Homelessness Part 2

Gary, the laborer who had been helping with odd jobs around my house, gave me an education on homelessness. We walked together through a tent city that was nestled in the forest just off the highway near Church Street and Highway 41. Gary told me that everyone gathered in this area because it was close to a homeless shelter on Highway 41 that was filled to capacity. It was so full, that it only accepted women and children at night, with the men sleeping in tents in the surrounding area. The shelter offered everyone one sandwich each day, so a large line would form each morning in order to get the lunchtime baloney. Men were allowed into the shelter twice each week during the day to take a shower and get fresh donated clothes. 

Gary didn’t live in the tent city that we walked through. At one point in the past he did live that way, but one evening a group of men wearing all black, including black masks that covered their faces, descended on the tent city with machetes and chopped the tents to pieces. The homeless people were forced to flee for their lives, only to return a few hours later to find their little village reduced to torn scattered pieces. Everyone figured it was a group of nearby business owners or even the police who wanted the homeless camp to disperse.  After losing his tent, Gary was forced to find somewhere else to stay.

He told me had slept at a bus stop one night and then under a freeway underpass, but both times the police came by during the night, illuminated him with an extremely bright light, and ordered him to leave through a loud speaker. Eventually, Gary found a little camp of men in a nearby vacant lot which had been used as an unofficial construction supply dump. The men had taken the scrap wood and pallets and built a group of small 'dog' houses, each with just enough room for one man. Inside their dog houses, wrapped in scrap cloth and newspaper, they managed to keep dry in the rain and warm enough to survive the winter.

When Gary led me into the vacant lot, I was somewhat apprehensive about going with him to explore the camp, but we stopped at the edge and he described how they built the houses and why they lived this way. Because of the mounds of construction piles that had been dumped at the entrance to the lot, the police couldn’t see the camp and didn’t take time to investigate anything there. By grouping together, the men could protect themselves, which turned out to be a major problem that homeless people faced. The reality is that homeless people prey on other homeless people. This is why you sometimes see vagrant pushing a shopping cart with accumulated belongings because otherwise if you left your collection somewhere it would be plundered while you were away. In Gary’s case, the group of dog-house men had made a pact to defend each other’s possessions. One man always stayed behind to guard the camp while the others went looking for odd jobs or got in line for the daily sandwich.

When one man found a job, he would share food, smokes, and alcohol with the rest of his vagabond clan. Gary told me that one of the guys in the dog-house camp was on Social Security Disability and received a check for $600 a month. Whenever his check came in, he would rent a motel room at one of the nearby sleazy fleabags, and 2 or 3 other men would share the room for a week or so. The rest of the check went to buy food, cigarettes, and beer.

Once, I picked Gary up from one of these motels so he could do some work for me and earn some money. When I pulled up, the door to their motel room was open, and I could see four men inside and one woman. After Gary got in the car, I asked about the woman. 

“Oh, she’s a prostitute,” he told me nonchalantly. “She hooks up with whomever has money at the time.”

Gary told me that homeless woman have an awful life. They end up homeless for a wide variety of reasons. Sometimes they are junkies, or they have been to jail or prison for something and their criminal records keep them from getting decent jobs. Or, they could have lost their jobs and ended up living in their cars until their cars were towed away. Or, they could have left a violent relationship and had nowhere to go. They then gravitate to the nearest shelter, where depending on capacity they often get priority on getting a bed for the night. But inside a shelter can be just a brutal as living out in the elements with the nighttime noises of several hundred people who have no respect for each other. They steal from each other, gang up and attack one another, and create their own intense prison-like pecking order that can quickly become too much to tolerate. Because the woman can’t usually get odd jobs like mowing yards and cleaning gutters, they turn to hooking up with a variety of homeless men who temporarily have a little money.

The homeless men were often very protective of the homeless women. Gary told me a story about a woman who had hooked up with a particular guy and they got into a very public argument. He shoved her to the ground and then stormed off. A small group had gathered around, helped the woman up, and offered her a little sympathy. She then told the group, “I’m pregnant.”  Incensed that the man would abuse a pregnant woman, a vigilante group of homeless men stalked after the guy, caught up with him, and beat him to death.

After seeing Gary’s situation, I asked him why he was homeless. He told me that he had lost his job at some point in the past, and even though his bank account was drained dry, he just kept writing checks. Eventually, those hot checks caught up with him, and he was arrested and spent some time in jail. During his jail stay, he caught hepatitis, so now when he applied for a job somewhere, either his criminal record popped up on the background check, or the inability to get a health certificate due to the hepatitis kept him jobless. So, he had been living in his car doing odd jobs for homeowners until his car had died in the middle of an intersection and had been towed away.

I started trying to help Gary find a job by buying him a pre-paid cell phone so that he could apply for jobs and have some way for potential employers to contact him. He gave me reports of places where he applied, and one day he told me he found a job cleaning RV’s at an RV rental place. He was ecstatic about finding a real job, and reported to work the next day. However, after a week on new job, Gary called me and told me the job hadn’t work out.

“I cleaned out these nasty RV’s for 10 to 12 hours a day,” Gary said. “After working all week, I asked about getting paid, but the owner of the place said ‘fuck off.’  I later learned from talking to some other guys that this place is notorious for this. They ‘hire’ a different desperate homeless guy each week, work him to death, and fire him with no pay at the end of the week.”

I talked with my wife Jennifer about what we could do to help Gary, and we decided to do something that I would later regret. We offered to buy Gary a car so he would have transportation to go back into the cleaning roofs and gutters, and also have a place to sleep at night. With those requirements in mind, I found a used mini-van with enough space for a few tools and place to stretch out at night. The price was $1500.  

