My Heroes Were Homeless

When most people think of a hero, their mind jumps to images of someone in tights and a cape or a fire fighter running into a burning building to save a child. Or maybe they think of a teacher who helped them in their time of need. The lucky ones get to think about a parent who was always there for them, loving them unconditionally. But for me, I didn’t have a happy childhood. My mother was the example of what not to be as a human being; selfish, arrogant, ignorant, and abusive. My father spent more time at work than at home. Police officers gave me anxiety, when I ran away all they did was bring me right back home. And I never saw a burning building being saved. When I turned eighteen, I saved myself from my hellish upbringing and started living in my car just to be somewhere safe. I eventually left my hometown and began traveling dirty-kid-style. Although most people tend to look at the homeless with either pity or disdain, I consider many of the homeless people I’ve met to be the unsung heroes of the United States.

Many in this country consider their war veterans to be heroes, but they fail to understand that not all war heroes get to come back home and start a family with their bountiful military pension. Some people who leave a war stay trapped in their minds with no grandchildren sitting around a fire listening to their stories. My friend, affectionately referred to as “Wheelchair Dave,” is one of those veterans who came back to our country physically, but still lived in Vietnam in his mind. Dave spent every day sitting in his wheelchair at the corner of Haight St. and Masonic in San Francisco with a forty ounce of Olde English hidden in a brown paper bag in his backpack. He slept in Panhandle Park every night in a place where the sprinklers wouldn’t go off until 6am. Though he was often not the kindest person in the mornings (and who would be having to sleep in a wheelchair?), after he had his wake-up beer, he became a warm and relatively talkative old man. He mostly spoke of watching Jerry Garcia playing live on stage and traveling for years to watch The Grateful dead perform. But every now and then, he’d reveal a small, sad part of himself. The part that had seen death and destruction as common place as a Starbuck’s. One where you’d say good morning to a friend and then be mourning them that evening. I couldn’t imagine being forced to kill people for a cause I didn’t even believe in. But Wheelchair Dave didn’t become my hero because he had fought the Vietnamese, I admired him because he continued to survive every day after he left. Despite the pain he hid, and the addiction he used to cover it, Dave had somehow found a way to still be kind and maybe even happy. I’d never quite seen that before. In my household, even a minor inconvenience would cause a slurry of yelling, blame, and intentional degradation. My mother’s misery was everyone’s misery. Even on a good day, we all walked on eggshells. Not to mention, my mother’s addictions harmed my family in a variety of ways. Yet here was Dave, drinking a copious amount of beers daily, who never let his addiction affect anyone but himself. It was a level of accountability and respect for others that I hadn’t ever really seen. Though I was only eighteen at the time and Dave was well into his seventies, he always treated me as an equal. Anything extra he had was offered to me, as well as his entertaining stories of the good times on tour. He quickly became one of my best friends and a mentor in street smart skills. I even convinced him once to let me take him to a reggae festival up north. Though Dave lived in a mental warzone during his limited moments of sobriety, he had the strength and courage to be gentle with others.

Another homeless hero of mine is a man named Roland. I was never quite sure how old he was, and I’m not sure he knew either. One time he told me he was forty, but his completely grey hair and beard said otherwise. Roland suffered from extreme schizophrenia. Every morning at 5am, Roland sat outside the liquor store waiting for them to open. He told me that he always heard the voices, but when he drank, they were nicer to him. I’ll be honest, for months I didn’t realize there was anything wrong with Roland other than him being a silly, drunk old man. But one day I saw him sitting alone on a park bench talking to himself. He was laughing and telling jokes with some figment of his imagination. He even offered the hallucination some of his beer. It was a few weeks after that when he told me he couldn’t be sure I was real. I offered to him the fact that I had bought him his beer as proof of my realness, but he just chuckled. I even asked him if he wanted to look at my ID (my teenage self clearly not understanding how schizophrenia worked) and through laughter he told me, “They all have IDs, though!” That’s when it hit me that Roland lived in a world where everything he knew and loved could be fake. I still can hardly imagine living like that. I know in my own life, uncertainty has been a huge stressor, even just over things like where will I sleep tonight or where can I get my next meal. But to constantly live with the question of whether or not you can even believe what your own senses are showing you, well I’m not sure I could survive that way. Roland is one of my heroes because despite the instability of his entire existence, he still found a way to have peace. I hadn’t ever known peace at that point in my life. There was always something wrong, even when everything was right, there was that hole inside of me that felt hollow, yet full of pain at the same time. Though in recent years I’ve done quite a bit of excavating and filling of that hole, I still can’t quite say I have the same peace Roland had. He had a certain kind of complete confidence in the uncertainty of life. He found a way to not only survive but thrive in his own way. He always had his drink, his food, a smile on his face, and a joke on the tip of his tongue.

