(Shutterstock)
I recognize the email address; this guy has written to me periodically over the years, either to share outrage over some social injustice, add a little insight, or offer warm concern. Now, for the first time, he is the one in trouble: he says he is about to be evicted and have to sleep in his van. He is worried that with his congestive heart failure, COPD, and peripheral artery disease, the cold will kill him. He is also worried that he will be arrested. After the recent Supreme Court ruling in Grants Pass, which gave local governments the right to enforce camping regulations when people are unhoused, “the cops now have a free hand to screw over homeless people with zero accountability.”
Worried for him, I zap back suggestions. Find someone to share a small, cheap apartment with? Ask the hospital social worker for resources when he goes for his next appointment? Find someone who would like a caretaker to live in their carriage house or shed?
That, it turns out, is where John has been living for the past several years: an unlit, unplumbed tool shed on the property of a Christian farmer who has now lost patience with him. John blames his own refusal to be evangelized. But later he describes the guy’s anger when John needed an ambulance. John refused to get on the gurney: the idea of being strapped onto that stretcher panicked him; it felt unsafe. The farmer tried to force him to comply, which I can imagine as a frustration born of care. But to John, the insistence felt infantilizing, with no concern for his wishes, dignity, preference.
None of this is simple.
John has studied human nature hard. In a letter to a famous physicist, he introduced himself as “someone whose life has revolved around the search for ultimate truth—spending 60 years researching issues like the biological science of aging, psychology, philosophy, religion, social justice, criminal and constitutional law, economic theory, human sexuality, political science, and all forms of physics….”
But none of it could save him.
By the next email, he is sleeping in his van and emailing from a Barnes & Noble. Exhausted by the move, he is freezing—he has to sleep in the nude because a bladder stone is causing nighttime incontinence, and he lies on a plastic sheet that in the cold “is a little like trying to force yourself to lie down on ice.” On top of which, the urine-soaked blankets are chilly and smelly and he has no way to wash and dry them. He struggles to breathe after the exertion, and the van is crammed with all his possessions, so when he was trying to figure out a way to stretch out his legs, a box fell on him and gashed his shoulder.
“If I had been given a choice of being born into this world,” he writes, “knowing what I now know, I would have definitely opted to pass! The tiny amount of glory and joy over the course of a lifetime is by far outweighed by the sheer physical and emotional hell and overwhelming loneliness.” If he cannot figure out a way to live more comfortably, he says, he is going to look into doctor-assisted suicide in another state.
He has not yet given up, though. He wants to know how to post a message Facebook-wide without violating the rules. “Surely there is someone who is willing to let me use their empty garage….”
I tell him I am not sure there is a way to send a message that widely on Facebook. Instead I send contact info for a bunch of agencies in Wichita. They all seem (to me) so hopeful, with names like Rapid Re-Housing and Homeless Outreach Team and HumanKind Ministries and Housing First, which even helps with utilities.
But to qualify for Housing First, he needs a disabling condition and continuous homelessness for at least one year or at least four episodes in the past three years. I would think living in a shed would count—and he has not worked since a car crash in 2009. He was run over by a guy with no insurance, he says, and the same year, he took so much penicillin for bronchitis that he lost most of his hearing at the human-voice frequencies. He wound up retiring at the age of sixty-two, so he receives less in Social Security than he would have if he had been able to wait.
“My hearing loss was pretty much the last nail in the coffin of my career potential,” he says, explaining his previous jobs as a manufacturing rep and district manager. “ALL jobs require you to interact either with the public—or at a minimum with fellow employees.”
He could apply for Section 8 now, but (so many buts) there are long waiting lists for housing, and he is afraid that every time a family applies, someone like him gets kicked to the bottom of the list.
“You need to understand how the safety net system works,” he tells me. “When a regular person first inquires the first blush impression is that there are all these programs out there to help people—UNTIL you get into the details. It gets messy quick!” Every housing program is set up for certain groups, he continues: minorities, families, pregnant teens, women escaping domestic violence, etc. Someone like him is “supposed to miraculously be wealthy enough not to need help….. If you’re white, male, college grad, single, not a felon, no drug addictions, no mental illness, not an alcoholic—you’re flat out of luck.”
John is scared of people attacking him or stealing from him, both of which he says have happened often, and that makes him distrust Section 8 housing, not to mention shelters. Also, he would have to contribute 30 percent of his income to rent, so even if utilities are covered, that only leaves him with $530 a month to pay for healthy food, over-the-counter or uncovered medicines, gas and repairs for his 10-miles-an-hour van, occasional replacement of worn shoes or clothing, laundry, paper towels, soap….
I live pretty simply—and need three times that much. Panicky, I throw out ideas scattershot. Move to a small town where the rents are cheaper. Hell, move to Mexico. He says he cannot afford driving to a big city for health care, and what if he has a stroke? Without rapid treatment, he could lose his ability to care for himself altogether. As for Mexico, he says, it is “unsafe and largely controlled by violent drug cartels, massive police corruption—and I don’t know the language.”
Fair enough. Meanwhile, 653,104 unhoused Americans were counted in last year’s single-night census, a record high. “The brutal reality,” John says, “is that you can try with all your might and still not make it.” His IQ is 130, he says, “same as Bill Clinton’s,” and he graduated from college with a 4.0 in his major, but he often had trouble finding work. When he was younger, he dug ditches and worked in orange groves and on loading docks. Then he landed corporate jobs, but never the sort that come with cushy pensions.
