“Did you hear,” said Lady, “Roberto is dead….”
“Who’s Roberto?” I said.
“You know, the flower pot guy….”
It was typically Lady, to assume that I would know the name
of the guy who had spent seemingly all his life resting his upper torso in one
large planter holding a miniature palm tree, while resting his feet in another
potter—but in fact I did. We all knew Roberto, and since we passed him several
times a day, he was fixture in the landscape.
“So what did he die of,” I asked.
“Who knows, but he died….”
So I had seen Roberto, but had I ever helped him? Given him
food or money? No, since I have a regular band to which I do give money, though
come to think of it, I hadn’t seen the most persistent of the group, who used
to come into the café and cadge funds. I would give him a dollar or two, and he
would protest: he wanted five dollars to eat at Burger King. That stumped me,
raising as it did the question of whether the guy had the obligation to take
what I gave him and be grateful, or whether, in fact, it wasn’t quite
reasonable. But why did I begin to dislike him, and start to feel like an
automatic money machine? And that led, of course, to wondering whether the fact
that I disliked him was reason enough to stop giving him money: his needs were
unchanged, and wasn‘t that the main thing?
“So whatever happened to the old guy who stood outside the
supermarket and begged for money, and would push your grocery cart home?” I
asked Lady.
“Oh, he got in trouble with the police, since he was also
being used by the mob to move drugs around,” said Lady. “So he’s somewhere,
either with the police, or with the mob, or in jail. Anyway, not around….”
Well, it made sense, in a way. If you were homeless, why not
take what money you can get and move some drugs?
To live in Old San Juan is to live in constant contact with
the homeless. This morning, taking the bus? The woman who wears tight short and
a tight tank top—you know, the one who sits in front of the old Western
Bank—asked me for a quarter. Coming back from the beach, a homeless man was
taking a shower at the place where the surfers rinse their boards off. And at
some point today, I’ll pass the profoundly disturbing sight of a ragged, filthy
man, who will look at me blankly as he has for several years and ask, “do you have
one change?” I will smile, shake my head no, and go on, though I have
considered, as an English teacher, pointing out the difference between “one”
and “any.”
There are times I wonder about our attitudes about
homelessness: when I was a kid, there was no such thing, there was only
vagrancy, which carried quite a kick. What did it mean? That you were shirking
your duty to get on with your life, to exert yourself, to take pride and get a
job and put a roof over your head. What? You’re in a park drinking a bottle of
cheap wine in the middle of the afternoon? Of course the police should go after
you!
It’s now 2014, and I get it now. I’ve had, after all, that
Friday morning meeting, in which I went from jobful to jobless in 20 minutes—never have I seen Human Resources
work so efficiently! And I have faced too many bottles of wine not to know that
some day, I could wake up and want to reach for one. This is called, I’m told,
the “morning bottle,” and it’s not a good sign.
So the double edge sword of addiction and joblessness has at
times swung quite close to my side, and may one day fell me. I ponder it, at
times: would I sleep at the beach? Trust myself to a doorway? Or would I, as I
see so many homeless people do, sleep during the day, all the better to be awake
and vigilant during the night?
Of course, I won’t have to worry about the most terrifying
thing of all: cold. But consider the fate of the homeless in Madison,
Wisconsin: according to Huffington
Post, there are 3370 homeless people in the city of 250,000. And given that
it’s my hometown, I can tell you about cold. Why am I still sweating, walking
the streets of San Juan?
Because here, the idea is to stroll, to amble, to move
leisurely, all the while wearing a coat or sweater. But I’m still back on those
frigid streets of Wisconsin, where the idea is to charge, stride, trot—all the
better to get the hell home and sit next to the radiator. OK, so what would I
do if I were homeless in Wisconsin? Well, I’d better hope for this:
Cute, hunh? It’s one of nine 99-square feet houses built in
Madison and inaugurated recently. They cost 5,000 dollars each, and are heated
with propane and solar panels. Here’s a picture of the inside:
Madison is one of a half dozen cities to start this project,
which came about after the Occupy Madison movement had folded—or rather, been
busted up. So the organizers had an epiphany: they had to comply with every
last national, state, and local regulation if they wanted to build these
houses. Here’s what one
source said:
Local organizers also state “Our approach to working
within the system came only after we realized that without dotting every “i”,
and crossing every “t”, the city and the county would never let us operate–
they used every opportunity to enforce ordinances, regulations, and seemingly
arbitrary whims against us. This paralleled precisely the persecution of
everyday, unaffiliated, homeless individuals. When you are homeless, “the
system” is rife with obstacles designed to prevent creative innovation or
adaptation– we at Occupy Madison experienced the same headaches.
Occupy Madison, by the way, has this
to say:
“Now is a critical
time for us financially– if we can’t raise enough funds to pay for making the
site as wonderful as it is, there’s a real risk our whole project could go under.”
Donations can be sent to PayPal account http://bit.ly/1uSYGew
Fundraisers in the past have been matched on a dollar per dollar basis and none
of current progress would be possible without a 100% volunteer effort.
Is it worth it? Well, even if you subscribe to the “vagrant”
theory, you might consider this:
A study recent study followed the progress of the Downtown
Emergency Service Center (DESC) in Seattle, WA. All the residents at this Housing First-styled
residence had severe alcohol problems and varying medical and mental health
conditions. When taking into account all costs – including housing costs – the
participants in the 1811 Eastlake program cost $2,449 less per person per month
than those who were in conventional city shelters, as described in the article
from the Journal of
American Medical Association.
Homeless
people get ill a lot, and often wait until their condition is extreme—and then
where do they go? Emergency rooms. And who picks up the tab? Or consider that
homeless people also go to prisons and jails—another cost to society.
If we
can’t be charitable, at least can’t we be sensible?
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