by Sarah Gerard
The next time we see him, he’s in his office. He sits at his desk in a small gray cubicle. He wears a clean white button-down shirt and khaki pants. The office is decorated in a tropical theme, with paper palm trees and Christmas lights. Above his desk, two laminated signs read sincerity & enthusiasms and empathy & conviction. His desk is outfitted with a mirror, so we can see his face while looking over his shoulder, as well as several people passing behind him.
“I started not selling,” says his voice-over. “And it’s like, I knew that you go through cycles of not selling.” His boss told him if he didn’t sell two vacations by the end of that day, then he’d be fired. “And I said, ‘Well, how about this: I’ll make three more sales, and then I’ll tell you to kiss my ass and quit,’” G.W. says. He shuffles some papers.
That day, he collapses in the office. Paramedics rush him to the hospital in Largo. They sedate him on June 29. When he wakes up, it’s July 15.
We cut to him sitting on a bench in Williams Park. He is thinner, and tired. By now, he’s lost his job and his room at the Kelly Hotel, and is sleeping on the floor of the Dream Center75, a faith-based organization serving the homeless. He stands, turns, and lifts the bottom of his shirt. A scar runs diagonally across his back, from his shoulder to the bottom of his rib cage. It wraps around to the front of his body, where it meets another scar, horizontally, in a triangle.
“I still don’t know what the operations were for,” he says. He pulls his shirt back down.
“It seemed like they had me in a basement,”76 he says, describing the hospital to me later. “It was more like a morgue, in a nurse’s room. They were racist and mean. I was hearing conversations about them stealing my drugs. I dreamed a lot about my brother and my sister, who was alive at that time. I thought I had those dreams every night, but it was an ongoing dream because I didn’t know day from night. I wasn’t aware of temporal reality.”
Prior to falling ill, G.W. had been hanging out at the Dream Center, helping them cook morning meals when he wasn’t at the travel agency. He’d learned how to cook in New Orleans, while he was a merchant marine. He cooked for hundreds of people at a time, big meals, for five years at sea. After cooking at the Dream Center, he’d go over and hear the church services. “I just incorporated that in my society,” he told me. “Then I got sick.”
His friend Tom, who worked at the Dream Center, heard that G.W. was sick. He went down to the hospital to advocate for him. They wheeled G.W. into surgery. His lungs were filled with bile and rot; they opened them up and cleaned them out. He flat-lined twice, and twice, at Tom’s insistence, they kept on working. Meanwhile, G.W. dreamed—
“I was riding in a car with people I knew from New Orleans,” he told me. They told him to put his clothes in the trunk and he obeyed—he hadn’t realized he was naked. He walked through a door and found himself in a courtroom. “They were saying, ‘Well, what has he done?’” he said. “I was trying to talk, and it was kind of like I was a child pulling on people’s pant legs. They were ignoring me, and they were talking about me, telling stories.”
The prosecutor said, “He’s known this story since he was a child, okay? He’s known this. Sometimes he has adopted it, sometimes he’s not.” They decided he wasn’t ready.
He leaned against a wall and it spun around, and he found himself in a field.
People were celebrating and eating something like chicken. A black guy came down and everyone started clapping. G.W. asked who he was, and the people said he’s the one who invented this: “He said that if he were ever famous or rich, he’d share his profits with his employees. And he’s rich and he’s famous, and so he did. He shared. He shared it with everybody.”
Just then, somebody called G.W. and said his job was ready.
“I left the field and I went to this big, huge kitchen. It had everything you need—it had a steamer, a kettle, a tilt kettle, and all of the kitchen tools. They said, ‘This is where you’re going to be working if you get the job.’ I said, ‘Gee, I hope I get this job!’ and everybody started laughing. They said, ‘Kid, you don’t want this job.’”
They called him back to the garden. They said they were going to give G.W. another chance. There were clothes, so he put on his clothes again. A huge black man was sitting there. “I said, ‘Where am I?’ He said, ‘Young man, don’t go in there, because the court is going to be tough. These motherfuckers ain’t bullshitting.’”
