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February 08
A journey through Colorado Springs’ third world
by Noel Black
We’ve been planning an issue about homelessness for many months now. With the economy tanking and the fact that any one of the millions of working and housed Americans now living at or below the poverty line, it’s a reality any one of us could soon face. According to the National Coalition on Homelessness, in any given year at least one percent (3.5 million) of Americans are homeless for an average of eight months. However, exact statistics are hard to come by and don’t take all the various kinds of homelessness into account, so it’s difficult to be exact. Here in Colorado Springs, estimates of the number of homeless (which includes people literally on the streets, people living in their cars, and people living in shelters, “transitional housing” or hotel rooms) range widely from 2,000 to 6,000, based on the methodology of the count, the time of year and any number of other variables. The politics of homelessness in Colorado Springs is no less difficult to grasp. The downtown area, for example, where many services for the homeless are located, has become a battleground between the interests of retailers, the homeless service providers/advocates and the homeless themselves, many of whom are without any kind of transportation and rely on the services around downtown for their basic survival. While we knew it would be next to impossible to give a complete picture of these myriad issues, we wanted at the very least to give an honest portrayal of what too often becomes drowned out in the rhetoric of the politicians, the retailers, the charities and the media: what it’s actually like to be homeless in Colorado Springs. To do this, I spent two days and two nights with a homeless man named Virgil (not his real name). He acted as both guide and friend as we toured just a fraction of the public and private agencies and services available to the homeless and working poor. He introduced me to dozens of people who shared their stories with me. I’m grateful to him and to them for their openness and candor. What follows is an account of my two days told in the second person, simply because the experience could just as well be yours. It’s fictionalized to the extent that I had to pretend that I was actually going to be homeless in order to prepare myself, and so I could include the many interviews and conversations that took place before I went out. I regret that I couldn’t spend more time on the street than I did, but it was enough time to learn that it’s impossible to even begin to understand it if you haven’t been there. However, even one day is enough to begin to get the picture of how unfathomably complicated it is. I also regret that I can’t tell you more of what it’s like for homeless women. This story is told from the perspective of a man, but I also met and spoke with many women. Thanks to Chris Bullock for putting us in touch with Virgil.—Noel Black
Maybe you just lost your job and you were already way over your head in debt. On top of that, maybe you suffer from depression or another debilitating mental illness like PTSD that you can’t afford to treat because you haven’t had health insurance in years—and even when you had health insurance it didn’t cover mental health. Maybe you were in the military. Maybe the pressure on top of the depression got so bad that you started self-medicating with alcohol or some other drug, which just made your mind worse. Maybe the drinking got so bad that you did things you regret. Maybe you spent some time in jail. Maybe you were married and your spouse left you and your kids and your parent don’t want to have anything to do with you anymore. Maybe you were working so many hours and making so little money after your divorce that you had to choose between eating and paying child support. Now that you’ve lost your job, maybe you have to choose between eating and keeping a roof over you. Whatever the case—and there are any number of scenarios—you finally lose your home.
Survival always being the first order of business, you pack as many of your necessities as you car, if you’re lucky enough to still have a car. You might even have a friend who’ll let you keep your things in her garage or have just enough money to rent a storage unit. But probably not. Besides, it would be embarrassing to admit that you were about to become homeless, and you don’t want her to feel sorry for you; it would be humiliating to sleep on her couch. Worst case scenario: you have no car and no family or friends who want much of anything to do with you anymore. The front of your home becomes a mid-winter yard sale. You could sell some things if you had any way of getting them anywhere or if it were warmer, but you don’t and it isn’t. You salvage what you can. It’s cold, of course, so you put on as much as you can wear: long underwear, jeans, boots, a heavy wool sweater, a jacket, hat and gloves. In a large duffel bag or backpack you put a change of clothes with extra socks and underwear, a sleeping bag and a pad (if you have one), some first aid items like Band-Aids and Tylenol, toothbrush and toothpaste, a lighter, a pocket knife, a flashlight, maybe some snacks if you have them. You have $10 in your pocket. You throw the bag over your shoulder and head for the bus stop. At the bus stop you realize that you don’t want to squander $1.25 of the last money you have, so you decide you walk. You’re headed downtown, of course—the only place in town where you’ve seen other homeless people. You know about the Marian House soup kitchen, behind St. Mary’s church on Bijou, because you’ve seen people lining up there at lunch. You also know about the shelter. You’ve seen people standing outside the cinderblock warehouse on Sierra Madre smoking cigarettes. Anyhow, downtown seems like the only place you can go at this point, because it’s the only place where things are close enough to walk. The first thing you notice is how conspicuous—almost criminal—you feel as a pedestrian with a large bag. You come across almost no one walking but other homeless people, most of whom greet you with a knowing look and a “Stay warm.”
