A Backpack, A Bicycle, or a Cold Beer?
What’s a homeless life worth in America?
“In that split-second, I grabbed my backpack from him and held on for my life, bredren! Seen?” he asked me.
“Yes, I,” was all I could say, horrified and mesmerized by the story my friend was telling me.
“Listen me, Iyah,” he said in Norfolk, VA patois, “I don’t sleep heavy, seen? These blood clot vampires will kill you out here, Iyah, ya hear me?” he said. “So I woke up to this older dude grabbing and getting ready to walk off with my shit. My life, all I have left from the fire, my family… all of it was in that backpack. It might not be much, and there was nothing for him, but I wasn’t going to let go if it killed me!”
My friend had been catching some rest near a railyard where he slept during warm weather. By day, he worked in the yards of his mother’s friends for donations. By night he washed dishes for minimum wage and food at a bar on Colley Ave.
His mother’s house had just burned to the ground and he, being her primary caregiver got her out, and barely escaped with his life. The fire left him destitute, mostly blind in one eye and with scarring from head-to-toe skin grafting.
A sibling stepped in to house his mom. That sibling disagreed with my friend’s life choices, and left him there with nothing but a burned-out house and a broken-down truck to sleep in. A handful of years back he had his own business, was a respected drummer among the local music scene and a tour manager for one of the hottest reggae acts in America. Now my friend was talking to me about his life and death struggle with another homeless man.
I called him this morning to check on him, and to ask about his story, as it parallels that of another friend of mine. He was found stabbed to death in a public park in Los Angeles in 2017. His case remains open and unsolved. He and my friend in Norfolk shared a few things: a phenomenal musical ability, a personality the size of Jupiter, and eccentricities which became more significant as they aged. Anyway, he continued:
“We were wrestling for the backpack and dude pulled a knife, so without thinking I just swung him around using the backpack and got him pinned against the train tracks. Bredren, I was scared! I told that man who I didn’t know that I didn’t want to kill him, but if I had to I would. I had him down and was pushing against his throat with the strap from my backpack and suddenly, this old dude started convulsing and dropped the knife. I jumped up, looked around at the crowd of other homeless who’d gathered to watch the fight, and asked another homeless dude: ‘should we call the police, or ambulance?’ and do you know what a guy said to me, Iyah?” he asked me.
“Nah, man. What the-“ I began to stutter.
“This other homeless dude told me to just get out of there, to run. But bredren, I was worried about this man, so I said again: ‘look, I didn’t want to hurt the guy. I just want to make sure he’s alright,’ and dude said back: ‘that’s more concern than he had for you,’ so I just picked up my shit and walked, brother.”
Nobody knows what happened to the guy on the train tracks. If he died, someone likely took his shoes and whatever else he had and left him there as nothing more than an afterthought for whomever would find him next.
These streets don’t give one wet fart about any of us. Yet many of us walk around feeling secure, ignoring the ones sleeping in doorways. In fact, that indifference is light years kinder than the response most of our homeless neighbors get from law enforcement and community resource centers.
My friend has been doing some landscaping around his childhood neighborhood. He spent much of the winter sleeping outside, nearly freezing to death twice. One night, he was found under a picnic table in the snow. An officer approached; my friend’s first thought was to prove he wasn’t a vagrant. Removing the glove from his hand to reach into his pocket for a paystub, his skin tore off the back of his hand.
The officer asked if he was an addict, seeing what he suspected to be white residue around my friend’s nose and face. But that was ice. Icicles had frozen to his facial hair and runny nose. This officer recognized that he was hypothermic and near death, so he pleaded with my friend to allow him to take him to a local shelter. My friend was reluctant, and today he told me why.
For five years, he has volunteered at the same shelter. He’s worked food kitchens and other programs of outreach on behalf of this same shelter while he was himself homeless without mention of it to the shelter brass.
He told me of arriving there that late night, frozen, and in dire straits. He told me how everyone was so shocked and initially asked him why he never said anything. Then he described in painful detail how they began to treat him differently than they had before.
This culminated with him telling me that not just those shelter folks, but how even people he’d known his entire life now act like they don’t know him. He literally cried when he said to me:
“I just want to find that person I was again. Everybody talks about that person like he’s dead or gone. But I’m right here, bredren. I’m still right here. But I still spend my days searching for _____!” He spoke his name to me in the third person.
“You are,” I reassured him. “My phone says that, I said that as soon as you answered today. Nothing has changed. You are still who you always have been to me. You are me. You’re my brother.”
He is now staying temporarily with some family friends. He’d been working on their property and during the last snow, they saw him sleeping under a wheelbarrow in their backyard. They brought him in, as we should.
I write this today as a plea to all who have the means to help. Somewhere Between LBJ’s reluctant signing of The Civil Rights Act, his War on Poverty being taken over by the war in Viet Nam, and Tricky Dick’s War on Drugs, the America I was taught about in school has lost its moral compass. Ronnie Raygun’s trickle down “get richer more quickly scam” for today’s oligarchs and Congressional robber barons and the introduction of crack cocaine to the inner cities all but sealed our fate.
Now it’s our turn. This nation is ours. This disease of organized poverty is ours to cure. Treatments don’t work. Practice is the only tangible reality; moment by moment, and breath by breath, this life is a practice in being. Within our being lies our collective and individual healing.
I will never again try to change the world. I will simply change the world, no try. Ask Yoda, or Hank Bukowski, although Yoda said it best:
“Do or do not. There is no try… You must unlearn what you have learned… Named must be your fear before banish it you can… Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering… That is why you fail… The greatest teacher, failure is… Pass on what you have learned.”
This piece is livicated to my Norfolk brother, and to my brother who was knifed in Las Palmas Park. Rest in Power, Fred “Freak” Smith. May Jah bless and keep you all.
One.
