A Gift of Hope: Helping the Homeless (9 page)

He never gave his name, although some people do as though to make a mark of some kind and be remembered. He said that he had been an executive in Silicon Valley and his wife had left him not long before. They were vastly overextended and heavily in debt, he had lost everything and then lost his job. He was trying to find employment in his field, and no one knew he was homeless, not even his family. He hung around and talked to us for a while, hungry for conversation.

For whatever reason, he had decided not to go to a shelter—scared maybe, with good reason. Shelters are dangerous enough for people who don’t look like him. And he would have stuck out like a sore thumb and been an instant target. Eventually, we had to go, and we watched him walk slowly up the library steps with what we’d given him. He had been extremely grateful, and before he left us, we wished him good luck finding a job. But he had shaken us all. With many of the homeless people we saw, it was hard to find the bridge between us other than our common humanity. We could no longer see where they came from, and we met them only with compassion. But this man had the kind of story that strikes fear in people’s hearts. A series of mistakes, some bad luck, too much spending, a broken marriage, a lost job at the wrong time. It happens to many, although they are the most likely to get off the streets again, as long as drugs and alcohol aren’t involved. Thinking about him, we were all silent on the way home. He was God’s Last-Stop Curve Ball that night.

Another pair I always remember with a smile were most likely teenagers, somewhere between sixteen and eighteen, although they looked fairly adult. It was very rare for us to see adolescents, and never children. Homeless children are almost instantly picked up by the police and taken to shelters, hopefully with their parents. In eleven years I never saw a child on the streets—many pregnant bellies, but never an infant
or a child. Ever. And I’d say teenagers (in groups of two or three, and rarely but occasionally a camp of as many as eight or ten) were five to every six hundred adults. They tended not to hang out in the same places as adults, and kept to themselves. In San Francisco, they were mostly in an area called the Panhandle, which was too dangerous for us, climbing through shrubbery and bushes in the dark.

Also, many kids on the streets had the reputation for doing drugs. They were more likely to sell what we gave them than adults. We saw our clients put their new clothes on immediately and we knew they didn’t sell them. There were plenty of drugs among the adults, but rarely did they sell the supplies we handed out. Their need was too great, their gratitude evident as we watched them dive into the bags and put on the jackets immediately. And as I drove around the city between trips, leading my own life, I so often saw the familiar black bags that we used to hold the supplies we gave perched atop shopping carts, their prized possession—so I knew these bags were not being sold.

Kids on the streets are a whole different breed. And when I say “kids,” I mean adolescents. Most of them, I fear, are out there because they have lived with such shocking abuses at home that whatever evils they meet in the streets couldn’t possibly be worse than what happened to them at home. Some are on drugs. Some have been out there for years. It’s
not unusual to talk to a seventeen-year-old who will tell you that he or she has been out there for four or five years. They have no desire to go home, and will grow up on the streets, doing what they can to survive. Many have come from other places and cities; some want to go back home but can’t afford to or organize it. They tend to stay in groups. I have never seen an adolescent alone or even with adults. They almost always tell you that they are older than they are. Almost all believe that they will “get it together” one day, and many can, with the right help from the right hands. They have a sturdy, determined look about them. Life is still ahead of them, and despite whatever hardships they’ve encountered, many will survive.

They were the hardest for me to walk away from when we left, because they reminded me so much of my children, and I wished we could do more for them, although they were often leery of us. They didn’t want to be taken anywhere, sent home, or dragged off the streets against their will. The one thing I always did was call a remarkable San Francisco organization called Larkin Street Youth Services, which is set up to assist young people with medical care, shelter, education, finding jobs, drug treatment or rehab, a program for kids with AIDS, or reunification with their families if desirable. Their street teams reach out both with vehicles and on foot, and I always let them know the location of young people I saw, knowing they would go out to them. I hoped the street teams could talk
them into going inside. Sometimes they succeeded and sometimes they didn’t, but they always tried.

So running into adolescents was rare for us. On one particular night we were in a back alley, and I can’t remember if it was a tent or pile of cardboard boxes we spotted, but out of it emerged a couple of teenagers about sixteen or eighteen right out of a movie or off a CD cover or on MTV. I had never seen such dazzling punk gear in my life: spikes and chains, leather and red plaid. The girl was wearing a pair of knee-high combat boots. He had a towering mohawk that was glued into place. They had piercings and tattoos on every surface, but in their own crazy way, they were so beautiful to look at, and so extreme, that all of us smiled. We chatted with them for a while, gave them our stuff, and didn’t intrude on them further. They wanted no additional help. And in their own outrageous way, they were one of the prettiest sights of the night. They weren’t God’s Last-Stop Curve Ball—we came upon them halfway through the night and they boosted our spirits for a long time.

There are a thousand other such stories, all of them gut-wrenching, touching, funny, devastating, heartbreaking, like the woman who leapt up from her rags and boxes in a doorway and said, “How did you know? It’s my birthday!” She was ecstatic, and we all hugged her and wished her a happy birthday. One man was totally encased in a roll of tin foil he had
found, to keep warm. We saw a woman with a dozen cats who we saw for close to a year, all of them on leashes. I was always afraid of the dogs out there. The people I met made their way into my heart within minutes, but their pit bulls and hungry mongrels never did. We had enough to think about, without worrying about getting attacked by dogs. I like dogs and have several of my own, but the dogs we saw on the streets scared me. The team often laughed at me for it. Show me a guy who looks like he might kill you, and most of the time, I could stand my ground. But show me a dog who bares his fangs at me, and I would run like hell, and babysit the doughnuts till the rest of the team got back. Yeah, okay, and I ate a couple of the chocolate ones with sprinkles while I waited. No one’s perfect.

