Homeless

I have a real problem with people being homeless.  As I posted in my 8/27/12 blog entry ‘Down By The River’, back in college in the mid-80’s my friends and I spent a lot of time exploring the banks of the Mississippi River and climbing on the various bridges over the river in Minneapolis.  In our many explorations we came upon a lot of homeless people living on the riverbank and under the bridges.  Sometimes they would have a dirty old mattress to sleep on, or just some blankets or towels…but no home.  I had never seen that before and it blew my mind that people had to live like that.  They never bothered us and we did not bother them, but their condition always bothered me.  I was sleeping in a nice warm bed in my expensive dorm room at my fancy college, and they had literally nothing.

Well I decided I could change that in the only way I knew how at the time:  beer and cigarettes.  So every once in awhile me and a friend or two would grab a case of beer, a few packs of smokes and head down to the river.  We would find some friendly homeless people and invite them to join us for the afternoon.  We would smoke cigs, drink beer and listen to their stories.  Everyone has a story.  Some funny, some meaningless, but mostly sad.  I am not sure it helped, but I think just having someone to talk to that did not look down on them was good for them.  Hopefully it made them feel like it was not always them against the world…that some people out there cared a little bit.

As I posted in my 8/16/13 blog entry ‘Austria’, Lona and I spent a sunny afternoon in Vienna in the summer of 1990 hanging out with three homeless people drinking beer and smoking cigarettes.  We had a lot of fun, but I had a real hard time dealing with the concept that some people have to sleep in parks while some people sleep in mansions.  The people we met that day all used to have homes, but fell on hard times and ended up living on the streets.  Could it happen to anyone?

I have more or less always had a home.  Even when I was backpacking in Europe with Lona that summer in 1990 we knew that when we got back to the States we would probably stay at her parent’s house in Waukesha, WI until we got on our feet again and found a place to live.  We eventually did just exactly that, but when we first got back in September I got in a huge fight with Lona.  I was so incredibly hurt, bewildered and angry that I grabbed my bank-book, some clothes, all my cassettes, and drove my ’74 Dodge Charger from Waukesha up to Minneapolis, MN and couch-hopped at various friends houses for a few months.  I did not have a ‘home’, but I always had a place to stay thanks to the kindness of my friends.

It was a crazy few months in which I ended up dropping almost $4,000, mostly in bars buying rounds for my friends, drowning my sorrows and burning through a lot of my savings.  I was not eating much that fall as my mind was not at all on food.  I would occasionally eat a turkey-bagel sandwich, but mostly I was just full of self-pity and bent on having what I thought was a great time at all costs.  One day when I was at my friend Gary Paulson’s house I looked in the mirror and I realized that I was pretty skinny.  I hopped on his scale and was dismayed to see that it read 147 lbs.  I had been around 170 lbs a year ago in college and that was about the right weight for my 5’10” frame.  Ah well, I didn’t care.  Back to the bar, and at the end of the night on to whatever couch was available.

There were various accidents during those drunken months.  One night at a party a bottle of beer slipped out of my hand into the sink.  I tried to grab it and save it, but my hand arrived at the bottle just as it was shattering in the bottom of the sink.  The broken top of the bottle sunk into my right middle-finger and sliced it deep, flapping it right down to the bone.  Another night I was at my friend Randi’s house fixing her an authentic Greek meal like the hundreds of ones I had recently enjoyed in Greece.  I was cutting up a cucumber for a Greek salad when I cut off the tip of my left index finger.  Just a small chunk of flesh and fingernail, but it came clean off and bled for 3 days.

So I was technically ‘homeless’ for a few months, but I always had a roof over my head and friends around.  I eventually patched things up with Lona and went back to her parent’s house and lived there for a year before the two of us moved on to Madison, WI.  We continued to follow the Grateful Dead around the country, but always had a home to go back to.  Unlike some of the Deadheads we encountered on our travels that basically lived wherever the Grateful Dead were.  ‘Home’ was their VW bus and they would travel around selling their wares in the parking lots of wherever the Dead were playing that night.  It was a gypsy type of life and had its romantic charm, but I was always glad to be back home after seeing a run of Dead shows.

One night after the first of two Grateful Dead shows at Madison Square Garden in New York City, on 9/17/93 to be exact, we decided to walk back to our hotel which was just a block off Times Square.  It was me, Lona, our friend Travelin’ Dave that I had met in the dorms in Minneapolis, and his friend Attic from Milwaukee.  We were all high on acid as well as the good feelings that we had from the wonderful show that night.  On the walk back we marveled at the late-night hustle and bustle and lights of mid-town Manhattan.  When we got to the corner of where our hotel was a scraggly guy asked if I had any spare change.  I was all happy and feeling groovy, but did not feel like pulling my wallet out so I offered him a few cigarettes instead.  We got to talking and he was a really nice guy.

He walked with us and when we got to the entrance of our hotel I told him to wait there while I ran up to the room and grabbed a bunch of beers.  I came back down and we had a party right there on the stoop.  A couple more homeless guys came over and we smoked and drank and talked.  They were really nice and very thankful and polite.  One guy was so thankful though that he offered to give me a blowjob.  Yikes.  I thought it was a nice gesture, but I politely declined.  I suppose it was all he had to offer, but I quickly decided that there are some things that are not better than nothing.

About 10 years ago I spent a summer volunteering at a homeless shelter one night a week, cooking and handing out food at the shelter.  The people that came in were almost always genuinely thankful and appreciative, but they all had an aura about them.  An extremely noticeable aura of sadness and pain.  When you look past the dirty hair and shabby clothes you see a real person though.  A real person who is sad, scared, mentally and maybe physically in pain, and completely desperate and hopeless.  It makes you want to take them home, let them take a shower, wash their clothes, give them as much food as they can eat, and send them off with a bunch of money.  It would be so cool to be rich and be able to do that.

The homeless do not want to be in the situation that they are in.  Nobody would want that.  People often see a beggar on the corner and say:  “Get a job!”, but it’s not that simple.  Someone who has been wearing the same clothes for months and has no identification is not just going to be able to walk into McDonald’s and get a job.  A homeless man with mental problems or drug/alcohol addictions is not going to get that door-greeter job at Wal-Mart.  When I see the guy at the intersection holding up a ‘homeless’ sign, if I have my lunch on me I will hand him that, but if not I occasionally will hand him or her a $5 or $10.  I know they may just head to the nearest liquor store and get a bottle of booze, but so what?  Can you blame them?  Hopefully they will buy some food, but I am not going to be the one to begrudge them a buzz.

Statistics vary widely because there is no way to accurately count the homeless, but it just blows my mind that there are as many as 3.5 million people in the United States that experience homelessness in any given year.  I am assuming most everyone reading this has a home.  But can you imagine not?