Across the Great Divide

Haircuts Don't Make the Man.

Last Wednesday, I laid hands on the heads of five men. 

One seeks me out when he hears the clippers. He is bound for court, and his public defender had told him he was looking a little scruffy. To me, he looks normal. Then he takes off the shirt he has borrowed for the hearing and his skin reveals a history of bad decisions.

I give him a high-and-tight military cut as his girlfriend watches to make sure I get the fade just right.

Another I have known for years. He is intelligent, but his heavy medication flattens his affect. He moves as if walking through waist-deep water. 

He is looking for a job. He knows the odds are long because his resume has big gaps, and he tells the truth in interviews. About why he hasn't worked since the '90s and those four years in prison. 

We'll call you, they tell him.

A guy my age, his nose half-collapsed, comes back for another trim. He's been stopping by the library to read one of my books, a few chapters at a time. (When you're in a shelter, it's risky to check out a book. They are too easy to lose.) 

His brother just got a lifetime achievement award for writing a series of Michigan state histories. He wishes he'd pursued a commercial art career instead of mechanics, but now he gives his drawings away.

A younger man I know has long been tripped up by anger issues and alcohol use. Usually, he's restless, but now in the chair he allows himself a period of sobriety-fueled reflection. Housing is no longer a hurdle for him; it's the lack of another person in his life and a beloved step child he no longer sees. I spend extra time with the scissors, listening, getting the cut perfect. 

Jose just needs a trim from his winter growth to a summer circle beard. He's a handsome man, but weathered, and he wears the telltale too many clothes for the temperature.

I do something for each to bring out his best, but I cannot blot the tattoos or erase the ink from their records. We revisit years of regret, of lost promise and broken relationships, but cannot walk them back. 

To a man, they are thoughtful, gentle, and full of appreciation. But they missed a turn somewhere. They lacked a mentor, a parent, a coach, a buddy, a lover, a partner, a brain chemical. They did not plan to become what they are.

They step out onto the street, invisible in their fresh haircuts.

A Home Invader Meets My Neighbors.

Last month in our Colorado neighborhood, a stranger broke into a home late at night, crashing through a glass door and awakening the frightened homeowners. 

The newspaper sketched the crime story in the next day's Blotter. The retired couple quickly responded, dialing 911 and confronting the intruder with a shotgun and an ice ax.

I suppose the incident will go down as a crime foiled by a citizen gun owner in a state with a "Make My Day" law.

In one sense, that's what happened; guns needn't be fired to do their work. But the real story is more complicated and nuanced.

The invasion incited neighbor fears and stirred up suspicions about a house down Monument Road that has served for years as a boarding facility for people dealing with disability, addiction and homelessness. The house was built 50 years ago in what was semi-rural scrubland. Today, the property marks the transition to the prosperous subdivisions between Grand Junction and the public land playgrounds to the south. 

At some point, the residence was substantially remodeled into a sprawling el-Rancho-Spanish-eclectic-style stucco with a shaded porch. Its surround of trailers, outbuildings and corrals wouldn't merit a second glance on a country road twenty miles from here. 

With enough upkeep, the house would still fit in with the developing area called the Redlands. But its poor residents probably never will.

The owner, a woman with a generous heart, had taken in boarders who needed in-home care. With time, their needs became more than she could serve, so she rented to others who could pay well below market rent. 

When the break-in occurred, eyes turned down the road, ready to assign blame to "the homeless" who might be skulking up the trails that run alongside our subdivision. The property was not quite what police would class as a "nuisance house," but miscellaneous complaints and calls had put it on a county watch list. 

Since I know two brothers who were staying at the house, I asked if indeed the man had come from there.

He had.

***

In Colorado, a citizen has no duty to retreat before resorting to the use of deadly force when faced with imminent peril in his or her home. Our neighbors, wrenched awake by the commotion and finding this crazed stranger in their house, would have been acting within the law if they had blown him away and obliterated any narrative other than self-defense. 

The man, bloodied from his plunge through the broken glass, was apparently under the influence of drugs. He  babbled about the Mexican Mafia chasing him. He was missing a shoe and his bare foot and legs where riddled with cactus spines from his run through the desert. 

