Requiem for the Homeless in Age of Cruelty

Requiem for the Homeless in an Age of Cruelty

[As I've repeatedly tried to emphasize in this space, one of the biggest issues in 21st century America is our treatment of the poor and the homeless. Like many trends, it has been made much worse by the presidency of Donald Trump; but unlike most things Trump has done, it has generated virtually no conversation, resistance, or backlash. At the present date, poverty and homelessness is simply not a political issue, for the simple reason that there is no partisan polarization around it. Rather, there is an emerging, near-universal consensus at practically every level of government and society around a model of 'solving' homelessness through a combination of criminalization, forcible interment, performative cruelty, practical indifference, and continual, localized expulsion. In response, I've resurrected a personal essay that I wrote a number of years ago, but shelved due to my own discomfort. I hope it will do some good.]

Not everyone makes it.

    We all know this, intellectually, on some level. There are the obituaries, the statistics, the crime reports on the nightly news. “At least five people froze to death overnight...” “A man was found dead yesterday...” From the opioid crisis to the suicide crisis to the homelessness crisis, we all recognize that, well, in a crisis, some people make it and some don't. Some people get revived and quit drugs; a lot more die of overdoses. Some people get the help they need and live happy lives; some people kill themselves. And, well, some homeless people eventually “get back on their feet” (what an odd saying, as if they had only tripped over a rock and needed to wait a second to get their balance back); and well, some don't. A lot of people die, every day and every year and every hour, because of the Issues with our society, Issues that exist to be discussed by pundits on television or politicians in a debate, discussed and debated and analyzed and finally solved by appropriate applications of public policy. In the end, we all hope, every Issue will be solved, and every crisis resolved; and in the meantime, a large number of people will die alone and cold and in the dark. 

We all recognize that on some level; but I can still remember the precise moments when I realized it was actually true: that in this life, when people are knocked down on the ground, cast off, forgotten, overlooked, hurt, some of them never do get back up and smile at you and say hello.

His first name was “Bob,” but of course that's not his real name. I didn't learn his last name until I finally read it in the paper, three or four months after he died.

I think the first thing I noticed about him is how sad he looked. This in itself is not uncommon; if you've never stood or sat on the street begging passersby for money, for an hour or a day or a week, it can be hard to understand just how dehumanizing and horrible an experience it really is. Put simply, every one ignores you—ignores you even if you speak to them, even if you look at them, even if you shout at them. Even then, it's not even really that they ignore you, that they forget about you or overlook you—they act as though the mere fact that you are there is the most shameful and horrible thing in the world. They studiously avoid your gaze, studiously avoid speaking, studiously avoid taking any action that will acknowledge that you exist and are standing in front of them. After a few hours, or an afternoon, or a week of that, anyone would go mad—or at least get a little depressed.

    There is an exceedingly obvious thing that most people who talk about homelessness--especially powerful people, especially policy-makers--leave out of their pictures: and it is merely the actual experience of being homeless, and the fact that it is, in its essence, suffering and humiliation. Statistics are touted by powerful people very frequently about most homeless people being drug addicts--based on what, I don't know. Homeless people do not talk to researchers, are hard to find, by general acknowledgement are undercounted by orders of magnitude in every survey, and also learn quickly not to tell the whole truth about themselves. 

    The deception middle-class people accuse the homeless of is very largely due to the simple fact that every homeless person learns, very quickly, that their ability to eat and sleep and survive depends very directly on more powerful people's opinions of them--and also that these people universally despise them and regard them as murderous drug-addled criminals whose mere existence poses a threat to all around them. Every and any flaw or fault or annoyance--including unavoidable bad hygiene, the absence of constant perfect patience and kindness and gratitude and generosity and deference to their betters, minor bad habits and addictions that would be easily tolerated among wealthier people, and mere presence and existence wherever they are not wanted--is treated as evidence for this thesis. And so most homeless hide their faults, and share only the most sanitized versions of their life stories. So, too, when you come down to it, do most middle-class and wealthy people.

