In the Life of a Homeless Man
With Christmas coming, I’m taking a timeout from my usual columnizing to send greetings to Tony, a homeless man in Colorado. He is 67 years old and may be sleeping in a North Face sleeping bag within an abandoned 144-square-foot wooden structure adjacent to a cemetery. (His summer bed has been a picnic bench about a third of a mile from a Safeway/Starbucks.)
Tony was born in Japan to a military dad. His family subsequently moved to Florida and then Arvada, a northwest suburb of Denver with a population that’s soared from 50,000 in 1970 to 124,000 now. When Tony was 16, he had some issues with his parents “just because I’m me,” and they sent him to a foster home 55 miles away.
Tony returned home two years later but “it didn’t go well. . . . I loaded up my pack and hitchhiked” to the house of a man with whom he had hiked and fished. Tony worked at a lumber mill (now closed) for nine months. When he got tired of that, he worked at a nearby resort, fitting people with skis, running a ski lift, and drinking lots of Coors.
He then became a restaurant cook for the next 21 years, living in an efficiency apartment and smoking lots of marijuana. In 1997, Tony began working for a stone mason and over the next 12 years often built fireplaces, but even more often drank lots of rum cokes and moved on from there to cocaine: “Things went downhill.” Tony lost his job. He stopped using cocaine in 2008 but drank even more.
When we met last year, I asked, “What do you do now?” He replied, “I lose toes.” No joke. After living outside in Colorado cold, Tony has no toes on his left foot and only three on his right, so he walks around using a metal cane and is otherwise unsteady on his feet. Four years ago, he caught his sock on a nail, fell into a pit at the end of his cemetery house, called 911, and received transport to the hospital. He had twelve broken ribs and a punctured lung.
Tony has also lost all his teeth. Three years ago, he received a full set of dentures, but they were uncomfortable and one day he took them off before walking to the Safeway for food: “Some punks stole my stuff,” including his dentures, so “I gum my food now.”
Losing his toes gained him Social Security disability payments which Tony has used to buy food, cigarettes, and liquor, but for some mysterious reason, his checks stopped coming and he was frustrated in his calls to find out why. (He gave me his Social Security number and some personal information, so I tried calling, but officials said they would only talk with Tony.)
He survived partly by getting canned food from the food bank. He tries to be selective because of his toothlessness and because “I have no means of cooking.” Sometimes he stood or sat outside the Safeway and did not ask for money, “but I’ve got the look [of homeless helplessness] so sometimes someone kicks me a $20, and one guy kicked me $150.”
On the day we met, Tony had a sandwich, chips, and a Gatorade from a clinic where he had gone after a fall left him with lacerations. “I used to get the cheapest [stuff] at McDonald’s for a buck. Now it’s two and the burgers still suck, but it’s food in my belly.” He added, “I like a little bottle of vodka. Alcohol and cigarettes are a homeless guy’s best friends.”
Tony said that sometimes, while sleeping on the picnic bench, he would wake up as “a cop is shining a Maglight in my face. The cop says, ‘You can’t stay here,’ so I fold my stuff up and walk off.” When the police left, Tony would go about twenty yards to a flat place behind a boulder and sleep there, undisturbed. But last year at the picnic bench “the cops were good” and he thought “someone said, ‘lay off Tony.'”
Tony said police leave him alone at his winter hideaway because they would have to walk uphill through unplowed snow, and “they don’t want to go through the hassle.” Tony said bears sniff around but he never brings food there.
As Christmas approaches, we might ask why Tony is homeless: Because of his own actions, or his parents’, or the general situation of society? Maybe all of the above. To play off Jesus’s response to a “Who sinned?” question concerning a man born blind: If it’s too late for Tony to change his material circumstances, that God might lead others to lay off him and give him gifts.