For the moment, our neighbors had no way of knowing whether he was paranoid or whether his pursuers would soon come charging down their driveway. Yet, despite their own fear, they recognized a terrified human being seeking sanctuary and calmed him as they waited for the cops. 

***

Last night, we held a neighborhood meeting to air out concerns about crime and to inform folks about what had just happened. 

According to the deputies who are working to address issues with the house down the road, the recent event was atypical of such break-ins, which usually involve criminals preying on criminals or people involved in disputes with each other. While we can't rule out all risk, the officers conveyed that they didn't regard the property as being a likely source of danger for its neighbors. We are barely on the law enforcement radar.

While still dealing with the disquieting after-effects of the invasion, the homeowners have responded with compassion. They hope the perpetrator can get help for his addiction and escape the paranoia that recently made him flee California to join his stepfather in the house down the road.

No torches were lit last night, and perhaps a few were extinguished.

Neighbors, at least those who attended the meeting, now have a better sense that our area is safe and what they can do to keep it that way. They have a stronger commitment to watch out for each other. One even asked if the woman who owns the house can get some help in more effectively screening and managing her rentals.

Still, under the same circumstances, other households might've exercised their rights differently.

How quickly prejudice and suspicion can balloon into fear, and fear into a perceived threat. How easy it is under stress to act without fully understanding the situation. In a national political climate that fosters fear of the Other, how reasonable it is to believe your castle is ever in need of defending.

This is Colorado. We are not all bleeding hearts here on the Redlands. Some of us have guns in our houses and a determination to assert our right of self-defense, even if it means killing a stranger.

Fortunately, drawn by the bright security lights, that desperate man picked a house where he was greeted by a shotgun and two kind and deliberate hearts.

Love of Place Means Having a Place.

Are you working now? A question we asked folks at the Day Center.

Yesterday, Susan and I heard a talk by the new head of Grand Junction Economic Partners. Robin Brown is smart, dynamic and great for the job. Her informative presentation about the valley's economic development plan was based on the idea of Topophilia, a strong sense and love of place.

The same day in the local paper, I noted the name of a woman arrested for drug possession. She came here in part because of family connections, participated in a women's support group, and was working honestly on achieving sobriety. Let's call her Hope.

Normally, I'd see Hope at the Day Center where I volunteer. She came in daily and we had good conversations, not just about her struggles and her homeless state, but about other things. She lived for seven years in the Uptown area of Minneapolis, but we have more in common right here.

I last saw her when the Day Center closed the first of March for a reconstruction and expansion. Long term, that is good a thing. For the summer, however, it means a hundred or more people like Hope have lost one of its most important services.

Provisions have been made so they can get showers, collect mail and do laundry. But they no longer have a safe, drug-free place off the street that is theirs.

Robin Brown doesn't know Hope. She may not know any people experiencing homelessness. Based on her remarks, Robin, like others in the community, views visible homelessness as a detriment, a reality that economic development efforts must overcome, because "we can't do anything about the homeless."

I get that view. I wrote a novel about the intersection of a community's hopes for itself and the individuals not included in those aspirations.

But there's another way to look at homelessness—as a failure of economic development to produce living wage jobs and affordable housing. Indeed, the plan for the valley focuses on high-wage employers and housing for those families who come here to work for those companies.

Robin mentioned a visit to Boise, Idaho, where she remarked on the lack of visible homelessness on the streets downtown. The answer she got—probably from another economic development person, not a homeless advocate—was that the city had co-located all the relevant services at a location away from the core business district.

That's not a bad approach, but it's not simple or sufficient. Moving homelessness out of sight does not address the core issues where economic development has something important to contribute—jobs, housing and a robust tax base that can help fund social services. And, if it contributes to higher housing costs and loss of low-income housing, development can actually undermine progress to reduce homelessness.

I am rooting for Robin Brown and the community to succeed. And I am rooting for Hope to succeed, too, because that means things are really working in this place they both love.

 

Christmas Presents.