By the time you get downtown with your heavy bag you’re already feeling hungry, but you figure a cup of coffee would be cheaper and stave off your hunger. You think about going into Starbuck’s, because a cup will give you sitting privileges and you’re getting cold now that you’re not walking. Still, $1.60 seems like a lot of money for a small coffee that doesn’t come with a refill and you suddenly feel embarrassed that you’ve got this huge bag to drag inside. You notice for the first time how conspicuously homeless you are. You could leave it outside, but it’s everything you own and you don’t want to risk it. The thought crosses your mind to ask someone to buy you a coffee, but your pride won’t let you. Not yet. A well-groomed middle-aged man in a camouflage jacket and hat with a graying beard sits down next to you and takes out a yellow bag of Top tobacco and begins rolling himself a cigarette. “Sleeping with the bunnies?” he asks you as he offers you the bag. You don’t smoke. Not yet. You look at him confused. “Sleeping out?” he asks. You say that you don’t know. “Ahhh, new kid on the block,” he says, nodding as he licks the edge of his rolling paper and twists the end of his cigarette. He lights it and introduces himself as Virgil. He tells you he’s going to the homeless clinic to pick up heart medication and asks if you want to come along. It’s one of the better places to go, he says, because the people who run it have true caritas. He stands up and throws his small backpack over his shoulder and picks up his green sleeping bag. You wonder why he doesn’t carry a bigger bag, but don’t say anything. You walk to the free shuttle (AKA “bum bus,” AKA “hobo mobile”) stop a block down.
The shuttle arrives quickly and Virgil tells you that there are rumors that the service will soon be discontinued. He nods to the four other people on the bus around you, three of whom are clearly homeless. He gives you a knowing smile and you notice that he doesn’t seem to have any teeth.
You get out at Cimarron and Tejon. You’re already getting tired of slinging your large backpack on every time you have to move, but at least you feel prepared for the crisp cold that rakes your cheeks as you head east four blocks and down past the police station and through an empty lot to the homeless clinic. The building is dilapidated and you’re greeted out front by a woman on crutches with a weather-worn face. Her name is Alice, and she’s a friend of Virgil’s. She’s on the crutches because of frostbite, but she’s relieved that she won’t lose any toes, “only pieces.” She lives in a camp with a boyfriend and considers herself lucky to never have been raped, though she did recently spend some time in the hospital after a guy hit her over the head with a bottle. She’s had a rough month, but considers herself lucky to have escaped the recent camp cleanups run by Keep Colorado Springs Beautiful. Once a month, and sometimes more often, Virgil explains, “bush beaters”—do-gooders, parolees and DUI offenders doing community service, accompanied by police officers—go through the hobo jungles, kick people out and generally give them a few minutes to pack up their things before confiscating all their belongings and trashing them. On a recent sub-freezing Saturday morning, they explain, over 18 truckloads of people’s belongings were taken from these camps. Such cleanups, though legal, can be a death sentence for someone who loses his or her tent or sleeping bag in weather this cold. Dee, the diminutive administrator of the clinic, comes out the front door, lights a cigarette and listens to Alice and Virgil for a minute before interjecting. “I’ve been trying for a long time to get them to bring people’s bags and things here to the clinic so people can come claim them,” she says. “Oftentimes, people lose their medications, their sleeping bags, the last items of any sentimental value they might have—everything.” Her tone and her demeanor are matter-of-fact, but you can see the candor in her eyes that she cares. “Yeah, and if you try to get your stuff out of those collection bins they’ll arrest you,” says Alice as she finishes her cigarette and turns to go quickly back inside. Though the sun is already high in the sky, it’s still bitter cold. Virgil introduces you to Dee and tells her that you’re new on the street. She nods and tells you that the clinic is available to anyone who is truly homeless for medical care, some clothing and just a place to rest during the limited hours they’re open if you need it. They also have dental services, but only pull teeth. The doctor who sees patients here, explains Dee, spent a week living with the homeless before he started working at the clinic. “Everyone here is really great,” says Virgil.
You all go inside and you take a seat in the waiting room where it’s warm. Dee explains that they used to offer showers to people, but that too many people abused the privilege and didn’t clean up after themselves so they had to revoke the service. There’s a closet of clothes where anyone can walk in and pick something out unsupervised, which, explains Virgil, is almost unheard of in local charities. Usually you have to register to get clothes, which requires having two forms of identification and a fair amount of paperwork and time. You don’t quite fully appreciate this until later.
While Virgil is getting his medication, you speak to a man in the lobby named Gary. He’s a large man with gray hair who did get caught in the raid on the camps the previous Saturday. He’s at the clinic because he’s diabetic and he lost his glucometer and his depression medication when the bush beaters took his bag. “Take your stuff and find another city, scumbag,” he says he was told. When he told them that he had important medication and medical equipment in the bag, he says, they told him, “You’ve had your five minutes.” If you put up a fuss, then they give you a ticket. Gary is one of many people who resent being called a “transient.” He lived here in Colorado Springs and worked at MCI until he got laid off during the big purges a few years back. He was still able to get some work after getting laid off because he had a car (in which he lived) and several university degrees, including one from the California Culinary Arts Academy. Though it’s illegal to sleep in your car, he did it for more than a year, because he was only getting about 18 hours of work at $7 an hour each week. Once he’d paid for food and gas, that money was gone. Then he lost his car after he couldn’t pay a ticket for parking in a handicap zone. “Without a vehicle, you’re practically an undocumented alien,” he says. “A lot of times I just wanted to die.” He also has a felony on his record for possession of drugs in California, and he just turned 60. All of these factors combined—his health, his criminal record, his lack of transportation—make him almost unemployable. When you ask him about his family, he grimaces. “I have eight sons, five daughters and 36 grandchildren. I was never a father for them, and so they don’t care what I’m doing. When you’re an I.V. drug user, the drug becomes your god. Finally I got on the one-step program—I gave my life to Christ. He took my addiction, but he didn’t take the memory.” Gary says his addictive personality led him to some strange behaviors after he became a Christian. Once, he says, he did five months in jail for fishing illegally and hoarding hundreds of trout from a nearby lake. “54 trout on one occasion, 73 on another and 117 on another.” His most recent indignity was losing his wallet, which, you learn, happens to most everyone on the street at some point or another. “Without a driver’s license, a birth certificate or a social security card you’re a man without a country.” These days with all the homeland security, he explains, it can take up to six months to replace all your identification, which is necessary for many services and to be able to work. Despite all these seeming indignities having been on the street now for two and a half years, he seems surprisingly optimistic. You admire him for his steely resolve. “God is training me for something down the road,” he says, but then his face darkens. “I’ve been out here so long I’m wondering when God’s gonna make a move.”
