Modern day nomadic tribes are in nearly every American city and town I’ve traveled through this year. From Maine to California, they are at intersections holding brown cardboard signs with forlorn scribbles. They are sleeping in the doorways of buildings, under bridges. They lurk outside of stores asking for spare change. Wandering rootless vagrants. Languishing, distressed and discarded on cold dirty sidewalks. The homeless.
As I walk in a historic area of downtown Seattle, I turn the corner and end up in the midst of a scrappy assembly of street people. I look up to the sign on the brown brick building. It's the Union Gospel Mission.
I feel very uneasy. They stare at me, but I say hello to one, then another. By the front doorway is a bright-faced Irish girl. She tells me her name is Nicole. I ask her to tell me about her life.
“I’ve seen Hell,” Nicole says.
It’s almost dinner time and she is waiting to go inside for a free meal.
“I’ve seen violence … I’ve seen shootings … I’ve seen ….” She lets out a sigh and looks away as scenes of violence flash through her mind.
She sits on a box of her clothing and her other belongings on the sidewalk guarding them.
“I was raped and almost killed.” Nikole punctuates her sentences with nervous smiles. “It’s been hard.”
Her light blue eyes do not reflect the barbarity of street life, but she has seen it. “From New York to Seattle,” she tells me, “for nine years.. But Nicole still holds herself with an air of dignity. Her reddish blonde hair is brushed back, falling slightly over the left shoulder of her clean blue hooded pullover. Her new hoody and clothing were gifts from churches and social agencies.
As I talk to Nicole, I am aware of more and more people around me in front of the Union Gospel Mission. Most have a laminated badge attached to a cord around their neck. It shows they are approved for entry when the front door opens to the hot meal about to be served inside.
Whiskey fumes and cigarette smoke drift through the air from several men standing nearby. The fray of rough-looking castaways increase. I’m uncomfortable. I’ve been forewarned to be careful. Many are felons, some violent multiple offenders.
A skinny African American man sheathed in a foreboding dark aura stands next to a tall emaciated pock-marked white woman at the edge of the street curb. Both staring at me intently like bobcats. The once attractive girl has the look I’ve seen in photos showing the human ravages of advanced meth addiction.
She grins at me as she swirls in place like there is a tornado twisting inside her; repeating over and over, “I’m a bad ass … I’m a bad ass….” Her eyes are inviting me over. The man stands guard next to her, looking at me with cold black vacant eyes. A look that says he could easily kill me if I come too close.
My heart beats faster. I try to look totally at ease and unworried midst this group. I’m not.
A young African American man is watching me from down the sidewalk. He’s crouched, leaning against the brick wall near the front door wearing a pullover wool cap and a hooded fleece under an oversized heavy-weather jacket. He smiles as he is talking -- to either me or the air. I’m not sure which.
I walk over and ask him to tell me his story. His name is Troy. “I’ve been on the streets between five and seven years,” he tells me.
“There is one word that explains it all,” he says as he rambles, drawing in smoke from the nub remaining of his cigarette pinched between his fingers. He repeats a word several times, but I have difficulty understanding him. And he wants me to understand.
“It’s in the ten-million word dictionary,” he says. “It’s the only one that has the word and it costs a lot of money to get it.” Trying to grasp the word he is telling me, I ask him to spell it. His language is rough.
“Ya know what … it’s like … J … S … K … M-I-A … ah … O-M-R-Y.”
The word I think he is trying to tell me is “Jakari.” It is the only one I can find in any dictionary close to what I think he was saying. It did fit with life on the streets he was describing to me.
Jakari, as defined in the Urban dictionary: “One who is a key component in the African America culture and continuously dumps trash cans upon people’s head and body.” Jakari.
I ask him, “What’s the worst thing that has happened to you on the streets?”
“I’ve been robbed,” he says. “I’ve been shot at. I’ve been stabbed. I’ve been murdered. I just say give it to me … give it to me … know what I mean.”
I think I do. We talk more, Troy has an odd acceptance about his situation. A strange sense of peace he finds in this word he repeats: Ja-ka-ri.
“I ain’t gonna to say I’m not scared of s#@%,” he says, “but I ain’t gonna let nothin’ bother me where I can’t go do what I think I want to do when I want to do it.”