Paul, we'll call him, since he was quoting Thessalonians and calling this passage a comfort in his suffering: 

Since it is a righteous thing with God to repay affliction to those who afflict you, and to give relief to you who are afflicted with us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, giving vengeance to those who do not know God...

It seemed a little in your face.

But then he closed the Bible and showed photos of the money strangers had pressed on him the night before Christmas. Three one-dollar bills. He swiped to a twenty. Then to a hundred. The week before someone else handed him a pair of new work boots worth $180.

He wasn't even flying a sign, he said. Just sitting outside. The girl who gave him the hundred dollars was maybe 20 years old.

What did you do with money? someone asked.

He thought about getting a motel room, Paul said, but instead gave half of it away to others on the street.  

***

Wendell came in the door with a rolling knee walker and another Christmas tale.

He's a welder and iron worker who used to sell handmade crosses on the roadside. To support his broken ankle, he had fabricated a homemade walker out of bicycle parts and castaway materials.

Rolling through Lowe's, Wendell noticed a Mexican man following him and chuckling. When they reached the checkout, the man tried to make himself understood.

Across the language barrier, they worked it out. I have two of those, the man was saying. You are welcome to one.

Now Wendell had two, one of them store-bought. He'd brought in his three-wheeler in case we could use it at the Day Center.

We passed, but held onto the spirit of giving that passed through the day.

Seeing a Wall Instead of a Window.

I remember the day last spring when the security curtain that rolls down over the Day Center vestibule's windows stopped working and was deemed beyond repair. Since then, the view facing west has been blocked by metal slats. 

In my years of cleaning our entry at the end of the day, I've tooth-brushed grime from the threshold, vacuumed nail pairings from under the baseboard heater and temporarily chased germs from every surface touched by human hands.

But yesterday, I found myself cleaning that blank window for the first time.

It's not that the glass was dirty. Someone on another day must swab it from time to time. But I realized I had started seeing a wall instead of a window.

Cleaning glass no one can see through—now there's an inescapable metaphor for what we do here. 

Since the Day Center opened in March, 1997, it has provided the same basic services to people experiencing poverty and disruption in their lives: laundry, showers, storage, medical, newspaper, phone and mail, free coffee, respite from the heat, cold and insecurity of the streets. Five days a week, about 17,000 visits a year.

But we also dispense the invisible and uncountable. We maintain small dignities and uphold good habits. We push back against the dirt and the chaos. We laugh at absurdity and resist injustice. We share what we have, respect most of all.

This spring, renovations will begin on the building and it will nearly double in size.

This time next year, we'll able to see the street again through this window. For now, it serves well enough as a reflection of the world inside.

 

Abuse Stories Take a Different Form on the Streets.

Abusive relationships have been all over the news lately because they involve well-known figures and sympathetic victims. In some cases, relatively minor exercises of male privilege are held up to represent a long-suppressed and much deeper problem.

At places like the Day Center, there's no shortage of examples of how abuse plays out in extreme ways against powerless people. But these stories are not salacious or satisfying to uncover. No wealthy monsters are called to account. No articulate and talented individuals receive belated recognition for what they endured.

Tricia, we'll call her, came into the Day Center for the first time Wednesday morning. 

She's been homeless since December 11th after being slapped with a restraining order by a woman who shares her house in a very small Western Slope Colorado town. She can't get back into the house to obtain clothing or other possessions without a judge's order. 

The other's woman's claims of physical abuse by Tricia are false, she says. The real issue is the friend's alcoholism and conflict over the fact that they bought the house together but only Tricia has been contributing to the payments. Filing for a permanent restraining order is a move to force a sale of the house so the woman can take half the proceeds, according to Tricia.

Her situation is complicated by the fact that she is employed in Rifle, a town large enough for a WalMart but too small for a shelter or other resources for homeless women. The shelter in Grand Junction has openings, but the hours don't align with her work hours and hour-plus commute to her low-wage job.

The last two nights Tricia couch-surfed at the house of a Grand Junction acquaintance, but the woman has a new boyfriend and said she didn't want to risk the relationship. A married co-worker has offered to put Tricia up until the situation gets resolved, but she doesn't want to impose on the couple.