Virgil comes back with his medication and you tell him you’re hungry. If you want to make back uptown to the Marian House, AKA “Hobo Bistro” (for descriptions of this and other services, see “We Just Want to Help,” p. 17) before they close, you’ll have to catch the bus. You pick up your backpack again and head out into the cold. You’re surprised at how late it already is. You begin to notice how long everything takes in this town when you don’t have a car. It dawns on you that even if you catch the bus, you probably won’t make it to the soup kitchen. Virgil recommends heading up to Ecumenical Social Ministries (ESM) to get a loaf of bread. If that fails, he says, he’s got some food stashed that he’ll share with you.
You walk north on Weber, past the “Slavenation Navy” and continue north, still bewildered at how long everything seems to take and how much work it is.
By the time you get to ESM, another utilitarian cinderblock box building at the corner of Bijou and Weber just across from First Presbyterian, it’s already well after one o’clock, and you’re hungry. You’re lucky that Virgil knows the staff well, because most newcomers to ESM have to take a number, take a seat, fill out a stack of paperwork and get into the system before they can take a shower, receive groceries, get clothing or use the computers for job training. Many of these faith-based organizations, he says, get reimbursed by the government for their services and have to keep records of who receives the charity. There have been from some people behind the desk, however, note gratuitous comments about people’s appearances that Virgil thinks characterize a kind of middle-class condescension. Though the organization is, for the most part, a helpful charity in Virgil’s eyes, it contains element of “busybodyism” because, he says, they get too involved in the irrelevant personal details of the people they’re trying to help. We run into is friend Slim (who also recently lost his identification). Slim is also talking about the recent bush-beater cleanup raids. He was in a camp where they actually poured water all over his things in sub-freezing temperatures. He says he’s sick of this fucking city, but he’s got to get his ID back before he can move on.
Virgil introduces you to a friendly woman at the desk who sees your glasses and kindly asks if you’d like a pair for backup. ESM is the only place in town that glasses frames. You decline, but she seems to want to help you. “How about some socks?” she says, offering you a couple pair of new white athletic socks without making your sign up. Socks (and foot powder, you learn quickly) are a valuable commodity when you’re walking ten to 15 miles a day with a backpack. Your feet become sweaty, when you stop, quickly get freezing cold in the winter. You thank her and Virgil leads you back to the grocery department, where the shelves are nearly empty. All the bread has already been taken today and the other canned and dry goods are running low. “Donations are way down,” says the man behind the counter, shaking his head and shrugging. Virgil leads you back to the computer room where he checks his email. On way out, the woman at the desk grumbles that the computers are for job-related activity only. Virgil pretends not to hear her. You feel strange being at his mercy for food, but he seems to perceive this and says, “Let’s go get my stash.”
You walk a zig-zag up a few blocks through town and come across a bush where Virgil does a double-take and then reaches in for a well-concealed plastic shopping bag. Inside, he shows you, is a large Tupperware container with several packages of ramen, a box of soup, a can of raviolis, and half-a-dozen packets of hot chocolate. He keeps several of these stashes of food items he’s accumulated from various donation centers and food lines well-hidden around town so that he doesn’t have to be at the mercy of the hours of the soup kitchen or the “Roach Coach,” AKA “Sally Wagon,” the Salvation Army’s emergency provisions truck that shows up most evenings in the parking lot near the welfare office on the east side of I-25 by the dollar store on Spruce St. The soup kitchen and the Roach Coach are popular with some because you don’t have to sit through a sermon to get a meal and nobody asks to smell your breath. Virgil recommends heading to the 7-Eleven on Spruce and Bijou to use the microwave. Most of the people who work there, he says, are really friendly and know he cleans up after himself. Being neat and courteous when you’re homeless, he points out, goes a long way toward winning favors and friends in the places that count.
You walk past the soup kitchen and over the bridge to the 7-Eleven. The woman behind the counter is incredibly friendly and says hello to Virgil. He goes back to the microwave and begins emptying various package into the Tupperware bowl. You break down and decide to buy a coffee, which leaves you with $8.54 after tax. For 50 cents more, you notice, you can get one of the breakfast sausages on the heated rollers, so you break down and do that, which you almost immediately regret when you see the size of the feast that Virgil has concocted. It’s a steaming bowl of ravioli and ramen with salsa and nacho cheese. It’s sort of repulsive-looking, but it’s hot and there’s a lot of it. You park your pack out in front of the store and sit down on it. You drink half your coffee and give the rest to Virgil. He offers you half of his meal and, though you’re more or less sated from the coffee and breakfast dog product, you eat most of what’s left. You’ve watched more than half a dozen homeless people walk into the store during the ten minutes you’ve been sitting there and dozens of working poor. Being on foot and without a vehicle at the places where poor and homeless people go for services of any kind makes you realize how oblivious you’ve been to their numbers. It feels like there’s a third-world country right under your nose that you never really noticed, simply because you didn’t have to.