    Still, the assumption is always that the drug addictions and mental health issues of the homeless are always, or at least most of the time, the reason why they're homeless. That is not my experience. I've known long-term homeless who were that way at least in part because of their addictions. I've also known wealthy and middle-class people who were drug addicts to equal or greater degrees, and were not homeless. But I've also known and talked to many, many homeless people who have told me about the constant, grinding humiliation and shame and panic and danger and fear and anxiety and stress of being homeless; and the need, the emphatic, overriding need, to find some way, any way, to cope with that, to go on living for another day or hour. For many, that coping mechanism is merely cigarettes, or even an occasional nice meal. For others, it's weed, or alcohol--or worse. But these people are not homeless because they are addicts; it is the other way around. 

    As for the much-touted statistic that most homeless people have mental health conditions...what can one do but laugh? I have spent afternoons sitting with people while they begged, and nights walking and talking with people as they encountered their own and others' suffering and madness and tried to navigate crowded streets of wealthier people who despised them and were forced, hour after hour, to drink in their own perpetual shame and humiliation. By the end of those periods, I was crazy myself. The average well-fed, well-clothed, well-housed person in America already has any number of "mental health conditions." They could not make it through an hour of a homeless person's life without developing several more. 

Still, most people who are homeless for any length of time get used to it, to some degree. Even if they don't, desperation eventually outweighs shame. If you're hungry, you're hungry, and there are few worse feelings than being hungry and unable to do anything about it. Probably the saddest sight I've ever seen was an extremely middle-class Dad, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a wide, rather frantic smile, reminding me inescapably of my own father and about the same age, recently tossed out on the street by a family member. Too ashamed to actually beg, he had his toolbox, obviously his pride and joy in a past life, and was attempting to sell the tools to passersby to pay for his food and asthma medication. But of course, after a little while the tools ran out, and he got used to begging in a more obvious way. After all, he needed that asthma medicine to survive—and he was hungry.

“Bob” was different, though. He had been out there for a long time, and he clearly hadn't gotten used to it. Far from it. I don't know if I've ever seen anyone look sadder, his head and eyes lowered to the ground, as he sat, day after day and hour after hour, on the little bench outside one of the most popular restaurants in town, with a cup beside him on the ground. He was not reconciled to his surroundings, not reconciled to his activities, not even by desperation or hunger; even the way he carried himself showed that. Somewhere in his mind, there were other surroundings, another way of life, other people, and he had not forgotten it.

He was only 56 years old when he died, but somehow he looked and seemed much older. This again is not unusual. Homeless people, homeless men especially, tend to look about ten years or so older than their actual age as middle-class folk measure it. Still, 56 is not young, especially when you're sleeping on the ground and eating fast food not nearly often enough.

He didn't want money for food, though, or even for cigarettes; this was another thing that set him apart from most homeless people I've known. He didn't even want it for clothes, or fresh socks. What he wanted, the first time I ever met him and talked to him, as well as most of the times thereafter, was a break. He wanted to stay in a hotel, a good or at least a decent hotel (not the really cheap one, full of prostitutes and dangerous men), for a night, to sleep in a bed, to bathe in a shower, to wear clean clothes and to shave. Then he would be back out on the street again, back to sitting with downcast eyes for hours as college students and wealthy couples walked by him without breaking their stride or looking down.

This, again, meant something very real; that what he wanted, really wanted, was dignity. He wanted to go back to being the man he had been at one point, the man who had worn clean clothes and slept in a bed and looked presentable. He also wanted a job—but of course that was impossible.

I think the very worst thing you can be in America today, in certain highly particular ways, is a 50-something black man. To start with, my experience (borne out by the extremely shady statistics that pass for knowledge in this area) is that men end up being long-term homeless a lot more often than women. There are a lot of reasons for that, I think. Women tend to reach a breaking point sooner, I think, and so get the help they need. Women tend to be more sympathetic, less threatening, more vulnerable, and so get helped more and in more critical ways. Then, too, homeless women can and do turn to prostitution, because the shameful reality is that if you're a woman and homeless for more than a day or so, no matter your age, you will almost certainly be harassed or propositioned for sex once or twice or a dozen times. 