Her plan is to sleep in her car and hope she can get the restraining order lifted at a hearing next month. Either way, it sounds like the living situation will remain untenable. The other woman's name is on the deed.

Tricia was clearly stressed and preoccupied with not coming across as needy. I encouraged her to accept the co-worker's offer of a place to stay. Neither pride nor instability was going to help her right now. She'd benefit from the support of someone who understands her situation.

Before she left to consult with a lawyer about her upcoming court date, Tricia took a shower and fixed her hair. Meanwhile, we checked around to see if we could find a sleeping bag so she could stay warm in her car without running the heat all night. None were available. I told her about some other places that had blankets and clothing and urged her again to consider the offer her co-worker had extended.

Tricia seems like a decent person in a tough situation, but I've only heard one person's side of the story. I've learned not to leap to conclusions or try to lift burdens from those who won't relinquish them.

On the county assessor's site, there's a picture of the house in contention, a manufactured home first sold in 2001. In 2007, when area unemployment was at a decade-low and the housing bubble had yet to burst, the house sold for more than twice its original price. By 2010 the house belonged to the lender and changed hands between mortgage companies before eventually being sold in 2012 for $1 to the U.S. Government.

County records list a zero-dollar sale price to Tricia and her friend later that year. I don't know the terms of the sale or the prospects for taking out equity if they do sell the home. It's possible that a working woman in her fifties could end up on the street with nothing to show for her five years of investment.

Maybe two people. There's no rich guy's downfall to spice up this story. No cushion. Just a net that will have even bigger holes in it if the powerful people have their way.

The Parable of the Wandering Pit Bull

We We started out sharing positive experiences that had shaped our attitudes toward winter. But as happens at our Peace House meditations, we veered off on a tangent about animals in our lives.

Lawrence told us about walking past a yard in his sister's neighborhood that was enclosed with a stout metal fence. Every time he walked by that house, a dog would rush the fence, repeatedly slamming its face into the bars hard enough to raise welts. 

He learned to ignore the dog, but it never stopped its charges or moderated its furious barking.  

His sister had a pit bull she kept in her yard. It was mild mannered and bit mischievous. Occasionally the dog would escape its tether and run off to explore the neighborhood.

One night when the dog slipped its collar, Lawrence volunteered to find it and bring it home. A few blocks away, he spotted it. The dog would stop when he called its name but then would head off again when Lawrence got too close.

They had played that game before. Sometimes the dog would lead him on for a mile before it would agree to be caught.

After a few blocks of this, Lawrence stopped trying to command the dog and dropped down on his hands and knees, making higher pitched puppy talk and wiggling his butt like another dog. 

It worked. The dog came to him. He stroked its ears, nuzzled its face with his and offered all kinds of good doggy positive reinforcement, until he was confident the dog would return with him.

Okay, go home, he said.

The dog trotted ahead and then took a turn into the open gate of the house with the metal fence.

This pit bull was not his sister's after all.

I had my face right down with his, Lawrence said. It could have ripped it off or clamped onto me before I had a chance.

The moral of the tale seemed self-evident. Affection and kindness can work wonders where anger and aggression fail.

Lawrence starting thinking differently about a few things in his own life after that.

But the next time he saw the dog, it hurtled into the fence, barking and drooling just like old times.

Of Blood and Beet Juice, and a Long, Dreamless Sleep.

De said he was drinking homemade beet juice. I believed him, since he could have claimed the ruby liquid in the cranberry juice bottle was what the label said. 

He was still getting used to the idea that it was the Fourth of August. He had received his disability money on the First, paid his rent and left a phone message to confirm he had sent it since he hated late fees. He bought a pack of cigarettes that he put in the freezer. The last thing he remembers was meeting a couple of acquaintances and then drinking himself into a stupor that lasted from Tuesday night until he awoke at his girlfriend's late Friday morning.

His gut hurt. His mother was mad at him because he hadn't paid for his phone minutes. His pack of cigarettes had disappeared. He was out of money and had arrived at Peace House just in time to dig into one of the last plates of food.