After you finish eating, you walk past Drive-In Liquors and stop in to have a look at the wall of shame—Polaroids mocking the dozens of ill-mannered drunks who got 86ed. Virgil hasn’t had a drink in months and it’s clear that it keeps his wits sharp, giving him an advantage where the niceties of survival are concerned. His only indulgence is tobacco, and you buy him a new bag of Top to thank him for his help.
You go around the side of the restaurant at the end of the strip mall facing south toward the the Veteran’s Administration and the Welfare Office. He rolls a cigarette and starts to smoke. You relax in the warmth of the sun for a minute before the owner of the restaurant opens the back door for a smoke and shoos you away. You put on your backpack again and start hoofing it back over the bridge toward the library where Virgil and dozens of other homeless people spend much of their time because they can read, relax and use the internet. You look forward to this.
On the way into the library you notice a sign that says no backpacks or bedrolls. You’ve never noticed this sign before. You’ve got your bedroll on the outside of your backpack, but Virgil tells you to just walk in and see if anybody notices. At first, no one does, but when you get downstairs to the reference section where the computers are, the security guards immediately spot you and kick you out of the library, following you all the way back up to the entrance. You start thinking about places you might be able to stash it, but everything you own is in your pack and if you lost it you’d be in deep shit, especially this time of year. Now you understand why you’ve seen so few people, Virgil included, carrying large backpacks. They’re too conspicuous. Once you’re outside, you notice the large number of people carrying smaller backpacks and duffel bags (presumably their sleeping bags or extra personal items). These bags fit the library standards. You feel aggravated that you can’t relax, even for a minute, somewhere warm. Virgil suggests going down and signing up at Labor Ready so you can work the following day. You can’t fathom how you’d be able to work when simply getting a meal has taken you well into the afternoon. It’s already three o’clock.
You walk down behind the Antler’s Hotel and past Giuseppe’s Depot to Labor Ready, a little log-cabin-looking building next to the train tracks. They’re open, but you’ve already missed the deadline for taking the employment test, which they only offer between 5:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. Virgil points out that they also have a microwave you can use in a pinch if you need to make a packet of ramen. Virgil used to get a lot of work out of this office, but some of the better construction jobs are now being assigned out of an office up north, well out of walking distance from downtown, especially when you consider that you have to be there to line up at 4 a.m. for a good ticket. He doesn’t recognize the women who are working there now either, which means he can’t get the preferential work tickets. Labor Ready, Virgil explains, is good for a quick $50 or $60 per day at most, but it won’t get you a bed at the shelter because it’s not considered a real job, which you have to have to be able to stay long-term. Staying at the shelter means you can save your wages toward getting off the street (which they make you do as a condition for staying there). So many people who work day labor will take their money at the end of the day, buy a cheap bottle and hotel room and do the same thing the next day. If you don’t get a work ticket one day, then it means you’re sleeping with the bunnies unless a buddy lets you crash in his motel room or you have a friend with a couch. The shelter will let people flop on the floor, but only when it’s below freezing. Many of the people who take day labor tickets are ex-cons, which means they have a really hard time getting hired permanently, thus making an attempt to get off the streets almost futile. Again, if you don’t have ID, you’re screwed and can’t work. Some, like Virgil, who are more resourceful, might manage to stash away some money while sleeping with the bunnies and working days, but it’s difficult and even if you get work every day, $250 a week won’t get you much. And if you have to spend any of those days going to the clinic to get your medications or taking a day off so you can shower and stock up on more food supplies, you lose even more money. You resolve to come back tomorrow to take the test and head back to the pavilion at “Choo-Choo Park” behind the Antler’s Hilton to wait for Food Not Bombs, a group of young anarchist kids who bring vegetarian food for anyone who wants to eat on Tuesday nights at 5 p.m.
Sitting still under the pavilion, you get cold. Your feet, in particular, which are wet from all the walking, start to feel numb. You think about changing your socks to a pair you got from ESM, but don’t have the energy and worry about exposing them to the sub-zero air. A few people start to show up and you meet Handsome Dan, a particular well-kempt homeless man who used to be a government scientist but lost his job after he got saved by Jesus. He says he became useless to the world once his heart was in heaven, which is what led him to live and work at a homeless ministry and religious transitional housing facility Virgil calls “Lord of Whorery” During the time he was there, he became the pickup driver for donations and began to notice that he was signing off on the same invoices every time no matter what the goods donated were. “At one place I noticed that the invoice always said milk and orange juice, even when they’d be giving us bread or canned goods,” he said. When he called this discrepancy to the attention of the director, he was immediately kicked out of the home. He’s been sleeping in the shelter ever since. Because he was a scientist, he’s found it almost impossible to get work and gave up, preferring to spend his days at the library. He confesses to me that he turned his back on God’s will at one point when God had directed him to play and win the Powerball to win riches for his service to the lord, and that his current condition is punishment for not following God’s will. He says he knows you’ll think he’s crazy for saying it, but it doesn’t seem any crazier than the son of God walking on water or rising from the dead—which isn’t saying much, but you keep it to yourself. Taking you aside after this exchange, Virgil says to you, “Many of the homeless have ‘middle class’ values. Even their pathetic attempts at homemaking with unsightly camps testify to that. If truth be told, the ones with the palimpsest of a bourgeois existence, or aspirations thereto—the ones who want to be ‘helped,’—are more of a public nuisance than Heartless Holmes’ Arrogant Homeless. A hardcore hobo once told me that he liked camping out in the snow because all the bums are in the shelter. They’re the ones who steal from other poor folks, cause trouble for the rest of us and give us a bad name.” You remember this clearly because so many people tend to lump the homeless into one monolithic underclass. Even here there are politics.
