spider (update from post on 5/28/09)

It had been dark for a few hours by the time we located him, and the temperature had dropped some thirty degrees since midday. In the heart of San Jose we found him, his aging bones curved into a frail mound at the foot of his wheel chair, surrounded by filth. 

The last time I had seen Spider was seven weeks ago. At about that time he had moved abruptly from his spot of dirt underneath the freeway, and I had lost contact with him. Then by chance I spotted him a few days ago on the sidewalk across from the gilded California Theatre. He was slumped in his wheel chair, a snail crawling across his shoulder. After talking for a few minutes he gave me a vague description of where he was now spending his nights. I told him I would come find him soon.

Six days later, on the appointed evening, a small group of friends and colleagues of mine sought him out, bringing with us several bags of essentials. After saying our hellos, we held out a sleeping bag, a jacket, a pair of pants, announcing each as we presented it.

Looking up toward us, his eyes clouded by cataracts, he said meekly, "Well, I can't really wear pants."

And it was true. Beneath his ratted blanket Spider had on nothing below the waist; only a grocery bag whose handles he had slipped his legs through to serve as a diaper. Purple sores were visible on his discolored calves and ankles.

"But I could use some batteries for my radio. And some food." His tiny radio was his almost exclusive source of company, for although he was heaped in a pile at a busy downtown intersection, he was very much alone, more of a plague for the public to avoid than a person to take note of. Hearing this desire, Nathan, a friend and partner who was meeting Spider for the first time, hopped up and quickly went to find some batteries. Meanwhile, my coworkers Kenneth and Rebecca began removing ready-to-eat food from a bag we had brought from Sacred Heart: lunch meat, a loaf of soft bread, a box of orange juice, some fruit cocktail in a pop-top can.

There were five of us there with him last Tuesday night. Several of us had the night before made a promise to each other that we would not rest until we saw Spider in the dignified, humane living conditions that even our pets are guaranteed. 

But this would not be easy.

After a good thirty minutes of conversation, Spider gave a cursory warning, and without rising from his knees began urinating into a tattered 7-11 coffee cup. We had hardly enough time to look away, and upon his completion, he summarily splashed his water against the mildewed wall of his concrete hovel.

When we turned back around, he waved us close, his hand damp and the wall dripping with foul moisture. We stepped toward him, crouched in the rivulets, and continued our chat. After some jokes and tomfoolery, he mentioned to us that his disability payments, which had been curtailed some months go, had now ceased all together. It was at this point, as I leaned in to hear him better, that I noticed what appeared to be clotted blood in his beard.

"How are you surviving?" we asked. 

"I panhandle for spare change," he replied. Just then somebody shouted as he drove by a a car alarm sounded up the street. Beneath Spider's recurrent wit, the sadness in his voice was still audible. "But I don't get very much because I smell."

(For those of you who read this, please keep Spider in your prayers. We have begun coordinating with a number of different agencies, but he seems to slip through the cracks of our community's meagre safety net. If you feel moved to get involved, comment here or email me at toddm@sacredheartcs.org. Thank you.)

impossible faith

"C'mon, Julian! Hurry it up!" Spittle formed on the manager's lip as his red face exerted itself in shouting. "What am I paying you for!" 

At 48 years old, Julian was washing the dishes as fast as he could. His hands were pruned from hours of soaking, his clothes were wet down to his socks, and his back ached from being bent in one spot for hours. But his boss at the restaurant is a hard man. "Let's go! Let's go!" he carried on. "Vamanos!" Julian's hands moved as quickly as they could, his eyes focussed on the task before him.

After bellowing out the orders to move faster, the manager turned to leave the prep. room where Julian sweats for his $8.75 per hour. As soon as the supervisor disappeared around the corner, Julian removed a fork and soiled napkin from a customer's dish that was waiting to be rinsed, and with his wet hand scooped up a palm-full of cold spaghetti, swallowing it whole.

"I don't like to do it," he confessed to me last night, "but it's hard to buy enough food."

"Don't they let you eat something from the kitchen during your break?" I asked.