That's Tom's pulled pork recipe, I told him.

De stopped eating. This is pork?

I nodded. He walked to the garbage can and scraped off his plate. I'm not sure whether De has religious objections or simply believes pork is bad for him. Some substances hurt his back, he says, including the menthol in cigarettes.

His mother was mad at De about the phone because when De signed up for his plan, he got two phones and put his mother on the other one. Service was suspended until his monthly payment cleared.

August First was Neighborhood Night Out. His sister celebrated with a group in front of her apartment building. An elderly woman who lived upstairs came down to investigate and stabbed De's sister in the arm with a butcher knife, then went back up to her apartment. 

Someone called 911 and the police arrived. De's sister was understandably outraged over being stabbed on Neighborhood Night Out. She apparently did not pass the comportment test when police were slow to believe the story about being stabbed by an old woman upstairs. She was handcuffed, taken to the ER for stitches and then put in jail. (Need I mention that De's sister is black?)

De's sister tried to call their mother with her one phone call from jail. It went to voicemail that was not accessible because of the overdue bill.

A day passed and then the old woman stabbed someone else. The police released De's sister. De's mom tried to call De and realized why she didn't hear about her daughter's arrest. 

De, meanwhile, slept dreamlessly through all this. His memory a blank except for foggy recollections of visits to the bathroom.

Friday, though, he was clear and philosophical about everything. The old woman had mental problems, he said. He did not blame her. His friends probably helped him drink away all his money. He has a kitchen where he can cook beets and make broth that agrees with him. The chicken wrap he got to replace the pulled pork—sent over with other expiring food from Kowalski's—tasted good.

When I'm not drinking, I feel like myself, he said. Still, he relapses and swerves close to returning to homelessness.

We talk about our bikes and bike accidents for a while. He's been hit on his bike by cars multiple times, twice compounding injuries from a serious car accident. He's been beaten and had his bike stolen by kids doing a gang initiation. He looks toward the future and entering his fifties sees that the life he has now is likely to be as good as it gets.

He stays with me on the porch until Peace House closes. Some people go to the library and hang out downtown, he says, but I don't like being around all those people with nothing to do. I go there and it makes me I feel homeless.

We unlock our bikes and head home in opposite directions.

 

 

Hugging the Red Vacuum Cleaner.

J. told me he was freshly homeless after seven years living in a neighborhood rooming house that had been taken over by a bad element. A new owner enforced the rules more strictly without entirely keeping trouble away.

At least, not the trouble J. perceived. He lost his room for getting physical with non-tenants he thought were making the place dangerous again.

Right now, he's sleeping in a former tramp camp near a freeway sound wall. Last night, he was kept awake by raccoons making noise as they came down from the trees.

I was up most of the night with a stick, he said. I was worried I might lose a toe... or more tender parts.

Talk to them, I said. Make friends.

I don't talk to animals, he said.

He carried a white cane that he joked looked like he'd swiped it from Col. Sanders. He showed me it was a shower curtain rod with rubber tips on either end collapsed to its shortest length. It was heavy and would serve as a defensive weapon as well as a skid-proof walking stick.

J. said he'd gone to films in the park last evening with a woman who was prostituting herself by day, but they just fooled around on the playground equipment and laughed. They didn't even watch the movie.

I'll watch out for you, she said. Then she left, and J. remembered suddenly he was homeless and couldn't go back to the rooming house.

(I am compressing his account, omitting personal details, editing the stream of consciousness, which would impossible to transcribe anyway. He is self-aware, expresses himself on multiple levels, but his speech is a torrent issuing from a sleep-deprived mind riding in a body that has carried PTSD since childhood.)

He told me of cleaning out his room before he turned in his key, leaving behind possessions that had no use to him any more.

A red vacuum cleaner stood in the back of his closet. He and his girlfriend had gotten it to clean the carpets of the apartment she had qualified for. It was not the best place, but it was hers and it represented a positive step up. Then the building was sold, the rents jacked up, and she was evicted.

For a while, she stayed with him illegally in his room. But she had some old charges facing her and she took a plea that sent her to the women's prison. She'll be out in December.