    But I think the most important reason is that women tend to be closer to their families, to their children, and the only real safety net in America that actually functions is family. Practically all the homeless women I've known had children, children they still saw and spoke to and who often helped them out in one way or another, or parents who still took an interest in them and were willing to help them out. That's less true with men. A cast-off man, a man without a family or a friend in the world, is the most helpless and pitiful creature in the world.

Then of course there's being older, meaning you can't do the hard work you might once have done, and can't yet retire and get social security or other meaningful government assistance. And then there's being black, meaning that businesses are less likely to hire you altogether, for reasons of racism or optics or advertising or fear.

Anyway, “Bob” had no hope of ever actually getting a job, though as long as I knew him he was trying with increasing desperation to do so. A long time ago, he had been in the military, then for many decades he had made a living as a house painter with a wife and children. House painting was no longer in high demand—and in any event, he was no longer in the physical condition appropriate for it. He was also homeless and black, meaning that few of the wealthier suburban families who might once have supported him would now even glance at him, let alone give him access to their houses. 

It was a college town, meaning that most of the available jobs, the low-skilled jobs requiring no significant education or training, were service jobs: cashiers, waiters, checkout clerks. “Bob,” a fifty-something black man who slept on concrete, was now competing against 18-22-year old white college students, supported by their parents but eager to make a little extra money on the side. There's a basic normality, a fittingness, of the sort middle-class customers value a lot more than they realize, in going into a restaurant and having a young, pretty woman take your order. There's even a certain fittingness in having an older woman take your order—and I knew a middle-aged homeless woman who managed to find a number of jobs as a waitress while living in a tent in the woods. But walking into a restaurant and having a grizzled old black man with a scruffy beard and calloused hands ask if you have any questions about the menu?

He never did get that job—and I think as the years rolled on, he slowly came to accept that he never would. At least, I hope so; he never stopped trying, even til the end, even as the sadness of his total obsolesce slowly crept in. He had once been a working man, of a very straightforward sort, a manual laborer. Now, he had, quite literally, nothing to do. That's another thing, I think, that middle-class people don't quite realize about homelessness: that one of the absolute hardest things about it, as it's been expressed to me by many people, is the simple fact that you have absolutely nothing to do, no way to fill your days at all.

Of course, even if there's not work, there are friends, family, people who know you and love you—but that's a hard thing, too. There is real community, real friendships, among the homeless in America; often far more than there is among middle-class people and the rich. Still, all these relationships suffer from the fact that people are, really, quite unstable. Bad things happen to them; they are robbed; they bend to the unrelenting pressure of their day to day lives, and have mental breakdowns, or turn to substance abuse. Still, at least in this town, people do know each other, for better or for worse. The average homeless person in this town knows and interacts with a lot of people on a day to day basis, whether he wants to or not. Friendships form, alliances, rivalries, as naturally as they form in any other group of people, in an office or a church or a government department.

“Bob,” though, was different. He deliberately avoided nearly all company, all contact, with other homeless people. There were many reasons for that, but the big one, as he expressed it to me, was his desire to “stay out of trouble.” There were alcoholics, drug abusers, robbers, among the homeless (as there are among suburban folk)--there were ne'er do wells, people whose lives were hard luck cases of one sort or another, people who had never worked a day in their lives. “Bob” wasn't like that, though; or at least, he didn't want to be. Perhaps, people reading this will say, he was hiding things from me the whole time, and he was in fact an addict or a criminal or worse. I saw no evidence of this, in him or from other homeless people I knew or in the obituary written by his family. The presence or absence of addictions, though, is hardly the most determinative thing about a person: for what defines people in the end is not what they are bound by against their will, or even what they happen to do, but what they value. 