Then he woke up.
He got out of the hospital three days later and slept on the floor of the Dream Center. He received a $300 rent voucher for his disability—and somebody accepted it. “And what do you know?” he said. “I’m not homeless anymore.”
The person who accepted the voucher was an elderly woman who lived alone with her cats.77 When she heard G.W.’s story, she cleared out her guest bedroom so he could live with her. Easy Street ends with this segment: G.W. stands outside his new house. A rainbow wind sock in the shape of an old woman hangs over a set of moss green stairs leading up to a latticed porch, which the old woman calls her “cattery.” He wears a long-sleeved, gray-and-white-striped button-down shirt and sunglasses.
“This is 672 Preston Avenue South,” he says into the camera. “This is where I reside.”
The old woman crosses the yard with a walker.
“This is the landlord here.”
“Just walking my dog,” she says.
We cut to them sitting together at a marble table in the backyard.
“Here we are in this country,” she says. “We go to the moon and all this fancy stuff. And we can’t even find a bed for people. That’s pathetic. It is shameful.”
The filmmakers ask her how she gets along with G.W.
“Oh, so-so.” She laughs. “He goes his way and I go my way.”
We cut to G.W. in the kitchen, frying something on the stove.
“His cooking style is a little different than mine, but we get on some things like the beans and rice,” she says. “Now that’s good.”
We follow the old woman into the house, through the cluttered living room that still holds the contents of what is now G.W.’s room. His room is painted pink. She stands before a desk strewn with hygienic items, vitamin and medication bottles, soda bottles, and papers. She points to a clothing rack behind a foregrounded bookshelf holding books and a stack of newspapers. The camera rotates, and we see, hanging between two windows, a wooden cross. It continues rotating, and we see G.W.’s bed, which looks very comfortable, with a pink coverlet and fluffy pillows.
“So, this is it,” she says, “and it looks out on the backyard.”
For months after G.W. left the hospital, he took the bus three hours every day to get an antibiotic shot. “All I had to do was get a shot so that I could go to sleep,” he tells me. “I would pray all the time.” A friend from the Dream Center gave him an audiobook of the Bible. He listened to it on the rides to and from the hospital. “I had always been neutral, and I always tried to do the right thing, since I’d come out of prison,” he says. “I just started trying to see what I could do for people when I got well. It’s like God told me he wanted more out of me than what he got.” So, he became a minister. “It’s constraining sometimes,” he admits.
I ask him why.
“I want things that I know I cannot do. But Paul says, for men like me, all things are lawful—but are they beneficial? I don’t get freaked out about people swearing, having dope, watching porn, and whatever, because those are temporal things—things of this world. It’s: How do you act? How do you feel? How do you really feel about people? That’s what you have to fix: how you really feel about people.”
He was ordained by Bruce Wright, his friend and another local minister and homeless advocate. A few years later, he founded Missio Dei in the fellowship hall of a church near downtown. It was the natural next step, he said, like getting ordained. He later realized he’d always leaned toward religion. But he hated dogma.
“I’ve been writing since
I was seventeen, in prison,” he says. “I used to write every day and I read a thousand books—and I’m supposed to stop [writing] because of your religion? I’m supposed to stop because of your morality, and stop honestly saying the things I see and feel? I mean, organized religion sucks. It really does. But it all boils down to that six-thousand-year-old question: What are you as a human being? How are you a reflection of God?
“You’re supposed to fuck up. You’re a human being. That’s part of your freedom. But you should get up on the horse and try to ride. You shouldn’t hurt anybody. You should save as many people as you can from adverse situations. That’s the way I feel about it. That’s why I do what I do without reward or publicity. That’s why I became a minister. And I think I’ve told that story three times in my life.”
