As rough as my anxiety and C-PTSD have been lately, and as tough as it is on me to write about surviving when I was homeless, I figured it’s time to give myself a gift, a reprieve, and tell a fun story about one of my all-time favorite homeless humans.
When I finally got sober at the age of 27, I spent my first year getting evicted from an apartment, couch surfing a lot, bouncing between cheap motels and day labor temporary jobs. At a year sober, and due to my homelessness, I finally got accepted as a resident to a men’s halfway house.
It took me a long while to get in because I’m not good at following rules and directions, but I finally got in to a stable environment where I could focus on staying sober. How I managed to not drink and get fucked up that first year, no one really knows, even me. I mean, I went to meetings everyday and worked the steps like a dying man fighting for hope, which isn’t far from the truth, but I also hung out in bars all the time still, dated sex workers, got in fist fights and near-brawls, got kicked out and banned from public spaces, hell, there were 12 step recovery meetings that tried to kick me out, and they’re supposed to help everyone.
So at a year sober, I moved into a men’s halfway house with 37 other junkies, derelicts, alcoholics, degenerates, thieves, scoundrels and fellow homeless addicts. It was one of the craziest, toughest and somehow incredible years of my wild ass life, and one of the people I lived with there was an old white dude we’ll call Reggie.
Reggie was in his late 50’s or early 60’s, and he’d spent his entire life sitting around homeless and getting drunk, until he somehow quit drinking, and wound up sitting on the front porch of this halfway house chain smoking cheap cigars and yelling at everyone that happened by, “fuck the homeless.” That was his catch phrase. He smoked so much his voice sounded like his lungs were full of rusty spray paint cans, and he’d yell at everyone, “eaaahh, fuck the homeless.” He sounded like a pirate with black lung.
I was 28 years old then, and me and the other younger cats would mess with Reggie some. Not in a mean way, but it got so that sometimes we all say, “hey Reggie, how’s it going?” And then we’d all yell with him like raggedy homeless junkie monks repeating a holy street mantra “fuck the homeless,” then we’d all laugh the laughs of free men. It was just something we did to break up the monotony of desperation that we were all living in. In 13 months of being a resident there, probably 200 men came through the doors, and now 17 years later, I know more of them that died than stayed sober. When I say the odds are grim, they’re grim for all addicts and alcoholics, but me and the guys living in that halfway house were betting on grimmer, longer odds than most.
Reggie was a constant there for all of my 13 months as a resident. In those kinds of places, it doesn’t take but 90 days to be one of the few remaining veterans, and I’d sit out on the porch chain smoking roll-your-own Bugler cigarettes with Reggie sometimes. He’d had a wife once, and he had a daughter, but he’d lost them when he was young, and he’d never wanted anything else. Living in the halfway house at 60, he was one of the most contented humans I’ve ever known. Happy to have unlimited warm meals, a comfortable bed, cable television, stability. All things he hadn’t had in three or four decades.
Turns out, like every other human being at every level of life that I’ve ever taken a moment to acknowledge, there were layers to Reggie underneath his “fuck the homeless” mantra. There were stories, memories, good advice and observations if you were patient enough to wait and listen. Reggie didn’t talk much, but I’d get up and refill his coffee for him, prime him with my home rolled cigarettes that were a step above his dollar packs of cigars. You ever smoke one of those? They’re harsher than January reality in Ohio. And sometimes I’d get Reggie going, and he’d tell stories about living in shelters, or different cars he’d lived out of. It wasn’t uncommon that in the middle of a story he’d randomly yell out “errh fuck the homeless” at anyone walking down the street, or in and out of the house, sort of like a nervous tic, and then he’d go right on telling me his story like he’d never glitched.
I got to be there the first time Reggie’s daughter came to pick him up for a lunch date visit. She was probably 40, and he hadn’t seen her in years. Friends, the smile on that homeless motherfucker’s face that day is one that’ll live forever in my sad soaked heart. Oh man, they don’t make lights with that many lumens. Reggie and his daughter went to the mall for lunch, and she’d bought him an Ohio State sweatshirt. He put it on over his five other shirts that he was currently wearing. You can take a homeless man to the mall, but you can’t take the homelessness out of a man.
Reggie’s daughter visited him regularly after that. He never yelled “fuck the homeless” at her. But he did stay sober, and eventually moved on to a boarding house where he lived sober and content as fuck with very little for serval years before dying of natural causes. Man, I didn’t realize at 28 years old, when I was fighting for my own sanity and survival, how cathartic yelling “fuck the homeless” truly is. I do it all the time still. I yell it at my friends. At others I know have survived it. At my cat and my kids.
That’s the thing about mantras. They’re a spiritual armor used to protect the soft spots of our hearts. Reggie yelled “fuck the homeless” at everyone that came by, because he’d learned it from being yelled at so many times over the years while panhandling.
So, one more time and all together now, let’s all yell it for Reggie FUCK THE HOMELESS.
Sometimes, one of us, a few of us, make it past that gauntlet of long odds, Reggie was one of them. I am, too. Someday, I’m going to sit down and finish writing all of our stories, the men from that halfway house. But today, I’m honored and grateful to be here to tell you Reggie’s. Fuck the homeless, old man, fuck the homeless. Hope it’s warm and there’s nothing but Marlboros and Newports on the other side my friend.
Love,
Dan
ps. you gotta have a graphic image to go with every story. That’s how it works these days.
Dan, your writing shines a light on things I rarely see.
Really dug this story, Dan. Great details. Bravo!