    "Bob" valued dignity. In his own mind, he was, or had been, a respectable man, a man who worked hard and supported his family, who showered and put on clean clothes and slept in a clean bed. It screamed in every movement he made and every word he said, his gentle smile, the quietness with which he spoke. He was a Christian, too; he prayed, often, and he believed in helping others, in telling the truth and trying to do the right thing. He had, too, a sense of hope, a fundamental sense of gratitude and cheerfulness about life and living, that kept him going, kept him living, where many another man would have given up long ago. He never did give up, even til the end. He never did stop trying to live, as best as he could manage.

“Bob” was divorced, a long time ago; I don't know that story, or the reasons behind it, because he never told me, though clearly it upset him deeply. He had a child, one child, and three granddaughters. They lived in a different city, far away, and he rarely saw them. I asked him, on more than one occasion, why he didn't live with them, or at least closer to them, and he never quite answered the question. One time, he said that there were no jobs for him where his daughter lived, that here there were many jobs, and he could try to make a living. I think we both knew, even then, that that wasn't true. Probably there was a strained relationship there; very likely there was a story there, a story involving conflict and wrongdoing, his or other people's. I don't know. I know many men divorced through their own fault who did not die on the streets. Perhaps "Bob" just wanted to live in this town where he had been born and gotten married and worked hard and supported his family and raised his child. He talked to me, on a few occasions, of what it had been like when he was growing up, of what had changed, of what was still the same. 

He saw his daughter and grandchildren once or twice while I knew him. He spent Christmas with them once, and it was almost frightening how happy he was to be doing it. He wanted money to buy presents for his grandchildren, to be a good grandfather. Actually, he reminded me a great deal of my own grandfather, though I never told him that—he had the same scruffy beard, the same beer belly, and, when he wasn't downcast and depressed, the same joviality, the sense of joy in simply living.

That was probably the happiest I ever saw him, before he visited his daughter and his grand-daughters for Christmas. Otherwise, though, as time wore on, I started to notice, at first unconsciously, then reluctantly, that, well, things were not getting better, that he was not finding a job, that he was not winning the lottery (we used to joke about that, one to another, me telling him that I was just waiting for a big payday once he won—his laugh was a lot like my grandfather's), that he was only getting older and more tired. 

    Then, too, his health was obviously not good. He had trouble getting around now, walking slowly, easily fatigued, forcing me to slow down—he had always had a bit of a gut, and like many homeless people, he was eating at McDonalds a lot. The poor eat fast food not because they're lazy, but because fast food is cheap and accessible and complete and it fills you up—hunger is a horrible sensation, and if you've been given ten dollars and don't have a stove, would you spend it on a few cans of beans or a complete meal, hot, sufficient, with a drink? I started to see him more and more during the day, sometimes with a McDonalds drink, sometimes not, but asleep, slumped on some bench by the road or another. Also, if you're homeless, it can be very hard to sleep, particularly if you don't have a tent or a cot and are sleeping on hard concrete or asphalt. But he was old, and tired, too, and not getting any less old, or any less tired.

Still, for most of the time I knew him I assumed, deep down, that he would make it. He would get a job, sooner or later; he would get an apartment, somehow, sooner or later (though rent in this town is quite expensive, the market price pushed upward by college students paid for by their parents, and most places require you to have a certified income of double that rent); he would move in with his daughter, and his granddaughters. Of course he would; after all, what was the alternative? Or at least, in my darker moments, as I realized that, almost certainly, none of this would ever happen, I continued to expect him to go on living as he did now, sad and downcast, sitting on the street by the restaurant begging, getting older and more tired every day, for years or decades to come—and who knows what could happen in that time? I've had a hard life, but I'm still young; and for the young, the future is above all a realm of possibilities. I don't think it ever quite came into my mind that he would die.

Of course he did, though—and in retrospect, from a more distant, dispassionate perspective, it was a quite obvious, even unremarkable, event. He was an old overweight black man in bad health, who ate poorly and didn't get enough sleep or nutrition or human contact, who no one was keeping tabs on or taking care of, prone to dozing on benches for much of the day. It was probably the last one of these that actually killed him—but they all played a role, in some way, I'm sure.

