“The soul of a homeless man,” the Reverend sermonizes, “is just like anyone else. We are all lone sojourners, on our way to the House of God. Only if we are united with him, we will attain our completeness. Every good Christian should know this. Homeless illustrate this incompleteness in a very graphic, visible way. It shocks people. That’s why they are pushed out of sight in most places. Homeless don’t have pretentious existentialist theories. They live them in their daily lives. They are a lot more honest than most people. And I am asking myself,” Father Bill muses, “if this is the real essence of our help to the homeless. Is there real compassion, or is it just ‘Gee, it would be nice if we didn’t have to look at them.’”
“You see, I always told everybody. It is only after the first hit that I get unreliable.” Bob is all smiles and his sky blue eyes twinkle. I visit him at Pete’s Place and have just reported back to him that according to Father Bill, he is one of the most honest people on this earth.
“Actually, I didn’t do that many scams. Okay, I admit,” Bob confesses, “that once in a while I ripped someone off. But sometimes the opportunity was too good. And when the dollars look me deep in the eyes, it is hard to say no. But most of our money, we made ourselves. Also for food.” Bob straightens his back. A proud man is speaking. “Bernard and me, we never begged, we never went to soup kitchens. In fact, we were the elite of the tunnel.”
Pete’s Place, a basement in a church, is a small drop-in center affiliated with the Partnership for the Homeless, an organization like the BRC and Project Renewal. At first sight, Pete’s place looks like a pleasant spot with a TV-room, billiard space, a library and quiet reading corners. Then I notice that all the visitors sit on worn-down couches like zombies, staring blankly in front of them. Others pace restlessly up and down between the book-shelves with ripped paperbacks and the very tiny billiard table. At night, the visitors sleep on the benches in the church.
When I present myself at the reception desk, Bob is always in front of the TV. His face lights up when the lady at the desk screams his name and he sees me. Except for all the programs and workshops (this evening there will be a lecture on ‘Faith Sharing and Life Experience’), these visits are the highlights of Bob’s existence. Once I did not show up as promised: Bob told me he had been upset all day. “They kill him over there,” Bernard told me. “With his heart problem, he is forced to sit there all day in front of the TV. Canning and some fresh air would do him good.”
I bring Bob a few photos where he’s collecting cans with Bernard. Bob hugs me, grabs the pictures out my hands and shows them to the director of the center. “You see, Anita, here is the proof. I have been working all that time honestly with Bernard.”
Anita is not convinced. She took it very seriously when Bob temporarily regressed to his drug-filled tunnel life, Bob explains as we are drinking a coffee on the sidewalk. “Never talk about drugs here,” he says. “In fact, the less people know, the better. Bernard and I made a deal to never mention it to the press.” Now Bob says he has totally stopped doing drugs. At the YMCA in Brooklyn, the temptation was too great. “There was a 24/7 crack spot around the corner.” Next week, his SSI payments will be restored and he will pay off all his debts. Bob is optimistic. “Don’t tell Bernard anything. I want to surprise him when I have my money.”
This is the third time Bob has told me that his suspended SSI will be paid out soon. Most of the time, there are incomprehensible and vague stories where there doesn’t seem to be any logic. But it is in fact complicated. The money is held at the YMCA and once it is released over there, it will go to Pete’s Place, where they will give him a sort of allowance. Of course this is when he’s actually receiving SSI, because many times it has been cut off for reasons Bob fails to explain.
It was a cold winter morning in February, 1994, when Bob left the tunnel. Stalactites of ice hung suspended from the grate, a chilly wind blew through the darkness. “I woke up, my clothes were damp and cold, I had a pain in my chest. The coffee was finished and there were no more cigarettes. Nobody had money, because we had smoked it all. We couldn’t even make a fire because there was no wood. And on top of everything, Bernard was in a terrible mood. It was all too much. I just walked out of the tunnels, all seventy blocks to here. Right through a snowstorm. I arrived as an ice cube. With a beard of two years.”
From outreach workers who had talked to him for years, he had heard that at Pete’s Place there would always be a warm bed ready for him. Bob took a hot shower and crept under the blankets.
After Bob ran away as a teenager, he never saw his parents again. He didn’t show up to the funerals of his Polish father and his Irish mother. He doesn’t have any contact with his two brothers, a priest and a cop who must now be in their seventies. He once wrote a letter to the monastery where his brother was, but never heard anything back. When he was twenty, Bob married an Irish girl. They broke up after six months. “She drove me crazy. Told me what to do and even worse, what not to do. She wanted to go back to Ireland. Fuck it, I said. I never saw her again.”
San Bernardino, Sacramento, San Francisco, and San Diego are some of the cool-sounding places where Bob worked as a cook. He also had odd jobs as a truck driver, and worked at a slaughterhouse and a cattle ranch. Bob was the archetypical hobo. “The good life. I was all over the country.” He stayed either in cheap hotels, or rehab clinics. “They knew me by my first name,” Bob says. He lost track of the number of rehab programs he underwent.
“I think I never really wanted to kick off. Tried to be high all the time. Non-stop. Running away from problems.” Because Bob preferred to work as a cook in hospitals and dietary centers, he could get his hands on diet pills and amphetamines, codeine and cocaine if he was lucky. “It was all the same to me. As long as I got speedy.”
In the ′80s, Bob tried his luck in New York. “Yeah,” he says proudly. “The fastest egg man in Manhattan. Could break and clutch twelve dozen eggs in three minutes, while at the same time smoking and drinking coffee.”
When Bob was working as a cook in a soup kitchen on the West Side, he met Bernard who was volunteering in the kitchen. “Every night he stole huge amounts of food for his fellow tunnel dwellers,” Bob remembers. “I immediately took a liking to him.”
Back in the tunnel I check on how far everyone has gotten with their vouchers. Tony is not interested. He’s already spent years on the waiting list for the housing he is entitled to as an ex-con. Besides, he doesn’t think the eviction will happen. He’s even working on big plans to turn the tunnel into a huge storage space for cans when Bernard has gone. If things go wrong, he can maybe rent a small room in his sister’s apartment building.
Marcus doesn’t have time to bother with alternative housing, because a girlfriend is staying over and he’s fully occupied with her. The hippie girl he met at the Rainbow People has exhibitionistic tendencies: after two cans of beer, she pulls off all her clothes and starts to run around naked in between the trees. “You can’t do that here. Ici, c’est la grande ville,” Marcus tells me and shakes his head. She has been hanging out now for a day and a half in Central Park, at a gathering of New York Deadheads. They are holding a memorial for Jerry Garcia, who has just died.
“Unbelievable, that Marcus,” Bernard sighs. “He is living on another planet. He really has to get his ass in gear, before one day he will find his cave all bricked up.”
Kathy and Joe passively wait for the things to happen, just like Ozzy. Frankie doesn’t want to have anything to do with the Coalition. He still has never forgiven the fact that a year ago they gave him chocolate chip cookies that were old and stale. And last week, he spent the whole afternoon waiting for the Coalition.