One Paycheck Away

09/09/13: Joseph, G St and 24th St NW

Joseph sits on a collapsed cardboard box with his belongings scattered around him. He is seated in what I’ve always considered a rather uncomfortable position. When I ask him his name, he tells me his first, middle, and last and I can smell alcohol on his breath. Joseph has been living on the street for over 40 years. His one commentary on what it’s been like for the past four decades: “Don’t. Be. Homeless.”

Before Joseph started living on the streets, he was driving a scaffolding truck for a living. He doesn’t seem to remember why it was that he stopped working, but he notes that he wasn’t laid off, he quit. He lived with his mother and father, and when his father passed away, he quit his job and moved out of his mother’s house.

As the oldest of nine children growing up in the District, Joseph was not afforded many luxuries. “School life was, oh my God,” he looks up at me while his head is positioned downward and lowers his voice to say, “I didn’t have a lot of food to eat,” as if it were a secret. His father was a construction worker and his mother stayed at home to take care of the children. His siblings are still living in DC, and he is in contact with them from time to time. However, he says, “I hate ‘em because they cry cry cry cry.”

He frequently pauses to consider how he should answer my questions and tells me, “if you were homeless, if you were out here and homeless, it would be bad. You gonna be out here. And the worst thing about it is when you are homeless, the rain starts comin’ down.” I ask Joseph to explain his daily life, and he says, “oh, darling, it is bad. It is real real bad,” he pauses for several seconds and looks around, “I feed the birds, I sit here and feed the birds.” I ask him if that makes him happy, “yes ma’am it sure does, it sure does.” As we thank him and walk away, he raises his hand to say coyly, “you’re pretty.” 

07/23/13: James, Miriam's Kitchen (Foggy Bottom)

We visited Miriam’s Kitchen on a Tuesday. In order to interview James, a regular at Miriam’s, we stepped out of the bustling main room where guests had just finished eating breakfast and into a small office to speak with him. I go into the conversation knowing that he has a medical appointment he needs to get to and that our time is limited. When I tell him about the blog, he takes a moment to assess the situation and says, “I mean, let’s get started!”

James heard about Miriam’s Kitchen through an acquaintance, and decided it was time to make a change. “When I heard about a place I could eat—cuz I like to eat—I said ‘take me down there!’” At first, he came to Miriam's for the meals and ended up participating in the art program that takes place every day after breakfast. “Before I came to Miriam’s, I was living out on the street, smelling, hungry,” he laughs heartily, “after talking to them, they told me there was a better way of living.” He first came to Miriam’s Kitchen in 1998; they helped him to renew his driver’s license, sign up for food stamps, and gain access to health care. About two years ago, James noticed he had been feeling under the weather for several months, and he spoke with his caseworker at Miriam’s about his situation. She referred him to a doctor, but he tells me, “I kept putting it off and putting it off, and then I went in and saw the doctor, they said that I had prostate cancer,” he pauses as I express my sympathy, “I had to get a biopsy, and it turns out the cancer was in six areas of my prostate. I’m going through a remission stage,” James tells me. Without Miriam’s, James would not have found out that he had cancer, and, likely, would have passed away on the streets. “The case managers are really good. They try to work with you and try to get all your needs met. If Miriam’s can’t provide it, they will make sure you get it somewhere else.”

James was born in Washington, DC, and moved to Prince George’s County when he was in elementary school. “I got a little older, my teenage years, when I started high school, I started hookin’ school, drinkin’, druggin’, you know, the crime life, in and out of jail,” James says as he recounts his youth. Addicted to drugs and not able to hold down a steady job in construction, James first became homeless after being laid off from a job, which left him unable to pay rent. “When I got laid off from my job, I started doing drugs and alcohol,” says James.  