In December 2015, the St. Petersburg Tribune reported Celebrate Outreach, the consortium of churches that oversees G.W.’s breakfast, was joining the effort to house St. Petersburg’s homeless veterans. Homeless advocate George Bolden was leading the way: his Tiny Homes Project would build clusters of tiny houses under five hundred square feet apiece, complete with amenities. Each home would be designed through collaborations between architecture students from the University of South Florida and the veterans who would live in the houses and help build them. Once inside, they’d be given a case manager and would be required to take courses in homeownership, maintenance, and financial management. Celebrate Outreach was now scouting for land. One volunteer had offered up a vacant lot big enough for four houses, but Bolden was also looking for one big enough to accommodate a “village” of ten, which they’d call Eden Village. There are similar projects in the works in Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Alabama.78
In his book Tent City Urbanism: From Self-Organized Camps to Tiny House Villages, urban planner Andrew Heben combines the horizontal democracy of homeless “tent cities” with the rise of the middle-class “tiny house movement.” He attributes the rise in homelessness in the United States over the last seventy years to our inflated standards of living, in particular among the middle class. Compared to 1950, the average American now requires three times the amount of space: then, an average family home was 983 square feet and housed 3.38 people. By 2012, the average home was 2,500 square feet and contained only 2.55 people. These numbers have proven unsustainable. The 2012 census found that 10.1 percent of American homes—over thirteen million units—were sitting vacant.79
While the mainstream conception of tiny houses, as featured on HGTV’s Tiny House Hunters and FYI’s Tiny House Nation, depicts the tiny structures as oversized dollhouses for the affluent, Heben’s interest in them sprang from a desire to improve the physical infrastructure of self-organized homeless camps like the ones he was studying while maintaining their existing balance of privacy and social interactions.80 In his book, he looks at several examples of unsanctioned and sanctioned tent cities, as well as three tiny house villages operating under different degrees of government regulation. Among the tent cities he examined was St. Petersburg’s own Pinellas Hope, which came about in response to backlash from the 2007 tent slashing, and about which Heben says, “my visit to the site . . . left me skeptical.”81 The tiny house villages included Eugene, Oregon’s Opportunity Village, which he helped establish.
Opportunity Village grew out of the closure of Eugene’s Occupy encampment, which in 2011 attracted over one hundred otherwise homeless individuals. The closure instigated public desire to confront homelessness in the community, and in response Eugene’s mayor formed a task force to find “new and innovative solutions.”82 After months of advocacy and planning by Heben and his team, the first of Opportunity Village’s structures was erected in August 2013, and in May 2014 the village was complete. In addition to thirty houses, it includes a gathering yurt, common kitchen, front office, tool shed, and a bathhouse with flush toilets, a shower, and a laundry room.83
Heben attributes the village’s success primarily to its grassroots style of governance, which balances the informal with the formal.84 It is self-managed but partners with a nonprofit organization and its board, which works with the City of Eugene to ensure the village meets municipal regulations. This informal yet intentional structure engages the community in the village’s construction and operation, according to Heben. The project is enabled entirely by donations from private donors, businesses, and organizations. Altogether, subtracting in-kind donations, Opportunity Village was erected for approximately $100,000.85
The support from the City of St. Petersburg for the Tiny Homes Project was overwhelming and seemed to signal a seismic shift in local perspectives toward the homeless community. Councilwoman Amy Foster, who had recently joined the Homeless Leadership Board, informed the Tribune in August that the city’s new strategy for addressing homelessness was to provide permanent housing first rather than services.86 “It’s a hard sell in the community, because people wonder, why would we give somebody a home if they’re drug addicts or alcoholics?” she said, but “without housing, people can’t focus on themselves.” The city provided Celebrate Outreach with a list of city-owned properties for sale.87 The Tiny Homes Project was underway.
In the early weeks of 2016, the temperature drops and the city opens its cold-night shelters. G.W. and I go down to the church parking lot across the street from Williams Park and make sure people get into vans going to the best shelters. One, a substance abuse rehab facility, is called My Place in Recovery. Rita sits on a bench near a low brick wall guarding a Vitaminwater bottle filled with rum. “Fuck My Place in Recovery,” she tells me. “I ain’t recovering. You can write that down.”