I also knew a woman who went by the name of “Half Pint” who is a personal hero of mine. Half Pint was about five feet tall (maybe less), she usually had a vibrantly colored mohawk, and had approximately ten teeth in her mouth. She used vulgar language in her raspy voice and was never afraid to speak her mind regardless of how it might be received. Though her appearance and they way she carried herself often resembled a troll living under a bridge, once you had gotten to know her, you understood that the more accurate representation of her was your stereotypical “tough love” mother figure. Half Pint was “married” to a man named Mason. Anywhere she was asked to go, it was assumed she’d be literally dragging him along with her. And once he had passed out for the night from inebriation, if you wanted her time, you’d have to find her. She consistently made sure Mason had clean clothes (as he often times urinated in them from being drunk), a full stomach, and a sleeping bag. I grew to admire this strong and courageous woman not only for her ability to disregard what society thought of her, but also for remaining loving and willing to look out for the ones she cared about. If you were on Half Pint’s good side, you could come to her with any problem, and she’d do her best to fix it. And even if you were on her bad side, the worst she did was ignore you until you found a way to apologize and fall back into her good graces. That being said, it took quite a bit to get on her bad side. The only things that seemed to truly make her angry with someone was if they stole or disrespected the place she was hanging out at. Her strict boundary was, “Don’t blow up the spot,” meaning that if you acted foolish and got everyone kicked out or managed to catch the attention of any wandering police officers, she didn’t want to be around you until you learned to act correctly. Half Pint taught me many lessons that I didn’t become aware of until I was blessed with the wisdom of hindsight. She showed me that no matter what the world thought of you, you were responsible for yourself and to own any consequences that came your way. She instilled a sense of self confidence in me that I hadn’t known before. And I also got to see a beautiful example of unconditional love between her and Mason that I’d never seen in my own parents’ relationship. From them, I saw that love wasn’t some enigmatic feeling of bliss, but rather an action and a choice that must be made every moment. I’m not saying she and Mason were all rainbows and sunshine. In fact, they often got into petty squabbles with one another over inconsequential things. But she stood by his side no matter what. And when Mason eventually passed away, she chose to honor his memory in love rather than pain. Up until the day she died, she sang his praises in her crazy stories she told. Half Pint showed me that love doesn’t need to hurt, whether it’s for someone else or yourself.

In the years that I spent homeless and hitch hiking, I came across hundreds of awe-inspiring people, raw and authentic to the core. Some were runaways fleeing abusive households worse than mine, some struggled with addiction stemming from mental health issues, and some just wanted to break free from the chains of society, previously afraid to be themselves for one reason or another. Within them all, I found beacons of hope; hope that I could heal from my childhood trauma and remember how to smile, hope that I could live life any way I saw fit, hope that I could one day be that same light at the end of the tunnel for someone like me. The homeless community in the United States is made of disenfranchised humans who, through one hardship or another, found themselves with no where else to go. While some people may pity them or look down on them, I call them heroes. We are not all born with privileges or opportunities, but someone worth looking up to will play the hand they were dealt the best they can. The determination, bravery, kindness, and empathy I’ve seen many homeless people display are the virtues I wish to emulate in my own life.