Further down the sidewalk a 46-year-old white male, wiry in build, sporting a ball cap and mustache, is watching me intently. He walks across the sidewalk, right up to me, smiling off and on. Trevor is his name. He tells me he came to Seattle from California. Heard about the place from a relative.
“I’ve been on the streets … since I was 16 … I lost four members of my family and my mom,” Trevor says.
Each person I talk to volunteered they had used drugs and all of them tell me how long they have been clean with a certainty in their voice, but lingering eye contact to see if I believe them. I was never convinced of the last part.
“I started using methamphetamines at the age of 24,” Trevor continued. “At the time it was a drug I liked … but I always told myself I had a problem.”
Nicole, Troy, and Trevor are just three of the roughly 5,000 people living on the streets in the Seattle area. Another 12,000-plus use homeless emergency and temporary shelters in various parts of King County, according to the Seattle Times.
National estimates for homeless in emergency or transitional housing during the course of a year are in the million and a half range. The number under bridges, in doorways, and elsewhere on the streets of cities across the nation is undetermined.
“New York is not half as bad as the violence we see here,” Nicole tells me with a big belly laugh. “… That’s because we are getting everybody from New York.”
Nicole is from New York. She came originally to work on a fishing boat, but she says, “I was duped … it didn’t work out … the guy didn’t even have a boat.”
“I’ve been clean almost a year and a half,” she tells me. She lives in a tent under a bridge. The Mission sold her a new zero-degree sleeping bag for only $10. She said it has saved her life. She is hoping to get into the program providing tiny houses to the homeless someday.
Throughout America and around the world homeless flock to different cities for various reasons. Rumors circulate among them about the best cities with the best accommodations and the big lure: free stuff.
Some Seattle politicians proclaim their town to be a “sanctuary city.” One of the workers told me it has sent an unintended message to the homeless in other cities. They hear from newly arrived homeless, the nickname for Seattle is “Free-attle.” I confirm this with people I talk to on the street.
“Everything is free in Seattle for the homeless,” the rumor goes. “Free-attle is the place that will take care of you.”
It’s not quite that way of course. Rumors of finding nirvana never quite live up to the imagination after you arrive. But the thought of it is enough. In this case, hundreds of homeless make their way every year, to the mecca of Free-attle in the Northwest of America.
So many come that the city and the county declared a “homelessness emergency.” But that was several years ago and not much has been done about the situation critics say.
They keep coming and a growing number stay in Seattle till they die. Overdose, suicide, and murder is not uncommon. There is even a community group dedicated to remembering the homeless people who die in the city. Seattle’s Homeless Remembrance Project members meet downtown at the city court to hold memorial services for each who pass away on the streets.
“There are a number of resources for the homeless who want help,” says one of the workers at the Union Gospel Mission. “But they have to decide they want out of the homeless lifestyle. A majority of them refuse shelter beds and help, preferring to live life on their own terms. But there is always food for them. They come to the Mission for the meals.”
Solution? Obviously the first thought that comes to mind, and I see other soft hearted people doing this all the time, is to give them a little cash. A few dollars. But the ugly truth is that doesn’t help. It usually, unfortunately, only enables another day of meth, or heroin or whatever drug is available that day.
Now I am in Salt Lake City, Utah. The population seems even larger than it was in Seattle.
“Please don’t support panhandling,” Salt Lake City posted signs say. “Turn spare change into real change. Give a hand up, not a hand out. Giving to agencies is more likely to provide hot meals, medical assistance, clothing, and substance abuse help.”
I believe the sign, but my bleeding-heart side is prodding me at this moment as I walk out of a downtown store. I am holding a boxed bread pudding I just bought in a cafe on this cold drizzly day. My eye locks onto a straggly gray-bearded old man sitting next to the curb with his back against the city light pole. A faded turquoise blanket is draped over his head and body. He stares down at the curb. Without thinking, I walk over and say, “You like bread pudding?”
He looks startled. I hand him the boxed bread pudding. “Ah … I haven’t had bread pudding in years … ah … thank you sir,” He places the box on the cement in front of him and protectively covers it with the corner of his blanket. I walk on.
I think it helped him. But I know for sure, in a stupid selfish way, it helped me.
As I count my many blessings this Christmas season, I pause to remember the less fortunate among us in America living on the streets. The verse in the Good Book is surely true, “…whatever you do unto the least of these you do unto me.”
Merry Christmas to one and all.