At five o’clock the Food Not Bombs crew arrives with vegan chile and rice and a couple of fresh pizzas from a Poor Richard’s. It’s hot and nutritious. You’re thankful for the meal and the young men who’ve brought the food are good, non-judgmental company who encourage you to eat as much as you like. After the food is all but gone, a few other people arrive who waited over an hour for the Roach Coach, which never showed. Even though the truck itself belongs to the Salvation Army, it’s run by different volunteer organizations on different nights, so it’s not always a sure thing.
After dinner, it’s dark and cold. You need to get moving so your feet can warm up. You suggest heading up to Poor Richard’s where the pizza was from, since they’re obviously a caring business.
You get to the coffee shop and your feet are still wet and cold. You put you bag down in a corner of the bookstore and hope it doesn’t bother the manager. You spring for a pot of hot coffee just in case, which takes you down to $6. After you get your coffee, you get out a fresh pair of socks and change them in the bathroom, drying your feet off with paper towels. You can’t believe how badly your feet stink after one day of walking around, though you figure you’ve walked about 15 miles since the day began. It seems likes weeks since you had a home and it’s only day one.
In the bookstore, you run into Carl, another friend of Virgil’s who manages to keep himself well-shaved, clean and nicely dressed despite the fact that he’s been sleeping with the bunnies for over four months since he got divorced and lost his business in Texas. He came to Colorado because he loves the mountains and he was out of money. He doesn’t drink much and likes sleeping out despite the cold. He’s cheery and speaks several languages, though his face darkens when you ask him about his business. He was a contractor with his own business for over 25 years and blames the “mojados” and their cheap labor for the demise of his livelihood. “I couldn’t compete with their labor prices,” he says frankly as he looks straight at you and shrugs. Nevertheless, he seems, like many others you’ve met, to be more content being homeless with his dignity intact than he does willing to submit to any variety of humiliations by entering the system to get out of his situation. “Sometimes I think the crazies are kicking the sane ones out onto the streets,” he says. The way he figures it, he’s not panhandling and doesn’t look homeless, so he’s not one of the “arrogant homeless” that scare off shoppers from downtown’s struggling retail economy. He spends much of his days at Poor Richard’s reading and eats at the Hobo Bistro and the Roach Coach, stashing a few extra things for breakfast or in case the coach doesn’t show. This, you think, is how you would like to live if you were resigned to being homeless. But you’re not there yet. The stability of Carl’s current situation is also predicated upon the security of his well-hidden campsite, where he has good, warm gear. Like Virgil, he doesn’t camp with other people to avoid drawing attention to himself and the cold hasn’t really affected him the way it has affected others. Over your slowly-nursed pot of coffee you talk about the cultural roots of America’s attitude towards the homeless. You all talk about the religious doctrines of the America’s original homeless refugees—the Puritans. Its roots in the culture are still deep. They believed that all were irredeemable sinners but by God’s will to forgive and that a man’s wealth was a sign of his favor in God’s eyes. So if you were rich, it meant you were among the elect—something you couldn’t change, unless God decided to change it for you. If you were poor, you weren’t one of the elect and you would likely go to hell, also something you couldn’t change. Only God could change things, making free will irrelevant. When these ideas got mixed with the ideology of self-reliance, rugged individualism and the idea of manifest destiny in frontier thinking it created a unique blend of capitalistic fatalism wherein anyone who failed was either not chosen by God or not self-reliant enough. Either way, one’s fate in America always lies firmly at a person’s own feet, not in the arms of society. It’s a generalization, but the Catholic and Lutheran visions of charity, Virgil points out, place far more burden and responsibility on the entire community. He also blames these cultural elements for the lack of class solidarity that keeps people stuck in the never-ending cycle of the penal system, welfare and sham charities. All of them, he says, are there to keep people in a state of wardship and dependency, like an open-air prison.
When the bookstore closes you realize you’re going to have to find a place to sleep. Virgil, though he usually sleeps alone like Carl does, offers to accompany you. The three of you head off into the dropping chill of the night. Carl bids both of you goodnight and heads off to his secret spot while you and Virgil head off into the park, walking another half-mile before you finally find a well-sheltered spot out of view of passersby. You unroll your sleeping pad and get your sleeping bag and remove only your boots and jacket before crawling in. You pull the bag up over your head and pull the drawstring tight so only your eyes are exposed. Virgil smokes after he crawls into his bag as you talk for another hour. He tells you about the “Bat Boys,” who were beating homeless people during the summer. He and a friend were attacked at a camp spot near labor ready and Virgil managed to hit one of them with a piece of rebar, sending him to the hospital. Both of them got caught will get a “chomo” (child molester) welcome when they get to prison. Many inmates are vets and have been homeless, and don’t cotton to such beatings. These attacks are incomprehensible to you and set you on edge, but he assures you they won’t be out in this cold. You enjoy his company and feel genuinely grateful for his companionship. Well after midnight, Virgil falls asleep. You can feel the corners of your eyes stinging with freeze, and so close the drawstring tighter as you stare at the stars in the belt of Orion in the sky to the south for another half-hour before you relax enough to start drifting off to sleep. Throughout the night you startle awake to strange sounds, but you somehow manage to get some rest.
