend's." A sick male predator out prowling for some young kid down on his luck. Mace comes in handy in situations like this.
Millions of dollars are spent annually to relieve the homeless problem but the numbers continue to grow: according to March 2000 census estimates 210,000 nationwide, 30,000 in New York City alone, with 170,000 assisted in shelters on any given day. Why so high? Joseph Minicozzi in the West Palm Beach City Planners Office believes, "It's because, by design, cities create poverty.... Housing is built first for the wealthy, second for the middle class, and lastly for the lower classes."
Maybe. Though I contend that the number grows because dollars go to pointless studies--such as those proving that tracking the homeless is difficult. And then there's the bureaucratic red tape that uses zoning, building, and fire ordinances; site selection; and the possibility of lawsuits to block mass production of a $300, four-person mobile shelter designed by Minicozzi and other University of Miami students back in 1992.
Or possibly the numbers grow because HACs are run in so authoritarian a manner that any self-respecting person, regardless of economic deprivation, would rather sleep in a bush with the mosquitoes and risk being arrested for vagrancy or trespass--or any other "order of maintenance" law the state can and will use against them.
I’m beat, walking in these smelly shoes, wandering about Miami looking for a safe place to sleep, something to do, something to eat. It costs a quarter to ride the trolley. I have no money. So I jump the turnstile and climb the stairs two by two, confident there's no cop at the top of the platform to bust me. I get on the Metro Mover. It moves me up and above and around the city. I see the sights, the lights, the harbor so pretty. It's as if I were on the set of a toy town--the kind kids play with, spending all day pushing tiny trains over plastic tracks.
I get off at Government Center, go down the escalator, cross the street, climb steps two by two up to the Miami-Dade Main Library where we homeless soldiers hang around outside on metal chairs at morning tables, reading discarded papers of yesterday's news. Skipping through the classifieds, too dirty and tired to get a job that will get us off the street, we look at the pictures and read the captions and wonder what it would be like to be worthy of a picture, words. We feel more like a Doonesbury cartoon, living moment to moment, frame by frame, in the absurd. There are 299 transitional housing facilities with a combined 10,576 beds throughout Florida's fifteen districts and yet we can't get off these damned streets. We sleep behind bushes and, waking up damp and hungry, may need to get across town for a job interview but have to carry everything we own, everywhere we go, because we have no place to stow it. What we need is a place to live. A job. Bus tokens to get there. And a telephone to call from when we're sick or late or hung-over.
The library is about to open. Here comes Magic Mr. Wendell. His face woeful, white hands hanging down at his side, as he shuffles in time with Bumper. They see me and sit opposite, the sun in their eyes. They have to squint or look down or away toward the art museum.
"What time is it?" I'm asked.
"Time for you to get a job so you can buy yourself a watch, Bumper, you fat dirty bum," I say with true affection.
"Hell with you, man. I'm fifty-six years old. I got me a bad back. I have AIDS. I'm gonna die soon. So, what do I care if I work. Besides, who's going to hire me?"
Wendell, silent, shuffling his deck, spreads the cards before me and says, "Choose." But I'm sad--mad because I know Bump is right and that he knows he's right. And with no family, both of these boys are beyond beat. Besides Bumper having AIDS, Wendell has Huntington's disease. And both men are terminal. Doomed to sidewalk sleep, minimum-wage labor days, all-night rotten-tooth stay-awake sessions, banging their head against a wall. Weeks of waking into euphoric puke sessions from sickness. I don't want to end up like them--with nowhere to go but from shelter to shelter, curb to curb, until one day someone trips over my dead and bloated body, rigor-mortis-posturing finger to heaven, bare-ass to the world.
Six weeks after I began, I decided my research was done. The story was originally supposed to be about the feel of homelessness--the desperation and struggle. And by walking in the shoes of the homeless, I'd hoped to find the art.
But there is no art. And the only feel is that being homeless sucks. For people like Magic Mr. Wendell and Bumper it is, as my new girlfriend says, a fate worse than death.
And so, to all the lucky people who have never known what it's like to be penniless, I want to say that, yes, what they assume to be true is true: the majority of this meek army of homeless are drunks, drug addicts, failed seekers, sallow sunken souls, mean ornery bastards, or wimps who gave up, got beat down and beaten for whatever reason--as well as those who are just plain crazy. However, if people look past the tattered clothes, they'll see in most a shiny, happy soul that belongs to someone's someone--a father's daughter, a mother's son. They'll see that all are human and want to know joy and love and a tender touch.
But that's not how they're viewed. Sitting there on the stoop, they can see you looking down your nose at them and only noticing their dirty, shabby clothes. You sneer and they feel like they may as well be on death row. Though you tell your children never to judge a book by its cover, you walk them across the street when you see the homeless, hoping they'll disappear back under the rock you assume they must have crawled out from under. The homeless have become dirty, discarded books that nobody wants to read. Allen Ginsberg once wrote: "There is no shame in the dignity of experience." And he was correct. The shame I felt during my research was for a society that, as George Orwell wrote, "is in conspiracy against its members."
And now that this article is done, I'll shuffle my stinky been-sleeping-in-the-trunk body back out to the four-door Honda Civic where a wonderful woman, who is now on the verge of a total breakdown, sleeps. And I'll go to the hotel where I've put my last bit of money down on a room so that she and I can have a shower and slumber in a real bed. It feels unfair, though, that I should have a bed just because I have a family to loan me money and am healthy and smart enough to work. After all, were it not for that lifeline, my few weeks could have become the rest of my days.
Buffalo Latham is a rogue journalist who has spent the last decade traveling throughout the continental United States, collecting the opinions of people from all walks of life, and writing for newspapers. He has hitchhiked, hopped freight trains, and even flown in the Goodyear blimp. Presently he is working on a book.
************************************************************
to next page