He was married once, many years ago, and he also still has family in Maryland. However, over the years they have “become tired” of his substance abuse, and his wife divorced him. “Let me throw this by you real quick: my sister and I got separated when we was little kids. She was seven and I was 10,” he says as he begins to tell me about his sister that he hasn’t seen in 47 years. One day, recently, he received a message on his cell phone from his estranged sister. After speaking with her over the phone, James traveled to Wisconsin to see his sister. He is hoping that his doctor will give him the all clear soon so that he can go back. “You know, those 47 years, that’s a long time that you will never get back; we’ve got a lot of catching up to do” James tells me in sadly serious tone. If it weren’t for Miriam’s, James wouldn’t have had the resources necessary to receive that call from his sister and, ultimately, make that life changing trip.

07/13/13: Joe & Richard, N. Lynn St. and Rosslyn Metro

It’s the middle of a DC summer: hot, sticky, the type of weather that makes you want to lie on the couch with a fan directed at you. If you’ve been here, you know what I mean. Joe and Richard are without that luxury on this balmy Saturday afternoon as we approach them sitting in the colorful chairs that one finds scattered around the Rosslyn Metro area. I take a seat next to Joe, whose face and arms still show the remnants of a recent fall. “He doesn’t mind if I tell you,” he says, thumbing Richard, who sits to his left, “but we are both alcoholics. And I hate it, but you want the truth, that’s the truth. It’s a way of dealing with the hopelessness of being out here.” He sits with his legs crossed, cigarette dangling from his fingers, his troubled blue eyes gazing in my direction.

Joe (pictured above) and Richard (pictured below) stay together the majority of the time, even though I spoke more with Joe than Richard, and it his story that I am going to tell. “It’s a terrible thing, and I would not wish this on anybody,” Joe tells me. The hopelessness in his voice is heavy, and he explains how they cannot access services without having valid identification. He knows that there are services available, and he knows there are places that will help him get a new birth certificate so that he can obtain an ID, but he says, “I don’t have $10 to pay for a new birth certificate. And if I did, where am I gonna put it? If I leave it here, it’s going to get ruined. What am I supposed to do? It is absolutely hopeless.” They show me their old IDs, both of which are expired.

Joe has been living on the streets, first in Ballston and now in Rosslyn, for three years. Richard has been on the streets for an undetermined amount of time. As a result of a drinking binge, Joe was fired from his job as a collections agent for a courier company. Joe admits that his employer was kind to him, offering him many opportunities to come back to work, but that his lifelong depression, which has resulted in alcohol addiction, was too hard to overcome. They sent people over to his apartment to check on him, he tells me, “I was too drunk to open the door,” and in the end, he lost his job and his depression and alcohol addiction grew increasingly worse.

Joe recalls his childhood, growing up in a small rural town outside of Upper Marlboro, MD. “My father died when I was 6-years-old and I never really knew him.” He was raised by his mother, who died when he was in his early 20s, and he stayed in the small town where he was raised until he lost his job, after which he came to DC at the suggestion of some folks he had met. Both physical and mental illness have plagued Joe throughout his life, which have made homelessness that much more difficult for him. He has a fractured femur and dislocated shoulder from two recent falls that were result of his bad back, a permanent injury that has been classified by doctors in the emergency room as a disability.

As I usually do, I ask Joe and Richard what they do on a daily basis and what they see for their future: “I get up and try to survive another day,” Joe says as he nods at Richard, “if it wasn’t for him, I would’ve died a long time ago. We’re all we have,” the melancholy in his voice is palpable, and I can feel it, “we don’t have anyone else to ask for help.” Richard smiles and leans forward in his chair to tell Saoussen about songs he has written and performed on the street for money. In the moment, he is the polar opposite of Joe, he is gregarious, he smiles and laughs and even makes light of the situation. Despite his appearance, he seems like a happy-go-lucky man; “never give up,” Richard tells us. Commenting on his future, Joe says, “I will just pray to God to help us. I don’t know what to do. What do you do when you don’t know what to do?” To which Richard responds, “We are in a state of confusion; it ain’t too bad.” Joe turns to him, looks his closest friend dead in the eye, and says, “don’t say it isn’t that bad. IT IS that bad. Don’t minimize it.” They argue for a moment as Saoussen and I stand by. Joe says, “I cannot say that I have a positive attitude about it because I don’t. I’m miserable.”