A Gift of Hope: Helping the Homeless (6 page)

We agreed that if anyone ever attacked us for the vans or what was in them, we would give up the vehicles immediately. There was no point dying for a van full of sleeping bags. So we would hand over the keys with no argument, no questions
asked. It never happened, fortunately, but at least we were all clear on our priorities and had a plan, if things went wrong.

We tried other safety measures over the years, none of which really worked. A few years into it, we decided to add two-way radios, since we so often split up and strayed from each other when we got busy. We tried to stay in pairs but often got spread out. There were always a few of us at the vans, handing things out, but most of the others wandered off to round people up, and make sure we found everyone we had gone there to find, in hidden doorways, in dark alleys, or under freeway ramps. Being able to communicate by radio in the event of danger or injury, or just to say how many people were in a camp around the corner, would have helped us out a lot and made us both safer and more efficient. The first time the people on the streets saw us with radios, they ran like mice: They thought we were all cops. I don’t think we used the radios, in all, for more than an hour, if that. Bad idea. Forget that. What we eventually settled on as our only safety device were whistles, worn around our necks to use in case of emergency, which was a sensible idea. We never had to use them. The team, however, did use theirs at every opportunity—every time I reached into the doughnut box. It did not deter me, unfortunately. I managed to scarf down two or three doughnuts every time we went out. I ignored the whistles and
figured the doughnuts were worth it! And I got hungry jumping out of the van all night. So I endured the humiliation of them whistling at me, and ate another doughnut.

A new element that the two police officers had added on their first trip was the addition of a greeting, “Yo!” I don’t know if it’s a cop thing, a guy thing, or a street thing, but their form of greeting as we approached people was “Yo!” A very loud “Yo!,” in fact. One of our cautions was not to startle people. People on the streets are wary and sometimes frightened. They live in danger, and mental illness is no stranger on the streets. You don’t want to tiptoe up on people discreetly and scare them to death at close range, or wake them out of a sound sleep by frightening them. Their reaction could have been dangerous. So we gave lots of warning that we were approaching, so people had time to evaluate the situation and feel comfortable with it—or, rarely, tell us not to, if they didn’t want us around. They had that right. It was their space, not ours. And Bob and Randy’s “Yo!” definitely did the job of warning people when we approached. I have one of those mouse voices that even when I think I’m shouting, people say “What?” And when I’m talking normally, no one can hear me. I am painfully shy in real life, and have a very soft voice. My first “Yo!” was beyond pathetic. It was a baby whisper that sounded like half of “yoyo,” said by a six-year-old. It took me a
while to grow my “Yo” into something impressive. By now I have a “Yo,” I am proud to say, that could knock you flat on your ass.

“Yo!” is a greeting familiar to people on the street, and they use it to catch your attention and stop you in your tracks.

We were getting back into the van on our first night out as a team, after one of our stops, when a man came running down the street as fast as he could, to stop us before we left. I saw him coming from the distance, desperate to get what we had to give. Into the night, in our direction, he shouted, “Yo! Angel!” We waited for him, and I was startled by what he’d said. He thanked us profusely for what we were doing, and said we must be angels coming to help others. We gave him what he needed, and off he went, leaving with us the gift of our name, as a group. We called our outreach team thereafter “Yo! Angel!”

Another extraordinary thing happened to us that night. We were cruising along slowly beneath an underpass, looking for people sleeping there, and there were a lot of them. Suddenly on a support post for the underpass, we saw a large chalk drawing. It stopped us all. It was a beautiful painting of a boy, done in pastel colors, and he had wings. There was our angel. A sign, after we had just been called that, deservedly or not. But what stopped me and mesmerized me, as tears sprang to my eyes, was that the boy in the lovely angel drawing
looked just like my son Nick. He was the angel in our midst. John and Jane returned days later to take a photograph of it, which they had put on a sweatshirt for me, as a gift. I treasure it still. It was the perfect sign for our first night together as a team, the night Yo! Angel! was born.

We became Yo! Angel! that night, and so did the foundation I founded years later, to help us manage our finances and make the most of every dollar we spent on the streets. Jane saw to it that we had a sign that said “Protected by angels” hanging from the rearview mirror, and various little angel mascots. The occasionally outrageous jokes we told between stops did not qualify us as angels, but they kept our spirits up, and we all liked the idea of angels as our theme.

Although our distribution went fairly smoothly, it was nonetheless complicated fishing things out of the van, making sure everyone had one of each item: sleeping bag, jacket, gloves, hat, socks. We had added a wool beanie, which was useful on cold nights on the streets. I wore one myself. Sometimes people wanted two pairs of socks, or a jacket for an absent husband or girlfriend. We gave them what they wanted, but running the supplies out of the back of the van was like a discount store on the day of a half-price sale. We did a lot of business quickly, and Jane had to stay on her toes to keep the rest of us from turning our supplies into a junk heap for her to deal with. She was always a good sport about the mess we
made as we handed things out at a fast pace, and people were patient as they waited for us to turn back to them with our arms full of things they needed. It was only the beginning for us, and we still had a lot to learn about what was needed and what worked.