“Probably 50 percent of average folks are one paycheck, job loss, or medical emergency away from being homeless themselves,” he says, “and many would be homeless except that they split rent or are married—but they choose to look down their nose at you.”
He is done with charity: “Every time I deal with Christians they will help me for a little while, thinking that they are going to get me to convert back to Christianity—and when I don’t—they decide to stop helping me and start blaming me for not being grateful enough for their help.” He offers furious examples of excess and hypocrisy—and his anger makes more sense when I learn that he was ordained a Methodist minister in his twenties. By age thirty-five, he felt duped and became an atheist.
Now he is hoping to reach other atheists who might lend a hand—or more precisely, a living space. Could I help him set up a GoFundMe plea? He is convinced that if he just reaches out widely enough, the net will catch some kindness. “I can’t do this for myself,” he explains. “In American society, no one is allowed to toot their own horn, or ask for their own needs. It takes a third party to vouch for the need to get people to give.”
I doubt people will hand over cash or living space to a man they do not know. That is why he needs me to vouch for him, he says. But they do not know me either, I point out. And I do not know you, in any meaningful way; we have never even met.
“Do you not believe I am who I say I am?” he asks.
Sadly, I do believe him. I would rather think this a scam, concocted by someone healthy and well-fed who goes home to an unsuspecting family. But I have encountered so many people like John: introverted, stubborn, sharply intelligent, but for one reason or another, incapable of either supporting themselves or winning others’ support.
Nonetheless, I ask for his surname (Williamson) and check Wichita’s court records. His only crime is not succeeding in the way we think imperative.
After being raised by a widowed mother who worked nonstop, then working nonstop myself for four decades, I harbor a meanspirited demon who hisses that no one has the right to just hold out a hand to strangers and expect to be saved. The demon also whispers that I am more self-reliant than lucky, more hard-working than privileged and healthy.
The demon lies, but I love to listen to him.
John, meanwhile, is set on GoFundMe. “I think it’s a numbers game of finding the right person,” he writes, attaching a news article about two girls in a migrant family using WiFi at a Taco Bell to do their homework, and a GoFundMe bringing in $115,000 for them.
What I do not say in response? Some forms of misery are more palatable, more charming, than others. He already knows this, through painful experience. But the magic of crowdsourced compassion is the only plan that feels hopeful right now.
I toss out more ideas. A cemetery that needs a caretaker? A company that needs a watchman on site? A cheap mobile home? House sitting?
“I don’t mean to put a damper on your suggestions, I know you’re trying—but I checked into house sitting with real estate companies long ago,” he writes. “Caretaker positions are more myth than reality. Storage facilities won’t lease to you if they even think you might be trying to live in it—idiot zoning laws make it illegal.”
As late as the 1930s, he tells me, there were no homeless shelters: “Friends and family took people into their own homes!” Even that would not work for John, though. His only remaining relative is a brother he lost touch with years ago.
What about looking up old friends?
“Unfortunately, sadly I never really had any friends to lose,” he replies. “Even as a young child the few neighborhood kids were about the only friends I’ve ever had and even then they were very light friendships. I was shunned because unlike all the other kids who had dads I didn’t have anyone to pay back by taking everyone out to entertainment—or to the lake house etc. —so I ended up always alone. You’d think maybe the adult parents would have had pity on me being the son of a single mom, a divorcée, but instead they were outright mean to me. All the neighborhood dads were redneck macho types, so being kind wasn’t one of their attributes. I mainly only had one key friend in high school (a guy in my rock band ) who honestly wasn’t much of a friend. I worked afternoons after school at grocery stores until 9 or 10 pm and went to school during the day—so really little room for relationships—especially since so much at that age revolves around sports and school teams I wanted nothing to do with—I HATE SPORTS! Also, I was heavily unpopular and made fun of because I didn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs—I was an outcast nerd. Not ever finding a wife or girlfriend has been my life’s greatest sorrow by far over encompassing every other loss in my life.”
Muted by his stark loneliness, I turn to bureaucracy. With all those health problems, surely he could still apply for disability. “SSI takes FOREVER to qualify for,” he replies, “and comes with a lot of restrictions.”
If I were John, I would try. But this entire exercise has been me popping up with things that I—free of limits, healthy, with savings—would do. In rapid succession I have had every reaction I deplore in others: He should find some low-key part-time job. Be more tractable so people will like him and help him. Put up with the evangelization, maybe even feign interest, would it kill him? Budget that $750 better….
All he wants is a garage, empty office, warehouse corner, or shed where he could live. “I can buy a large card table, folding chair, air mattress, and plastic book shelving,” he writes. “I already have a desk lamp, and even wall posters to make a garage feel more home like.” His dream is to have “heating, cooling, a toilet, shower and space to work in.” The question that burns: “Why is it OK for society to price people out of housing to fund rich property owners? And then society blames the poor for not being able to afford rent. Why do people not see shelter as a basic human right? I’ve got a life expectancy of one to three years. Is there literally not a single man, woman, family, or social org, in my entire country willing to help me live those years with minimum basic dignity?”
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