Day 2
You wake just past dawn in the pink light to the noise of a commuter’s bicycle. You get up to pee and notice what look four piles of frozen human shit that must be several days old. You pee on the tree and then start packing your bag. Virgil rouses and notices all the trash around. He says he made the mistake of telling another hobo about the spot, presuming that he was on the wagon. He say it’d be wise to pick up so it doesn’t become a target for the bush beaters. You pack a black trash bag full of beer bottles, newspapers and the like and then set off toward 7-Eleven. You notice another site in the park that’s been trashed, with some debris from a construction dumpster, and Virgil shakes his head. This is what fucks up a good spot. There’s too much crap to pick up in the cold, and so you keep walking. Outside 7-Eleven, Virgil retrieves two cups from a garbage can and goes into Denny’s to wash them. He comes back out, and you pour hot chocolate powder into the cups and then fill them with hot water inside 7-Eleven. You drink them at the bus stop where you meet Jim, a guy who spent the entire night walking so he didn’t freeze or get frostbite. He looks haggard and exhausted, and he’s waiting for the liquor store to open so he can get a bottle. You get to talking and he tells you that he has a small inheritance—about $1800 every three months—that keeps him fed and watered, but that’s about it.
After your hot chocolate, you eat a granola bar and then hike back across the Bijou bridge. You decide to wait until later to go by Labor Ready, because there’s no chance you’ll go out today even if you do get signed up. You park out in front of Starbuck’s and finally break down and get another coffee so you can sit inside and read the paper. The weather forecast says it’s going to reach seven degrees tonight so you start thinking about the Red Cross Shelter, AKA “No Hope Shelter” on Sierra Madre. You ask Virgil if he’s ever stayed there and he shakes his head. “I went in there for three hours once and had to leave. It feels like a holding cell.”
After you warm up, you go outside and sit on the corner. A wide variety of homeless folks walk by and say hello to Virgil, including a crew of self-professed drunks who describe the horrors of the Lighthouse detox, AKA “Darkhouse,” AKA “Faketox.” You’re glad you aren’t drinking. It seems hard enough to keep your wits about you sober. You waste a couple of hours around Starbuck’s and then decide to head over and line up for lunch at the Marion House.
The food at the Hobo Bistro isn’t bad. There’s a sort of pasta chili thing, a chile soup (lots of chile when you’re homeless!), fruit salad and pastry from the Broadmoor. You sit down at one of the cafeteria-style tables. It’s crowded, and you can see why they’re building an addition next door. People are talking about a guy named Lee who lost all of his toes to frostbite. You sit next to a woman who’s stocking up on peanut brittle and pastry because she’s getting ready to hitchhike to Yuma, AZ, where she says she can get work. Sitting across from you is Handsome Dan and a really friendly 60-year-old man named Charles who says he’s been homeless for six months and can’t get work because of his age. The two of them have been sleeping on the floor of the shelter during the cold snap. If you want to sleep there, they tell you, be careful not to have even a drop of alcohol on your breath or clothes or they’ll kick you out into the cold. Charles was recently ejected on a sub-freezing night for having the odor of a Hall’s mentholated cough drop on his breath, because he had a cold that he picked up in the very same poorly-ventilated shelter. The attendant at the front desk thought he smelled alcohol, so they sent him the Lighthouse detox, where they gave him a breathalyzer. Though he blew zeros, says Charles, the attendant at the shelter insisted he had been tested there and that alcohol was detected. He spent the night wandering around the streets in the cold. They tell you to get over there by 4:30 p.m. if you want to get on the list. There’s only room for about 50 people, and if you don’t make it in there, you have to go down the street to the “Springs Catch-You Mission,” where there’s a one-hour sermon before dinner. “How’s the ventilation in there?” Virgil asks, nodding at you knowingly. Not so good, they tell you. They say a guy was coughing blood in the showers recently, that everyone sleeps head-to-head (instead of head to feet, which is considered to be somewhat more hygienic) and that they don’t do TB tests. It sounds grim to you, and despite what Virgil’s told you about the place, you want to be warm and say you’ll see them there this evening. As you look around the room, you notice how many people seem to be working poor rather than homeless. Virgil points out that many of them might not be able to eat there anymore if Bob Holmes’ plan to issue homeless identification cards gets off the ground. “You might as well have a big ‘J’ stamped on your passport,” he says. The plan would surely drive off hundreds of people, which, he believes, is the real incentive.
After lunch, Virgil takes you upstairs to see Sr. Roberta and to get you a smaller backpack so you can ditch your big bag and get into the library and other places with a little bit more stealth.
You switch your gear, then Virgil takes you to another couple of places he finds to be genuinely charitable: the SET Clinic, in a small house off Spruce and Kiowa, where another incredibly friendly woman named Ruth offers you some socks and foot powder. You gratefully accept and she invites you to come back if you ever need medical attention. You don’t remember ever getting the kind of greeting that she and Dee Anderson at the Homeless Clinic gave you when you had insurance long ago.
You walk around the corner to Haven House, which serves the mentally ill, mostly, but is also a nice place to stop in for a cup of coffee and a piece of cake. They used to offer laundry and mail services to those without an address, but abuse of the laundry privilege and a recent break-in put an end to both of those services. This is something not uncommon at the more generous organizations: they give a little and people take a lot. And it fucks things up for the people who genuinely need it. But resources are always limited and everyone’s generosity has a breaking point.