I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, though. I'll tell the story the way I found out about it, as horrible as that is. The last time I saw him, just before I left town for Christmas, to visit my family, he was worried. He had every reason to be; he wasn't visiting his family this year, and it was going to start getting cold, soon, and would stay cold for months. He asked me for money for a sleeping bag, a heavy-duty one to keep out the cold, to replace one that had been stolen; he wanted to make sure he would make it through the winter, wanted to keep on living, keep on praying and hoping and working and doing the right thing. I gave it to him, and he was even more grateful than usual. His gratitude, jovial as always, burst out in the statement that throughout the whole winter, every time he went to sleep under that sleeping bag, he would think of me and be grateful.

I left that Saturday, and when I got back, I didn't see him at his usual spot. That wasn't too unusual, especially since it was winter and cold. But I boarded a bus, not long after getting back, late at night, and saw another homeless man I knew. I asked him how he was doing, and he was obviously depressed, a little shell-shocked. It was cold tonight—that old black man who sat by the deli, did you know him? He froze to death this winter.

The funny thing is, even then at first I didn't believe it—didn't want to believe it. I looked everywhere, online, in the newspaper, for any story on it, any scrap of official news, and found nothing. So how did I know it was true? The guy who had told me was not always the most trustworthy—but why would he make that up? It couldn't be true. Surely he was still around, somewhere, surely I would see him soon.

There was probably a month or so in which I would go back to that spot, his usual spot, to check if he was there, a month when my heart would leap every time I saw an old black man on a bench or walking down the street. It was never him, though, and slowly I gave up hope, while never quite giving it up, until finally I got the evidence I had been looking for. I was handed a news story by a homeless couple, who had been profiled in an online magazine; in that story, they mentioned that my friend had died of the cold the night I had left town, back in December, before Christmas. In that story, too, I learned his last name for the first time. Then I googled it, and found his obituary.

Like I said, it was probably his habit of dozing on benches that doomed him, along with his poor health and his failing heart. A freeze warning was issued, and the homeless shelter opened its doors to everyone—but it was a long walk away, and maybe he didn't even see the warning. Probably he just fell asleep on the bench, in the evening, and never woke up.

I could have saved his life, if I'd been there, at the right place and the right time. That's not an accusation or a boast, but a fact. There had been a night, long before, when it was very cold, and snowed. I ran into him, and got him a hotel room for the night. I didn't have much money, I don't have much money, but I could have afforded a hotel room, for the night. If I'd run into him; if either of us had known what was coming.

Anyway, that was that. I think we both knew, by the end, that he was never really going to “get back on his feet,” as it says in the newspapers; but neither of us expected him to die alone and cold on the street that December, only a few days after I saw him and spoke to him and got him a sleeping bag for the winter. I don't know of many thoughts more horrible than the image of him alone and dying from the cold on a street in the town he grew up in, while college students and wealthy couples walked by and ignored him as they always had, on their way to their restaurants or their cars or their homes. Presumably it was one of them who found his body. 

He was a gentle man, a kind man, a man with dignity. He died alone from the cold. That is, on some level, all there is to say.

Of course, on another level, there's a lot more I could say, and a lot more I perhaps should say. He was a Christian, he was poor, he was (I firmly believe) a fundamentally good and decent man; I do hope, I do believe that he found in heaven, with God, the dignity and the love that he could not have on earth with man. If that's true, then perhaps it was a mercy that he found it sooner rather than later. He was never going to get younger, never going to get a job or his family back or a shower and clean bed of his own. Maybe it's better that he died and went to God, rather than stay there for another year or another decade, with downcast eyes, watching people ignore and despise him. I don't know.

This I do know, though: that he was a human being, and that he was not treated as one. That his death, even if it was a mercy, was an injustice, an injustice that cries out to heaven for vengeance, vengeance upon us all, upon every person who walked by him and ignored him, upon every person who despised him or forgot him, upon the whole society and the whole civilization that allowed him to die alone and cold in the dark.

An old man died alone in the cold, because he simply wasn't useful enough for anyone to care about him or feed him or clothe him or house him. He was only a man, with a failing body and a soul full of longing and sadness—nothing any of us had any use for. God help us all.