The sun sets, and as the chill settles in, a rumor circulates that the Starbucks in the Sundial complex is no longer giving out free cups of hot water. A pickup truck with a bed full of blankets and bottles of water shows up, empties itself, leaves. Ed the Mop waits along the edge of the parking lot with a rolling laundry basket containing his belongings. One man helps another out of a wheelchair and into the first van as it arrives, loading him in through the back double doors. When the third van leaves and we are left alone, G.W. points to a place at the foot of the low brick wall, behind a concrete bench.
“That’s where I used to sleep,” he says.
We go to the Emerald Bar and drink beer and hard liquor, and smoke cigarette after cigarette. Less than a month earlier, the week of Christmas, G.W. had a heart attack. For days, his breathing had been labored, and friends at the church had grown concerned. Rita saw him coming up the stairs one morning and knew in an instant that he needed to go to the hospital. There, a doctor told him he had the body of an eighty-year-old man, though he was sixty and looked forty. He asked G.W. point-blank if he was the devil. G.W. laughed. “I don’t even like the devil,” he said.
They stuck a camera inside his chest to see if he needed a stent. He didn’t. He was told again to lose weight and quit smoking. He’s going to quit, he reassures me.88
He tells me he’s been thinking about his novel. There are at least another hundred pages he needs to write. He has some people living with him at the moment, but as soon as they’re gone, he’ll get back into it. I’d met them when I picked him up that evening. His apartment was cluttered with their stuff, and it was hard to move around; it smelled like four bodies living in a place meant for one.
G.W. admits that it’s hard to find time to be alone. The time that he does have, he spends preparing for the next weekend’s meals. Somehow, money has materialized for the breakfast, but there are whispers that more will not be forthcoming. G.W.’s been laid off from his job at Southern Legal. Aside from his government assistance, he has no other income. Missio Dei pays the rent on his apartment. He isn’t supposed to have others living there.
I tell him that I feel his novel is of urgent concern. He agrees.
The day of the January 2016 point-in-time homeless count, it pours. I arrive at my deployment center and find a cluster of people standing in a conference room reviewing the su
rvey questions one at a time. I’m given a chartreuse T-shirt identifying me as a volunteer, a clipboard with twenty surveys, and a pencil. I climb into a silver sedan with my team leader and two other volunteers: an economics student from Eckerd College and a woman who works at the health department downtown.
Our first stop is Daystar Life Center, a drop-in agency whose stated mission is to “provide the basic necessities of life to our neighbors in need.” People stand under the porch overhang, staying out of the rain. A man leaning against his bike says they’ve already talked to our group this morning. We proceed to the waiting area. A young woman sits watching TV, and a man sleeps in a chair against the wall. People talk at the check-in counter. Back outside, a man asks me if it’s true that I have a stack of one-day unlimited bus passes in my pocket to give out as incentives for completing the survey. I say that it is.
I ask him for his first and last name and social security number—the last four digits are enough. His date of birth. How he identifies his gender. Whether he is Hispanic or Latino. His race and, if he is biracial, what he considers his primary race. If he is single, married, divorced, or widowed. If he’s ever served in the US Armed Forces. If he has, I thank him for his service.
I ask if he lives with others who are homeless: a spouse or partner, his guardian, his children, his friends.
I ask him where he slept the night before. If it was an emergency shelter, I ask him to name it. If it was a transitional housing facility, I ask him to name it. He’s been staying in a hotel or motel, couch surfing, or sleeping in a place not meant for human habitation, like a vehicle or the woods. He’s been in jail, in a mental health or substance abuse facility, or the hospital.
I ask him how long he’s been homeless this time. I ask him how many times he’s lived on the streets or in emergency shelters in the last three years, including at present. Whether, when he combines all the times he’s been homeless in the last three years, it equals twelve months or more.
