Homeless. Please Help. God Bless. Go Twins
by Pete Feigal
I read the sign as I
pull up to the stoplight. The “Go Twins” tag
makes me smile. A nice sales technique. Something new. But then it
puzzles me, makes me uncomfortable. An unexpected touch of humanity.
I don’t recognize this homeless guy. This intersection is busy
so it gets the “panhandle-tag team” almost 24/7, and
there’s always new faces. To be honest, I often don’t
look at the faces, and the grubby jean jackets all look the same.
How do they choose who gets what corner or for how long? Is there
some kind of seniority of suffering, some kind of timing system,
punching in and out on some invisible clock?
I miss The Punks. I
miss the pink mohawks, the cutaway black leather, the heavy boots
and piercings that hung out in front of the McDonald’s
in Uptown back in the ‘80’s. They were like tropical
fish. Homeless people make me depressed, angry, frightened. They’re
grimy, living proof of where my country fails. “Unclean, Unclean” the
leper rings his bell as he walks, warning people away. The pariahs
don’t carry bells anymore, just cardboard signs.
They have no names.
I instantly assign everybody I see a kind of ‘Indian
name:’ “Rich Guy In Beemer,” “Cute Brunette
Walking,” “Old Fart With Chubby Dog.” But homeless
people are just homeless people. Maybe I don’t want them to
have names. It creates a distance. In some mythology, the only ones
without names are those who have been sentenced to Hell. Often in
the past, when mentally ill people died in the American Gulag, the
old State Hospital System, they were buried in a ditch in the backyard
with only their hospital number and date they died on their tiny
gravestones.
Once I saw one of the
guys talking into a cell phone. At first I thought it was somebody
with schizophrenia speaking to his “voices,” but
then I glimpsed the tiny device. The new technology creating smaller
and cheaper phones might actually break some of the stigma of mental
illness: we’ll all go around talking into the air. I asked
a friend who had auditory hallucinations who he was talking to. He
told me that he heard people in his head telling him secrets about
himself, sometimes very scary things. Other times he was trying to
tell his story, who he was and how he came to be this way. Rationalizing,
explaining. And sometimes he was practicing. “Practicing what?” I
asked. “Apologizing,” was the answer.
When I got out of a
hospital back in ‘81, I had no money,
no apartment, and no official system to help me. What I had was a
loving family and friends who gave me places to stay and resources
to re-establish myself. I wasn’t “homeless” during
that period, I was “houseless.” And because of that help
and love, that limbo between illness and recovery was only temporary.
Many are not as lucky
and, without help, their transitional stages become permanent conditions
of purgatory. Imagine the terror and horror of literally having
nowhere to go. Is there any word in our language more powerful
and sacred than “home?” Native
Americans and Jews can testify to what happens when you are banished
from your home. Homeless people understand what happens when you
become an exile even within your own country or city. Those who’ve
battled mental illnesses know what happens when you become lost even
within your own mind and soul. Think about “home,” and
all the love, acceptance, safety and comfort that it means and implies.
Then imagine “homelessness.”
Politicians, doormen,
police officers, bus drivers, you, me, we sweep them away, out
of sight, out of mind. “Move on, now.
Keep moving.” Let’s face it, it isn’t law or charity,
it’s sanitation.
Sometimes alone, or
huddled in bands (Homeless people don’t
sit together, do they? They huddle.) Hungry, mentally ill, cold,
drugged, sick, drunk, desperate—some are veterans of foreign
wars, some are veterans of closer conflicts. Debates about football
stadiums, traffic congestion, even global terrorism pale in comparison
to the daily issues that they face. Am I going to eat today? Am I
going to be robbed or beaten or raped today? Am I going to die today?
Afraid-in-the-dark terror. Waiting-for-the-first-light-of-dawn terror.
I doubt their motives.
I doubt their hardship, even while seeing them dirty, and watching
them beg for help. Even after my personal experience of stigma
and exile from my thirty-year struggle with mental illness and
MS, I still feel that old judgment, the old self-hatred sneaking
in: “Pick yourself up by your bootstraps.” I
comfort myself with the lie: “People get what they deserve.
They are where they are because of who they are. I won’t enable
deadbeats.”
I have to remind myself
that I have also been a nomad, a refugee, a wanderer—that I am also “just passing through.” That
within my own heart I once had nowhere to go. I had to beg for help—for
my life. And that begging caused a residual wound that’s still
hard to heal. I have to remember that real change comes slowly, and
my recovery is still in progress after thirty years.
So I force myself to
look. I keep dollar bills and Snickers bars in my car. Maybe this
person is a lazy deadbeat taking advantage of people’s guilt or goodwill. Or, maybe he’s been knocked
flat or battling an illness, or just trying to stay alive until the
first light of dawn. For a buck, I’ll take that chance.
Sometimes we just keep people alive. Keep them alive until some
assistance arrives. Some insight, or medicine, or help from the City
or County or from perfect strangers. The dollars and candy bars I
give are a toll for being lucky, for being American, for being human.
And, as for the argument
that you can’t help those who won’t
help themselves—those are the people we have to help. We must
keep knowingly being helping angels.
I hand him a dollar
bill. I hold out my hand to shake his, I make myself look him in
the eye. “Thank you and God
bless you, Sir.” “You
take care, Brother. And the Twins are going to win tonight by three
runs.”
