For years I worked on the frontlines of homelessness in the urban South. It was good work, and one of the honors of my life that I got to do it. It was also exhausting and led to burnout and PTSD. I’m finally writing about that time, after years of silence on the subject, as a way of processing it all. You can read more of these stories here. – HH
In my early years of ministry on the streets, I had no money. To say I had no money does not adequately convey just how little money I had. I mean, I had negative money.
I would pick up writing jobs of the meanest sort – $5 a page blah blah blah website copy for content farms promoting saunas, cell phones, and nude beaches. I would work at a hot dog stand a friend owned on the sidewalk in front of a leather bar, across the street from a hardcore porn video shop. I worked the overnight shift at a 24-hour gym, where my job was to hand people towels and say, “Have a good workout!” in a cheerful voice. I wrote website copy when nobody was there, in the lonely hours between 1 and 4 AM.
A friend referred to this work as being in service of my ministry habit.
Raleigh had a decent public transit system for the South, and I lived and worked downtown, and so I didn’t own a car for years. That was less an environmental stance as much as it was that I could not afford a car. I could barely afford groceries. Rent for the tiny room I rented in someone else’s house was a struggle each month.
But a church that knew and respected my work bought me a $1000 Chinese knock-off scooter, and for nearly five years, I rode that thing everywhere at 30 mph. It was bright red, and it was well known on those streets. I was terrified of it getting stolen – the thing probably only weighed 500 pounds, and two strong people could have easily put it in the back of a pickup in seconds. I had a cable as thick as a hoe handle that I chained it down with every chance I got.
In those early days, everything was very fragile. Security was in short supply, and one miscalculation could mean buying groceries or not.
I was dating Renee (whom I later married), and she was on disability because of the heart disease that would eventually lead to her receiving a heart transplant. She lived in a tiny efficiency loft apartment that took more than half her income. She got food stamps because her income was so low, and many weeks we would go on a date to the neighborhood grocery store and buy a sub sandwich from the deli and a Diet Coke from the cold drink box and split it. An unhoused friend had clued us into that – if you bought the cold sub, you could use food stamps, but if you had them toast it, you could not.
To this day, untoasted bread tastes like poverty to me.
We would sit at the café tables outside the Starbucks beside that grocery store, eating our (untoasted) sub sandwich and Diet Coke, courtesy of the taxpayers, and watch the sun go down and see the birds grabbing scraps in the parking lot and then, when it was over, we would climb on my scooter and we would put-put back to her tiny loft.
I reminded her recently of how tight things were in those days, and she said, “I never felt like we were struggling.” It made me happy that she said that, because I was intimately aware of how much we were struggling. One of us freaking out was enough, I assure you.
It was a Tuesday morning, and someone I knew had a court date that morning for one of the petty crimes that only poor people are charged with – trespass, most likely – and so I drove my scooter to the park downtown and parked it next to the light pole I always chained it to and began walking toward the courthouse.
I always did it that way; arrive early, park at the park and walk the several blocks to the courthouse because I would see folks I wanted to check in on along the way. In those days, I could not walk a block downtown without seeing someone I knew, catching up on who got housing, who got arrested, who moved away, who died.
People were always dying.
So on this crisp Tuesday morning (you notice the weather more when riding a scooter), I had parked by that light pole early in the morning and trekked the three blocks and had many conversations, then sat in a courtroom waiting for hours for my person’s case to come up, and then when I testified and it got dismissed, we walked together to the soup kitchen and ate a celebratory lunch put on by the Episcopalians, who didn’t always get it right, but their food was good and their heart was in the right place.
Around 2 PM, I drifted back to the park, spent and talked out. I had heard heavy stories, been emotionally “on” for hours, and had expenses piling up I had no idea how to deal with. I was already dreaming of going home, taking a hot shower, and taking a short nap.
It was then I saw the small crowd of people around my scooter. As I got closer, I recognized individual faces, and realized they were all people I knew, and that they were waiting for me. Inwardly, I sunk a bit. I just wanted to go home. I just wanted to rest. I just wanted to be warm again.
As I approach the small crowd, folks turn and great me, smiling.
“What’s up?” I ask.
Ramon fills me in.
“You left your keys in your scooter when you parked it. Stevie here saw that, recognized it was your bike, and told the rest of us. We all been taking turns guarding it until you go back.”
I must have gone pale when I realized how close I had come to losing that scooter.
“Oh my God”, I croaked.
The guy we called Pops came over and put his hand on my shoulder.
“It’s OK, man. We got you. Nothing happened, and nothing is gonna happen, because we got you. You got us, and we got you. That’s how it works out here.”
I hugged some folks, slapped palms with others, and thanked everybody. They gave me a good-natured hard time, calling me rookie for making such a dumb mistake, and making plans to catch up at the soup kitchen that evening or tomorrow. Then they shambled off to their lives, and I got on the cold seat of my cheap scooter and put-putted toward my cheap rented room, aware that my life had just changed, and that I would never measure security the same way, ever again.