With your new compact travel kit, you decide to make another run at the library, but once you get across the bridge you decide you’d better go back down to Labor Ready to sign up for work. However, despite the fact that woman at the desk told you they offer the signup tests between 5:30 a.m. and 2 p.m., the office is closed and it says they will return at 5:30 p.m. on the door. At this point, you figure, it’ll be at least another two days before you get work. You walk back to the library and run into the guys with whom you ate lunch, who are all waiting for computer time or napping in the chairs lined up in front of the panoramic windows that look out onto Pikes Peak. You were supposed to meet Virgil here, but they tell you he went to Labor Ready to look for you. You feel the aimlessness of the unstructured time catching up with the disorientation, fear and waning adrenaline in your body and mind. As much as you had fantasized about enjoying a carefree afternoon in the library reading a book, you feel listless and decide you need to walk around some more. You tell them to tell Virgil to meet you at Starbuck’s and head back out into the cold.
On the way back toward Starbuck’s an old friend sees you and shouts out from the bank drive-through at Cascade and Bijou. You walk over to his car to punch it in. “Man, for a minute I thought you were homeless,” he says and laughs. You laugh and say you’re just heading back to work. You’re surprised it’s already that obvious.
It’s almost three o’clock now and you spend another hour on the concrete planter outside Starbuck’s. Virgil shows up eventually and you decide a cigarette would be nice, even though you haven’t smoked in years. You smoke. Some of the drunks wander past sober and sit for a spell. They’re stemming (panhandling) for a bottle. Time seems to contract and expand all at once into a blur of directionless moment. You have no exact purpose other than the looming date with the floor at the Red Cross Shelter.
Just after four o’clock you start heading for the free shuttle bus stop where you got on yesterday morning and it seems like weeks have passed. You’re heading to the shelter, and Virgil joins you for the ride, even though just getting near the place gives him the creeps. Again, it arrives quickly with a majority of the passengers being fellow homeless or working poor. Who else rides a shuttle in a car town?
The cold is already starting to blow down with a dry snow off the Peak, and you walk into it toward the shelter. It feels as spooky as Virgil made it seem—a place of hopelessness rather than shelter and warmth. You walk inside and sign your name to the cold weather list. A woman at the desk in thick Gloria Steinem glasses tells you to be back at 8:10, for some reason, though others have told you they won’t open the doors until 9. Virgil sheepishly apologizes that he can’t join you with a shellshocked look on his face. You tell him it’s alright, that you’re just not as hardy as he is yet and need to get out of the cold for the night … just to see what it’s like.
You talk about trying to sneak into the movies, but decide to head for the Roach Coach instead. It’s snowing pretty hard now as you walk north on Sierra Madre. As you cross the Colorado Ave. bridge you notice how much of the foliage they’ve cut down—all of it, you presume, to prevent homeless people from camping. In fact, almost everything public seems to be designed to prevent people from relaxing, sleeping or taking cover. The walls under the new bridge are vertical and there are no crannies. To people in cars, it’s irrelevant. They pass by in a river of indifference—little self-contained worlds removed from the elements. As it gets dark, you also notice that there are lights everywhere. Even in the park the night before, there was floodlight. You cringe to think of a restless existence without darkness of any kind, ever. You don’t feel happy, but you don’t feel sad or numb either. You feel tired and automatic, but alert. Everything seems vivid, but devoid of comfort. The snow does not possess sublimity of any kind; it is a fact that comfort has made you ill-equipped to battle. Comfort is the enemy. You wait for half an hour in the cold. Your feet are already wet again and chilling. The Roach Coach shows before 5:30, but it’s another 15 minutes before they start serving. A woman pulls up in a car with some work clothes, gloves, hats and things that people in line divide among themselves. If you needed these things yet, you would be grateful for this kind of direct charity. The food is chile again, a bean salad and a vegetable soup. There’s hot chocolate in a big water dispenser at the back. You grab a stale donut from a box. Again, the food tastes OK, though more like survival fuel than something that you savor. You eat on a concrete bench next to a group of the drunken kids you saw earlier who obviously found a bottle. They get belligerent with each other, fall upon each other in the hard grass now covered with a thin sheet of snow. You don’t fancy yourself judgmental, but it seems stupid. It’s their life, though. Real freedom isn’t necessarily something to behold, you think, and leave them to their histrionics as you finish your meal.
After you eat, you’ve still got a couple hours to kill before the cattle call for floppers at the shelter. You head to the library and roam around for a while before finding an empty chair. Virgil pulls a copy of Otto Friedrich’s classic study of Weimar, Germany, Before the Deluge, from the shelf and shows you a passage about these German hooligan groups that you scan before nodding off.
When you wake up, you realize it’s already 7:45 and that you’ve missed the shuttle. You say goodnight to Virgil and head off into the quiet of the cold and snow. You walk deliberately to stay warm.
At the shelter, the cold-weather floppers are already gathered around the north entrance to the building where they call your names. A group of young thugs is there talking shit about the meal they just ate at Springs Catch-You Mission, where they had to listen to the one-hour sermon. “Damn, dude, that guy was like Hitler for Jesus,” he hollers out so everyone can hear him. “I mean, I’m down with God and stuff, but fuck, man.” His buddies all crack up and they start rattling off Chapelle’s Show routines. They all have sharp-looking clothes and you wonder why they’re there. There’s also a crew of goth-ish kids speaking loudly among themselves who also seem unlikely homeless. The rest of the floppers look like hobos, for the most part.