I picked up the van with Gary, and helped him over the next few days to get it registered. That required having insurance and an inspection. I gave him $200 to buy a few months of insurance, and then we went together to get the minivan inspected. That is when we discovered the van didn’t pass the air quality inspection. We took it to a shop where I spent another $300 making repairs, but it still wouldn’t pass the inspection. We had a temporary 30-day dealer’s plate, so I told Gary to go ahead and drive it until we could figure out what to do to get it inspected and registered.

During those 30-days, Gary went around to various neighborhoods and did a few odd jobs, but then one day I got a collect call from the Cherokee County jounty jail. Gary told me that he had been arrested because he didn’t pay the ticket when his previous car had stalled in the middle of an intersection. It was a ticket for $90, but he had never paid it or appeared in court. Now, he was in the Cherokee County jail. 

Gary asked me to check with one of his friends about the van. When Gary was arrested, his friend Jeff had been with him, and the police had let Jeff keep the van. Gary told me that Jeff lived in the dog-house village, so I went there looking for him. I didn’t find Jeff there, but another guy told me what happened. Gary and Jeff had picked up a woman and the three of them were staying in the van together. Gary had been pulled over for some minor traffic violation, and when they checked for any outstanding warrants, the old ticket and failure-to-appear status showed up. Jeff and the woman stayed with the van, but later that night, Jeff went into a convenience store to buy something, and he left the woman in the car. When he came back outside to the parking lot, the woman was gone. She had stolen the van, and according to my contact she had driven it to Florida where it had broken down on the highway.

I was disgusted by everything I learned, but not really surprised. Gary called me again and asked if I could bail him out of jail at a cost of $350. This time I said “no.”  He told me that the jail was terrible and asked if I could at least put $50 on credit at the jail so he could buy a few things he needed there. I reluctantly agreed, and went down to the county jail, worked my way through the guards and metal detectors and gave a deputy clerk $50 to put on Gary’s account. 

It was late November, and I did not hear from Gary all winter. I figured he either got out of jail somehow, or he stayed there for the winter, which I rationalized might not be such a bad thing compared to spending freezing nights in the dog-house village.

But then one day I got a phone call from a woman who said she was Gary’s cousin, Angie. She asked me, “Did you buy Gary a car?” I told her I did, but I explained what had happened to the minivan. She said she had some information about Gary that I needed to know, and she invited me to meet at a nearby coffee shop. 

I wasn’t sure what to expect at the coffee shop, but when I arrived I was surprised by the nicely dressed woman that identified herself as Angie. She told me that she thought it was nice that a total stranger had befriended her homeless cousin, but then she asked me a question that blew me away completely. “Did you know Gary has a trust fund?”

“What?” I asked not sure I had heard her correctly.

“Gary has a trust fund,” she repeated, “I’m the trustee of the fund, and I had to cut Gary off several years ago.” 

Angie explained that Gary was adopted as a teenager and lived with his new parents in a small rural South Georgia town. From the very beginning, Gary had been a problem child. The adopting couple were older, had never had their own children, and had taken a teenage orphan because they had been told that teenagers were the last to be adopted. When Gary’s adopted father died, he lived with his mother long after he dropped out of High School. His mother began to have symptoms of dementia, and Gary took advantage of this by telling her that he needed money for various things like tires for his car. She would give him a few hundred dollars, and then he would ask again next week for the same thing. Not remembering that she had already given Gary money for tires, she would give it to him again. Over and over this happened until other extended family members found out what was going on. 

Knowing that she was fading, Gary’s mother set up a trust fund for him, but asked her sister (Angie’s mother) to be the trustee. When Angie’s mother died, Angie took over as the trustee.  Gary’s mom left him a substantial sum of money in the trust, and Angie and her mom gave Gary a monthly stipend of $1500.  There was never a month that Gary didn’t blow through all the money halfway through the month and come begging for an advance. Angie had eventually helped Gary get a job as a maintenance man for her church, which included an apartment on the church grounds. 

One day, Angie got a call from the church and they said Gary had not shown up for work. The same thing happened the next day, and after three days Angie went online and checked Gary’s debt card, which was issued as part of the trust account. She discovered a variety of charges including some from a cheap motel in Marietta, and she went there to investigate. After finding out which room Gary was in, she went and knocked on the door. Gary opened the door and was very surprised to see his cousin. Angie said a cloud of marijuana smoke hit her in face, and inside she saw a woman that looked like a prostitute.  She said it was then that she stopped the monthly stipend from the trust.

“So Gary is just an all around fuck up,” I said in disgust.

“Yes,” she said, “That’s basically it. I appreciate the good deed you tried to do for him, but you need to stop. He’s taken advantage of you, just like he took advantage of his mother, and like he took advantage of me.” 

I still feel somewhat of a fool for what happened. I don’t regret trying to help someone, but I realize that the help we offer can sometimes be an enabler that reinforces continued bad choices. I am still trying to determine how I should feel about this. If you read this and have some advice for me, I’d appreciate a comment.

A few months later, I got a phone call from Gary. He told me that he spent the winter in jail, and after he got out he had lucked into the perfect job. He had been hired to work for a traveling carnival where he was running the merry-go-round and working a balloon-dart game. He was sleeping each night in one of the carnival trucks. 

“I just wanted to let you know what happened to me,” he said, “and I wanted to tell you thank you for everything you did to help me.” 

I was quiet for a moment, and then finally responded, “You’re welcome.”