Last week I broke a ten for Val, who needed the change to pay back his debts. Small sums change hands often as individual fortunes rise and fall among the homeless. One week you're a borrower and maybe next time you'll be a lender. The same type of exchange happens with tobacco, shoe laces, booze, blankets and other commodities.
Val's a veteran from the Vietnam era and would have qualified for one of the new housing units for vets across the street, but he prefers the subsidized room he has east of downtown because it carries less responsibility, I think.
In my notebook last week, I wrote about Val's distinctive style of walking. He propels himself with sort of loose-limbed, soft-shoe glide, his head thrust forward from hunched shoulders. Imagine a character animated by R. Crumb sneaking into a house late at night keeping his head low in case there are bats.
Concern for Val was rippling through the Day Center Wednesday morning because on Tuesday he'd been trucking across the street in his head-down manner and stepped in front of a truck.
Since he was hit on a main drag entering downtown between the police station and the main homeless park, there were plenty of witnesses. They agreed Val simply forgot to look both ways before he crossed a street he crosses several hundred times a year.
Paramedics were on the scene quickly, stripping him down and then hauling him off in the ambulance. His friends spent the rest of the day searching for him at the VA and other hospitals, and when he didn't turn up they feared his injuries were so serious he'd been airlifted to Denver.
In fact, he was at St. Mary's, had undergone surgery and was going to recover. Two days later, there still hasn't been anything in the news about a homeless pedestrian being hit by a truck.
There's another drama going on that I'm not ready to write about until I collect some more information and events have a chance to unfold. After a guest heard me talking to some people involved in it, he cautioned me not to get too involved.
"I know you mean well," he said, "but you have to be careful not to get too wrapped up with them. Those people are meth heads who created their own troubles because they didn't take care of things around their camp."
His concern reminded me that I only see one slice of life a week here, and it arrives in fragments cloaked in best behavior. I hear opinions and accounts from all kinds of people, some of them unreliable, some charming, some with hidden agendas and some who'd believe Satan himself deserves another chance. Some of the guests here are all of the above.
Gotta remind myself to keep looking both ways.
The reality here is that homeless people are marginalized by society and also by the choices they make. If you can overcome your fears and set aside judgment, their community may seem surprisingly diverse and open, but in other ways it remains closed and isolated.
Family members, social services, religious communities, cops, soup kitchen and shelter volunteers, courts, doctors, security guards, EMTs, employers paying in cash and strangers with spare change weave in and out of their lives, but the street, the park or the river provide the only reliable facsimile of home for some of the people I've met. So that's where they return to support each other, rob each other, learn from each other, inform on each other, worry about each other, distrust each other, fall in love with each other, argue with each other, share living space with each other, give legal advice to each other and compete with each other for whatever status and scarce resources can be scrounged at the bottom of the safety net.
Also on Wednesday the guests were remarking on the moon and the moons of other planets and other galaxies. Out here, the moon doesn't just sit in the sky; it gets a nightly chance to perform framed by a 30-mile-square arena of mountains, against a backdrop of black infinity pebbled with stars. The night before, the moon had glowed like the horns of a golden calf lit from below by an invisible bonfire.
In a camp by the river there are no lights for reading, no TVs, no iPads and nothing much to do but talk and drink until you leave the fire for a frigid sleep. Down there, the moon was not a sight glimpsed on a drive or framed through a window. It was the glorious fixture in the ceiling of a place we think is not a home.