In the spirit of that innocence and newness, we managed to drive headfirst into a one-way dead-end alley south of Market Street, where we saw two or three people asleep in doorways. It looked like an easy stop to us, and no big deal. But once we were deep into the alley, with another van behind us and no way out except to back up, about forty young men poured out from doorways and nooks and crannies where we hadn’t seen them as we drove in. They were a rough crowd, and just about all of them looked high on drugs. The alley was closer than we should have been to the very dangerous Sixth Street, where we had agreed not to go. The alley had seemed okay. It wasn’t, and we found ourselves instantly surrounded and outnumbered by a large group of very angry-looking young men, who began jostling each other and us, afraid that we wouldn’t have enough for all of them. We were hugely outnumbered, three or four to one. They were pushing, shoving, and shouting, and in our nervousness, one of us accidentally locked the van with the keys in it, so we were stuck on the street with the men, locked out of our van. I took one look at the situation, and religious or not, I said the only thing one could in that
situation, which didn’t look good to any of us. I muttered, “Oh shit!” In all honesty, I figured we were going to be killed.

We had the other van to escape to, but we still had one locked van with the motor running that we couldn’t get into. Five of us, panicked, scrambling into the unlocked van, was the kind of exit from the situation we’d all hoped to avoid. Within seconds, Randy gave one of his bellowing “Yo”s, told everyone to line up single file, and informed them loudly that we had more than enough to go around. Much to my amazement, they grumbled, but even in their bleary-eyed, aggressive state, they lined up single-file. Randy looked calm and in control. Our other men kept a watchful eye on the situation, and Jane and I sorted through jackets, hats, and the rest, and handed them out with lightning speed. Tony found a spare set of keys to our van in his, and we were able to unlock it.

We handed out everything we needed to, the men we were serving calmed down, and within a few minutes, the first van was backing out of the alley. Jane and I sailed into the back of our van through the back doors, and landed flat on our faces on a stack of sleeping bags, laughing nervously. A moment later, our doors were closed, and we were gone.

All’s well that ends well, but it had been a more stressful situation than any of us liked, and we all agreed: No more dead ends, and next time we check it out more carefully before we just hop out. That didn’t stop us from getting into a
few narrow squeaks at other times, but little by little we learned the things we had to do to stay safe, and what to look out for. For our first night together as a larger team, it had gone pretty well, with only a few minor hiccups here and there, the dead-end alley being one of them. Jane and I still laugh at the way we sailed into the van that night. I swear we looked like we were flying, but the truth is, we were damn lucky to get out.

We gave away a hundred of everything that night. There were the now all-too-familiar touching, poignant moments, and the last stop that ripped your heart out. It never failed. We had left my house in good spirits, making jokes and munching doughnuts, but as we drove home, and as it would always be from then on, we rode in silence, thinking about the people we had seen, the moments we had shared, and embedding every one of them deep into our hearts. Everyone knew then, just as I had weeks before, that what we were seeing had already changed our lives. How could it not? We would have had to be dead not to absorb into our souls all that we were seeing every time we went out. We took a part of them home with us, and left part of ourselves with them on the streets.

O
ne thing I was shocked to learn once I began working on the streets was how hostile the city was to the homeless, while claiming otherwise. I suspect that may be true in almost all cities. I never see homeless in Beverly Hills, so where do they put them? What do they do to move them away or hide them? New York has its homeless, yet the city claims they have made vast inroads into the problem. Really? How? Informed sources say that one of New York’s best tools to deal with the homeless is bus tickets to New Jersey. Likewise, at one time San Francisco had a program to give them bus tickets to anywhere but here. Just get them out! It’s a modern-day version of the pea-under-the-shell game. Just move it around to somewhere else, and hide it there.

Civic leaders in every city find homeless people lingering
on the streets and in doorways an embarrassment. They want them to go away. Merchants complain that the homeless interfere with business. And there are programs in every city designed to assist them to get off the streets, or so they say. But in truth only the most functional among the homeless are able to access those programs. Lines are endless, forms are impossible to decipher, qualifications can’t be met, standards don’t apply. Waiting lists for every kind of facility keep people on hold for months for medical care, detox programs, housing. Some waits are as long as a year, while those on the lists grow despondent, get sicker and more desperate, or die. Funding is being slashed and eliminated at an alarming rate, so some programs disappear entirely while potential clients languish to no avail.

One of the methods of dealing with the homeless is called creaming, which is scooping the “cream” off the top and helping those who are most able. But those who are less capable, less functional, more disturbed or damaged, or mentally ill sink to the bottom of the system like rocks, where no one helps them. Those were the people we looked for when we did outreach on the streets: the ones who couldn’t get to free dining rooms, and the many who were often justifiably afraid of shelters, or too disturbed to be allowed to enter them, and had no idea how to fill out forms to access help. They are the truly
forgotten people of the streets, and the ones in greatest need. If we don’t reach out to them, who will? Almost no one does.

I don’t know about you, but going to the DMV gives me the vapors, standing in line at a department store makes me hysterical, and looking at a six-page form of any kind makes me feel brain dead. How is someone who is already in dire straits and often disoriented supposed to access help in a system where even trying to reach someone by phone puts you in cyberhell? Today calling a doctor, an insurance company, the post office, a passport agency, an airline, or even local information is a nightmare. How are people who are already in shaky shape supposed to deal with that? They don’t. They just give up. And worse yet, the agencies and people who are supposed to help them are overworked and understaffed and give up too.

There are far too few real, accessible programs for the homeless in every city. Philadelphia is said to be the best in the country in dealing with homelessness. I have no firsthand experience with that city. In San Francisco, where everyone on the streets readily agrees that the shelters are extremely dangerous, in order to get in, you have to be there by six o’clock, and one of the criteria for entry is that you not exhibit “bizarre behavior.” By definition, living on the streets can be called bizarre behavior. How many of us would qualify as
not
having bizarre behavior? And not everyone who wants to be in a shelter can get there precisely by six, or earlier if they need to line up. How easy are we making life for these people? Or more precisely, how difficult? And how realistic are we? Do we really have to make their lives so much more difficult than they already are?