N
ot everyone we met on the street was friendly, though we were remarkably lucky and had very few incidents. On the whole, people met us with kindness and gratitude, and sometimes concern for us. And then there were a few who reminded us to keep our guard up, and be alert and watchful. We were venturing into someone else’s world, and a hard one. We could have easily become targets for someone’s anger or frustration or fear. There were areas we stayed out of by unanimous consent, as I’ve mentioned. We also decided, after a few unnerving experiences, to avoid places where people were living in cars, old trucks, or school buses. The danger for us there was that we couldn’t see who was inside, how many, or what was coming at us when the doors opened and they came out. I liked working outdoors, seeing a wide area where I was working, and who was around me, and who was
running toward us. I don’t like surprises, and those buses and trucks were an invitation to bad surprises. After a few of those, we decided to avoid them. On the whole, we were pretty brave about the areas we ventured into. Some of what we did was just plain foolish, done in innocence and determination. But we were clearly blessed, and most of our clients were incredibly wonderful people. And sometimes even the less wonderful ones provided a certain kind of blessing.

We often reminded each other to look out for weapons as best we could. I suspect that many of the people we dealt with carried them, anything from handguns to knives and even razors. I have seen razors flashed next to a pant leg, then quietly slipped into a pocket. We were aware. But we also posed no threat. We wanted nothing from them—we gave, we didn’t take. But in the case of someone mentally unstable, particularly if you startle, frighten, or worry them unduly, you can easily set them off. We gave plenty of warning as we approached, with that resounding “Yo!” We stayed plainly visible, we announced what we had to offer, and theoretically there was safety in numbers. There were almost always eleven of us in three vans, although admittedly once out of the vans, we spread out. We didn’t mean to, and we tried to stay in pairs or groups, but sometimes there were too many people, spread out themselves, who needed us, or we drove into someplace
darker than we expected, or there were thirty people hidden in the darkness when we thought there were only two or three. We took our chances on the streets like everyone else, no matter how careful we were.

The composition of the permanent team of Yo! Angel! was racially varied, so people were likely to be comfortable with some of us and not others. But there was a face and style for everyone. We were one North African, two Asian (one Japanese, one Chinese)—although you almost never see Asians homeless on the streets—two Hispanics, and six Caucasians. Of the eleven who composed the permanent team, three were women, eight were men. So there was pretty much a flavor, nationality, style, and gender for everyone’s preferences about who to deal with. And we worked wonderfully as a team, and loved each other. The work we shared for so long was a powerful bond between us. We considered our street work a sacred engagement. Most of us just about never missed it, except in an emergency. My guess is that in eleven years, we each missed it once, twice at the most, and only for injury or illness. I stayed home once for a bad back, and worked on the streets with a cast on my leg for six months, with a torn Achilles tendon. None of us ever wanted to miss those nights, for whatever reason. We tried to get out to the streets about once a month from September through May.

The scary moments were overwhelmingly outweighed by the wonderful ones, for all of us. We acknowledged the hard incidents, and learned from them. In our very early days, we walked into a situation that looked like a fairly large and mixed group, and within minutes we realized that we had wandered into a group of homeless people being robbed by a bunch of young predators. It was a lesson for us, that the weakest and most unfortunate are preyed on by others who take what little they have. There is definitely a pecking order on the streets. We walked into the midst of that group like innocents, smiling happily at those we were about to help, as one of the predators looked at me and rolled his eyes. I was dressed in rough clothes, looking plain but clean, but probably even in my roughest gear, work boots and an old parka and wool cap, I looked pretty civilized. The leader of the predatorial group glanced at me in disbelief. “What are
you
doing here?” he asked with a wry grin, as we all realized the mistake we’d made. Trying to stop what was happening would have been too dangerous for us. We couldn’t and we didn’t, although I was sad about it. I explained rather nervously that we had brought some things to give away. He asked if there was enough for them, and we nodded. “Okay, leave some for us too, and go,” he ordered. He was laughing by then, and even their victims were smiling a little. We must have looked
pretty silly, Goody Two Shoes and Her Band of Merry Men walking right smack into the middle of something where we didn’t belong and that was potentially very dangerous for us.

We left enough for everyone and got out quickly. We felt bad about the homeless people being ripped off, but we were extremely grateful that we hadn’t been attacked. It was an early lesson in awareness on the streets. In some areas, even angels have to watch their backs. And it was a good warning to us to be more careful in the future. We constantly reminded each other to stay alert. It was easy to get too comfortable and cocky. That’s usually when bad things happen.

Another time, I managed to get myself trapped at the back of the van, while waiting for clients. The person standing on the street, handing things out at the back of the van, ran the risk of being shoved up against it and getting squashed, if the recipients got too anxious or were too numerous. It was best not to be back there alone. I think Jane was standing near me, but everyone else had fanned out to find people as much as a block away. We were handing out stuff as fast as we could. I noticed, farther back in the line pressing against us, a man with intent, piercing eyes. He looked angry and nervous, and hostility oozed from him as I noticed his hand go to his waistband and adjust something. It could have been a gun, but
whatever it was, he was suddenly right up against me, looking down at me with an expression of suspicion and fury. “Why are you doing this?” he asked, referring to the things we were handing out. “Because I want to,” I said as calmly as I could. “I think it’s important and people need what we have to give.” He stared at me for what seemed like an eternity, his eyes boring into mine, as I thought,
Shit, this guy is going to kill me
. We were belly to belly with a crowd pressing up behind him. I didn’t move. I didn’t want to make him angrier than he was, and then suddenly his hand left his waistband. He nodded, took what I’d been handing him, and glanced at me one last time as he murmured, “God bless you, Sister.”