"Well, they do give us a discount, but it's an expensive restaurant, and I can't afford the food, even with the discount."

"That's rough." I didn't know what to say. 

After a moment of silence between us, Julian blurted out, "But my Lord is so good to me!" I was moved by the fact that he spoke with such familiarity, that he spoke of "my Lord."

Julian has a long struggle ahead of him, but last night was a night for thanksgiving: after eight months of homelessness, he has at long last moved into his own apartment.

After serving seven years in prison, Julian was released and told that he had exactly 30 days to find work. He was given a motel room for the month, but this was toward the end of October of last year, the same time that the economy was imploding every morning on the front pages of the newspaper. When his 30 days had come and gone without producing employment, his parole officer spread out a map before him and pointed to a creek.

"If you go here, you'll find some guys camped out under this bridge." Julian stared at the map, and then up at the parole officer. What was he saying? "I would recommend taking your stuff and heading to this area here," the parole officer continued, running his index finger over a squiggled blue line on the city map. Julian waited for the punch line, but it never came. He was simply shown the door.

Leaving the parole office, Julian felt an overwhelming chill settle into his bones. With great difficulty he piled all his possessions onto his bicycle, and frustrated, alone, and slipping beneath an onslaught of despair, he began to pedal toward he knew not what. 

As he rode slowly toward the creek, Julian heard a voice, an insistent, nagging, demanding voice telling him to swerve into traffic. Just a subtle shift of his weight on the handlebars would give him rest and would put an end to the daily struggle to survive. 

But Julian resisted the voice that day, and instead of heading to the creek, he settled for a patch of sidewalk. And for the next eight months, he slept on the street, along railroad tracks, in shelters, in a van, and now, after what at times seemed to be an utterly hopeless situation, he was sleeping in his own apartment, on his own bed.

But in spite of what might have been a time of jubilation, there was something weighing on Julian's soul. "What's the matter?" I asked.

Julian looked into my eyes. "What I'm afraid of is that if I continue to receive such blessings as these, I might turn my back on God--I might think I don't need Him anymore."

And right then he buried his face in his hands and prayed that he would remain faithful.

my dinner with andre

Waving the sizzling knife in short, crazy arcs before my face, Andre exclaimed, “I know more than 300 ways to prepare beans!” Then, in a prophetic pitch, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he shouted, “but this recipe, this one is from God!” He broke out into a howl, his open mouth revealing a vast emptiness where his bottom incisors should have been (which ironically made him appear more dangerous).

Sitting in his tiny studio apartment the other night, the unfamiliar odors swirling between us served as ambiguous warnings that I cheerfully ignored. After all, a year ago Andre was still sleeping in Sacred Heart’s parking lot, anti-social and resigned to his place as human rubbish. For years he was without friend or family, his world a sinister place perceived through the distorting prism of schizophrenia. The only way the social safety net seemed to know how to deal with him was to lock him up periodically, then release him back to street, cold, hungry, and all alone. 

But on this particular evening those desolate nights seemed far away--as if they had belonged to someone else. Andre was giddy and goofy and grinning with buoyant abandon. We were celebrating; neither of us knew what, but we were most assuredly celebrating.

Standing over the stove, Andre polished off a peach and dropped the pit into a pot that I later discovered was brewing our tea. He then took the towel from his shoulder, wiped the perspiration from his balding head, and dried the bowl from which I was about to eat. I was having the time of my life. 

After several minutes more of fiddling with the pots and pans and plates and platters laid out before him, the moment came when he vigorously rubbed his hands together, clapped, and snapped his fingers--this seemed a good omen. He brought over to the table some olives, our tea, then after pouring the soup, he surprised me with a daring presentation of cubed potatoes and strips of merry “meat-fingers”, as he would refer to them in conversation.

“The meat,” and as he spoke, he used a gruff voice and made gorilla arms, “it was about to go bad,” (at which point I wondered how you could ever really be certain that something that was about to go bad, was not in fact, bad already). “It was about to go bad, so I boiled it.” When he said it, he said it with such conviction, puffing out his cheeks and thrusting the saucy knife at my chest, that boiling it seemed perfectly appropriate. I mean, what do I know? “You see,” he said sharply, as if having just proven his point, “I might be insane, but I’m not stupid!”

