Sunday Morning (Part 1)
Frost clung to the grass and windshields as I made my way through the tiny park near a confluence of two creeks.
It was 7:30 on a Sunday morning.
I crossed a wooden bridge and saw a man dressed in baggy black clothes standing under a towering cedar tree. A backpack and sleeping bag rested on a bench. He was rolling something with his fingers, presumably a joint or cigarette. It was impossible to estimate his age.
Twisting up behind the tree, in the not-that-far distance, was thick brown smoke that struck me as very strange. There were no factories with smokestacks around here and it wasn't factory smoke. It resembled the smoke you might see from a slash burn scalding a clearcut.
Whatever was burning, it was equally strange to me that I hadn't heard a single siren, so maybe it was a controlled burn of some kind. But in this neighborhood, on a Sunday morning.
I walked toward the man, and he indeed was rolling a joint because I saw and smelled the stash in a tin container near his backpack.
He said hello. I said hello.
Then I opened with my usual opener: “I don't know how you do it.”
I don't recall how or why I came to employ this opener when I want to talk to a homeless person, but it seems to work in allowing me entry into their lives.
He said, “I can't do it much longer.”
What followed next was a 20-minute conversation while the smoke continued to plume into the sky: Here is the gist:
He wanted off the streets. It had been five years. It was becoming increasingly more difficult and dangerous. He'd suffered injuries from multiple assaults. This was the neighborhood of his youth and his childhood home wasn't far from here. He'd spent time in an Idaho prison and was released without ID, given a few bucks, somehow had found a steady decent-paying job, worked overtime all the time, had an apartment, paid his taxes, and then moved back to Oregon and became homeless, primarily because his criminal conviction prevented him from finding employment and renting an apartment.
Not having a phone was his biggest problem at the moment. He'd recently dropped his and it stopped operating. He needed a better one anyway, because he was finding it impossible to use his older model to unravel the digital mystery of how to access his Idaho tax refunds and Pandemic stimulus checks. He thought he might have ten grand waiting for him in some online bank account he'd established but now couldn't access. He'd tried using a library computer but couldn't make that work either and no one there could help him. He'd also used the library's phone to call various non profits for assistance but nothing came of it.
If he could just access the money he could afford an apartment and get a job. He'd recently applied for and received a food stamps card. He'd waited for years because wasn't ready to accept public aid and was using hard drugs. He wanted to do everything all in one big shot, this getting off the streets and changing his life. He didn't want to do it half ass because then he might backslide back into drugs and homelessness again. He couldn't stand that failure again. He knew he had one chance to get it right.
I fished three bucks out of my pocket and gave it to him for coffee. He thanked me and introduced himself as Phillip. I told him my name was Matt.
“You've got to get over to one of the homeless organizations in person and get help!” I said. I was surprised at the urgency in my voice. If it had been a weekday, I would have run home, got my car, and driven him to one.
All the time we talked Phillip rolled his joint with meticulous precision, and it was surely the longest such rolling of a joint in the history of pot smoking.
I said had to go. Phillip and I said our goodbyes He mentioned the smoke and turned to look at it. The fire had started this morning.
A voice flew my way from the street above. I stopped, looked up and saw a young black man sitting in the passenger seat of a sedan. I recognized him as the same young man who was living out of the sedan with another young Black man. They'd been here and there around the neighborhood for a month.
His voice reported that the fire was still raging and had raced up a power pole and blew up wires. Fire trucks were everywhere.
The fire was burning up a homeless shanty, he added. Phillip concurred.
What?
I knew exactly the shanty he was talking about because I'd seen it yesterday. It had rocked my mind with its bizarre inventiveness and peculiar decorations.
He said the name of the shanty's occupant but I didn't catch it. The man suggested I should check it out. Three seconds later I was jogging toward the smoke.