They don’t start calling names until 8:30, and most everyone is shivering by this point. They only take five people in at a time. By the time they call your name it’s already 9 and you’re freezing. You get inside and the lady with the Gloria Steinem glasses you saw earlier is checking names with IDs. You hand her yours and she checks you off and tells you to grab one of the gray wool blankets stacked on a folding table. There’s a security officer who asks you to empty your pockets and pats you down. He takes your gear and puts a strip of tape on it with your name and tells you to go pick a mat in the area down the hall.
You walk into the shelter and the stifling smell of men in sweaty sleep hits you. The large cinderblock warehouse of a room is filled with plywood bunk beds arranged like cubicles in a labyrinth throughout. Most of the beds are filled with average-looking men either sleeping, reading or arranging their few belongings. These are men in the program, you learn, who have jobs (or several weeks to look) and are giving their paychecks to the shelter to save for them, so that they can buy homes. Your sleeping area is near the TV lounge—a two hundred square-foot area with about 16 quarter-inch-thick mats arranged on the floor in two rows of eight. The spots next to the low walls have all been taken already, so you throw your blanket down on one of the black mats in the middle and start to look around the place. The guys in the TV lounge are watching the end of the new King Kong. There’s a group of guys gathered around some kind of gun catalog and one of them with a thinning kinky mullet is telling a story about shooting a bull elk right through the lungs on a really cold day and watching the steam come out both sides of it like a locomotive before it collapsed. You see a guy named Steve you met yesterday. He’s got a bed because he’s in the program. He doesn’t remember you, which is just as well because he’s sort of annoying. He thinks the place is practically a palace compared to the barracks from his Army days. He tells you that he’s playing the “Shell-ter Game” and moves his hands around like he’s playing a shell game to make sure you get his pun. What he means is that he’ll go from here to Colorado House, the veterans’ shelter, and then maybe to Springs Rescue Mission and then back here so he can save as much money as possible. He’s also got some buddy who’s suing the VA for something and should have enough money to buy them both a house once his lawsuit’s settled. “Do you know html?” he asks you. When you shake your head he offers to buy you a book with a CD so you can learn at the library. He’s offering you an opportunity. He then goes on to tell you why the economy is headed for a depression of monumental proportions in three years. He also has regrets about having to give up his year-and-a-half supply of powdered milk, which he was trying to build up to five years. A tall, handsome black man comes over to tell you that you look like a “Scottish pimp,” which you take as a compliment, particularly since its been so long since you’ve looked in a mirror. His non sequitur provides you a convenient out from under Steve’s plotting wing. You walk back over to the TV area and watch the credits roll on King Kong and then a few minutes of Mission Impossible before they call for lights out.
You lie down on your mat, which has all the foamy comfort of an old towel. The goth kids across from you are playing their portable Sony PSPs and looking at their laptop computers. This baffles you almost as much as their discussion about Hebrew National Frankfurters and rice balls. They shut off the lights a little after 10 and the place gets quiet but for the snores, hacking coughs and farts that join together in a jarring susurration of white noise. You can’t sleep, of course, because there are two large men just inches away from you on either side, and because the floor hurts your hips when you’re on your sides and you can’t lie on your back with any comfort. So you listen to the noises in the room and wish they were crickets and that it was summer and that you were outside under the stars in a dark forest in the mountains near a stream full of fish. You try to distinguish between the different types of snores as an exercise for you mind. There are the sipping-an-empty-soda-cup-through-a-straw snores, the coffee-percolating snores, the mooing snores, the wind-blowing-lightly snores and the lion-furiously-snoring snores. The concentration helps you take your mind off the airborne viruses that are almost certainly entering your lungs, and you finally fall asleep.
When you wake up in the morning the lights are still out and you can already feel a scratchiness in your throat. You think about taking a shower, but the hand towel they give you seems ridiculous and enough people are already in the showers that the water’s probably cold. You put your boots on and get at the beginning of the line for breakfast behind a guy reading a three-day-old Gazette.
Before they open the cafeteria they call for ten volunteers. People in the line snicker at the idea that you need ten volunteers to serve cereal and coffee. The doors to the windowless kitchen open. It’s the only time men and women can mingle in the same room. You get a bowl of Chex with some sugar on top and a cup of coffee. It’s all right. Some people talk, but most don’t.
After breakfast you zip up your jacket, get your stuff and bolt. It’s the only time you’ve felt elated since you left your home two days earlier. It’s cold and it’s still dark, but you feel free. Then you walk past the brand-new courthouse on Cascade and Vermijo and look into the shiny new halls of justice they’ve built for the county. “How the fuck can we live in a society that will build a palace for punishment while it puts its most helpless citizens in a virus-infested warehouse?” you wonder to yourself as you head for downtown to spend the last of your money on a coffee to tide you over until the Hobo Bistro opens at 10:30. Maybe you’ll get some reading done today. Maybe you’ll get your application filled out at Labor Ready. Maybe you’ll take a shower over at ESM if you have time to register. Maybe you’ll … no, you don’t think you could survive even one more night in that shelter, even if you did have a bed and were in the program. You don’t give a shit how cold it is tonight—you’re sleeping with the bunnies.
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[...] downtown, I ride the shuttle 2-3 times a week. It has had a reputation at being the Bum Bus (remember Noel’s excellent story in the Homelessness issue?), but in the past two years it’s become a great tool for commuters and has helped to bridge [...]