He turned back to his caldron, but suddenly, Andre shot his head up and froze. I watched him, wondering what would come next. My mouth hung open, waiting.

He slowly turned toward me and broke out in a knowing, almost wise chuckle. “Ah, ha, you see! I know they’re not really there!”

“Are you hearing voices?” I asked, sensing that in some strange way we had company.

“Yes, but I know they aren’t there. It’s a test,” and as he spoke he pointed frantically to about fifty different spots on his head in rapid succession, blinking wildly.

“What do the voices say, Andre?” I had never before asked him so direct a question about his symptoms.

His response was a masterly piece of misdirection. “Don’t worry about it. I’m not going to do anything.” 

Now typically, in the business world for example, a pronouncement like "I'm not going to do anything," would be a sign of insolence or the sort of slothfulness that could get you sacked. But when Andre said it, I found myself feeling mostly relieved.

As we ate and talked and laughed, I kept before me the image of this man when he was living in our parking lot. How could it have been that for years he had languished in such degradation? He had regularly succumbed to eating from garbage dumpsters, sharing his food with the rats and stray dogs that occasionally accompanied him. Back then it had seemed impossible that he could have ever made it off the street. He was mentally ill, he was hardened, he was angry, he had given up ... and I had given up. Yet, against all conventional wisdom, here he was, living a humane, dignified, even happy existence. It had taken a great deal of work on the part of many people, but here he was.

I will never give up on another human being.

happy interdependence day

The phone call came, as this sort of call usually does, late at night. “Um, Todd?”

“Yes?” I asked. “Noe?”

“Yeah. You’re still up?” These calls also tend to begin with an awkward series of questions-by-inflection.

“Well, I … my refrigerator only has condiments in it—like ketchup and butter.” His voice was subdued and uncertain. I could hear the struggle in his voice, the struggle between pride and shame and the recognition that he could not make it in this world alone.

In fact, the last time Noe had eaten was over 24 hours earlier. He continued, “I don’t know what to do. I’m really hungry.”

Noe is 24 years old and had been unemployed for the past few months. During the course of this challenging time, he has relied on the generosity of others to maintain his housing and nourishment. In return, he has offered his time to Sacred Heart through volunteering to help us run our Poverty Simulation program.

But last week, Noe went back to work.

Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)—the Stimulus Bill—approximately 1000 low-income Santa Clara County youth between the ages of 15 and 24 received the opportunity for paid internships at government and non-profit agencies, schools, and colleges.

When I went to visit Noe this past week at work2future, his internship site, he was beaming. He showed me his desk, his employee badge, and the email he was busy typing. He had never dressed up for work before, and on his first day he needed help tying his tie, which he carefully removes each night after work without untying--except, he informs me, on casual Friday, when he gets to leave the tie at home.

Growing up in the foster care system and spending a majority of his life in group homes, at age 18 he became homeless. He has no known family, and he has never, in all his life, heard the words, “I’m proud of you.”

Now, through this summer internship program, Noe is proud of himself. He works 36 hours per week and receives an additional four hours of job-readiness training—and all of it is paid at $13 per hour. But more than just providing Noe the resources he so desperately needs today, this program is building his job skills, teaching him appropriate habits for the workplace, helping him to identify and overcome barriers to employment, and preparing him with the experience critical to a permanent role in the marketplace.

But it is important to point out that it is not just Noe and the other low-income youth who receive the benefits of this program.

Here at Sacred Heart we have eleven ARRA interns working in our essential services programs, filling a significant gap in volunteer support for the summer months. With the massive increase in the number of people we serve each day, it would be extremely difficult without their help for us to continue providing emergency food, clothing, hygiene items, and items for infants such as diapers and formula.

However, although Noe started his internship last week, he is still awaiting his first paycheck. During this difficult time—while he is working but has no money, no food, no way to pay rent or utilities—we will continue to support him, just as he and the rest of the interns are supporting their internship sites and the communities we serve.