the why of it...

My interest in homelessness began in 1993 when i spent a couple of weeks at the Samaritan House in downtown Denver, a shelter for the homeless run by the Catholic Church (but without imposing a religious stamp on their services).†  I was a middle-class American, born and raised, and had always had a home...a place to live in that had walls and a roof. I carried a vague memory with me of the homeless men I had seen on the streets of downtown Houston, Texas, way back in 1975, when I worked and lived there, and would pass them on my way home. They would ask me for change, and i would think to myself "why, so you can spend it on more booze?" I felt repelled by them, afraid of them as if they were foreign subversives.††

Staying at Samaritan House was a time of awakening for me...a beginning awareness of something like a subculture. There weren't many alcoholics at this particular shelter (a policeman checked for sobriety at the door as we went in). Drunks and skunks were sent a block away to the "Jesus Saves!" shelter, where no one was turned away, but there was a price to pay...you had to sit through a sermon. There were a lot of real people at the Samaritan House...whole families in fact. I learned that there were many reasons people might become a part of this subculture, willingly or not. And that being part of it didn't mean they were necessarily bad, or sad, or lazy.

Since that time, a decade ago, the reality of homelessness has been a weight inside my being. It has remained one of those unshakable things that the curious mind might be drawn back to with a sort of regularity. Suddenly, I began to see homeless people almost everywhere I went, as if another dimension in the fabric of life had unexpectedly materialized. It became something of an adventure to join the subculture at various times...when I was between jobs or suffering through some bipolar crisis.†††  I would seek out some small homeless group and, if I felt them trustworthy, would ask to join them for awhile. Everything is scaled down a bit in the homeless subculture, well almost everything. I think desire is the same as it is anywhere, only less is expected to come true.

more stories...

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