I thought I was okay, he said. This is what God wills for me, and I can deal with it. But then I saw the vacuum in the closet and I started crying. I couldn't stop and I couldn't breathe. I was on my knees hugging that vacuum, making this whistling sound in my throat, and the guys in the other rooms went downstairs until I stopped.

Tonight, he will sleep again with the raccoons.

The Only Man with a Helmet.

Back in February, I shot this photo of my bike outside the Day Center to remind me of a brief conversation I had with my friend Kelvin.

He was having a hard day, which seemed to be a symptom of a hard year. Some of it had to do with being the father of a new son he couldn't see. He'd seen the boy once in the hospital before the infant was taken from the mother, who had some legal and mental health issues that required her to be handcuffed to the bed rail.

Someone, Kelvin had been unable to find out who, had dressed the child in pajamas with mock prison stripes. The insult of it was still raw months later.

We talked for a while outside. I did my best to convey my sympathy and sincere hopes that he might get things resolved, but I was aware enough of his situation to know that I really couldn't help him. Kelvin knew it, too.

He said, You ride up here on your bike with that funny British helmet on. I know you're happy to be here, but you don't have to be here. The rest of us, we don't wear helmets. What's the point? What would we be saving ourselves for? You get to leave and go back to your beautiful life. It is beautiful, isn't it?

Yes, I said. I've been very fortunate.

He wasn't scolding me or asking for anything. Just stating reality. Of the hundreds who walk through that door, I'm the only one who brings a helmet.

He walked off toward the soup kitchen then. I've only seen him in passing once or twice since. 

I hate leaving that moment hanging open, but today was my last day at the Day Center until winter. Leaving reminds me of how little control I have here, how little influence in the affairs of people we try to serve. When I return, things will be different, and I will have to gather up what loose ends I can.

Six weeks ago, I wrote about Ben showing up at the Day Center, worried about his missing EBT card. He got some help and I thought maybe "things will work out. He's a generous man and has friends who'll pitch in a little."

The last time I saw Ben, a few weeks later, he looked bad—red faced and fragile. He sat briefly in the vestibule but didn't come in. I asked another guest who went outside with him if Ben was all right.

"Yeah, he's okay," he said.

Besides being a gentle soul, "Uncle Ben" was a heavy drinker of the sort where drinking, once it starts, ends with obliteration and incontinence. One of his fellow campers told me when Ben was drinking alone by the river, he used to sit with his legs in the water up to his knees, so if he passed out, it would be easier for others to clean him up before dragging him to his tent.

Ten days ago, Ben died along the railroad tracks south of downtown. The coroner's news release said, "there was nothing suspicious regarding his death and it was related to a preexisting condition," which I suppose is a kind summary of a sad end, but also bloodless and sanitized beyond recognition.

The Big Girl borrowed our clippers so one of our new guests could remove the stubble that had grown out on the sides of her scalp while she was in jail. As she got her hair cut, the Tiny Girl came in to check her mail. T.G. was wearing fingerless leather gloves that looked like something from a ultimate fighting getup. She told B.G. she was taking self-defense classes and B.G. said if T.G. kept it up, she had a pair of boxing gloves she'd give to T.G.

Within an hour, B.G. was grousing about T.G. acting like a child and getting into her business. Before long, they were shouting at each other outside, T.G. accusing B.G. of messing with her man. B.G. swatted T.G. in the back of the head, and T.G., who weighs about 65 pounds, went down on the sidewalk, screaming at the top of her lungs.

There was no blood and the boyfriend chose to calm down T.G. instead of go after B.G., which was the right decision on several counts.

The new guy who'd trimmed B.G.'s hair had steered clear of all the drama. All he wanted to do was get to the animal impound building when it opened so he could claim his dog. He'd tried without success to find a ride. I told him I would have given him one if I'd driven instead of biking in. I gave him directions how to find the place, which is nine miles out of town.

Last I saw him, he had started walking south, a route that would take him right past where Ben's body was found.

I put on my helmet and pedaled back into my beautiful life.