Meanderings on the Homeless Crisis (Part 2)

I read in Street Roots a poem titled “Money Shot” by a poet named Dumpsta D. Actually I read it five or six times. In the poem, Dumpsta D assumes the identity of a soulless and conniving female television news reporter who helicopters into a homeless encampment and picks out a “photogenic waif” to produce “poverty porn.” Such a production, the poet tells us, will land her a book contract or TED talk and pay for her plastic surgery that will make her a network star.

It is a remarkably cynical and savage poem and the first one I have ever read where a poet judges and excoriates the life of someone the poet doesn’t know, say a media starlet, in precisely the same odious manner as the poet does not want the life of someone, say, a resident of a homeless encampment to be judged and excoriated.

It feels like Dumptsa D took the wrong approach with “The Money Shot.” The poem took me nowhere I wanted to go. It led away from the heart.

In that same edition of the newspaper, I read a column by the editor excoriating the stepped-up sweeps of homeless encampments in the Old Town area of downtown Portland where her office is located. She writes: “Here’s what mostly happens (with the sweeps): people experience the trauma of displacement and further erosion of trust. Then, it’s that much more difficult to trust other services offered by the same city that sweeps you.”

The word “trauma” is deployed ad nauseam by advocates for the homeless, but is only applied to the homeless themselves in the context of the inflicted traumas that led them to become homeless and the the inflicted traumas of beings swept from their encampments. There is so much more going on with “trauma” in the homeless crisis than trauma on only one side, and the writer might consider exploring this in future columns and consider writing columns to the homeless people themselves. I’ve read this publication for years and never read that kind of column from an advocate and that seems like an inexcusable oversight. We are all in this together and reciprocity must exist. Yes, a column about reciprocity would be important, very important. It’s what everyone I know who talks about this issue is talking about. If we give you a hand up, will you take it? How about asking that in a column and quit with the nostrums and jargon?

I have not witnessed first hand a sweep of a homeless encampment. Perhaps I should. I suppose I could go online and see where one is scheduled to unfold and then drive or bicycle over to see for myself and talk to some of the displaced people. But I don’t want to do it for the writing. I want to do it for the learning.

The homeless I have observed are never dull. And to quote Charles Bukowski, “What interests me is non dullness.”

A friend recommended I read Poor People by William Vollmann.

Published in 2007, the book was a culmination of Vollmann’s two-decade long, worldwide exploration of poverty where the writer began each encounter by asking a poor person a single question: “Why are you poor?” Then he took it from there and I followed him.

What about a similar approach for my writing about the homeless crisis? When the opportunity to talk one-on-one with a homeless person arises, and they do almost every day for me, why not ask: “Why are you homeless?”

In fact, I have never asked this question of anyone homeless I’ve met. Sometimes the reasons have emerged in our conversations, such as release from incarceration with no place to live, tired of dealing with slumlords, an addiction, or kicked out of a residence, to name just a few.

Many writers have asked, “Why are you homeless?” and the answers have appeared in media platforms ranging from newspapers to podcasts to feature films. The question interests me but the following questions interest me more and I’ve occasionally asked them:

How are you surviving?

Do you want out of this life?

How can I help?

Why Old Crow?

What are you reading?

How does your dog help you?

Why all the collecting?

How did you get your RV?

My thinking here is that these questions lead to other openings and nuances in how a person might discuss their homelessness. This has already happened in my writing about the New American Diaspora. There’s no theory nor strategy to this approach. I’m going on intuition, and largely making it up on the spot.

One of the stranger moments during my writing about the New American Diaspora was spending a romantic evening on my 57^th birthday with a spectacular woman at McMenamins Edgefield resort in Troutdale, east of Portland. A fancy meal, fine wine, soaking pool, wonderful intimacy, a collection of Lorca’s poems as a gift. I say strange because it all took place in what formerly was the Multnomah County Poor Farm, and our dormitory-styled room once housed indigent, infirm or mentally ill men and women (including many families) who worked primarily as agricultural laborers on county land to earn their room and board. Their labor contributed all manner of food and dairy products to the local community. There was even a brewery!

There we were having an incredible time together in a complex whose mission a long time ago was to house and employ poor people and keep them from ending up on the streets.

When it opened in 1912 with 211 “inmates,” the Multnomah County Poor Farm was considered a visionary social welfare program. Today, it would be considered a punitive, even barbaric measure to alleviate the homeless crisis in Oregon and elsewhere.

But it worked reasonably well and provided a sense of community for decades until post WW II prosperity and changes in the American character rendered it largely unnecessary or undesirable. Is such a social welfare program targeted at homeless people willing to participate viable today? Could a smaller-scale model be adopted?

It is clear to me in my interactions with homeless people that many of them have created a powerful sense of community and camaraderie, sometimes unhealthy, sometimes destructive, but not all the time.

I have wondered if their current communities are stronger than the ones they experienced before, if they experienced any community in their former lives. Perhaps living a shared story of surviving homelessness in the richest nation in the world is significantly more compelling, than say a bullshit job, endless bills, an abusive family life or crushing loneliness. I don’t know. I am speculating here. But when I hear homeless men and woman sitting across the table or a sidewalk from each other, talking about how to survive, how to navigate, laughing at their travails, recounting their moments of joy, of former adventures, of getting fucked up on legal and illegal drugs, cursing common homeless enemies who steal and perpetrate acts of violence, championing their favorite books and movies, or how to care for dogs or fix a shot engine on their 47-year old RV, something connective is going on. And I suspect most homeless people engage in more face-to-face conversations than typical Americans, who increasingly seem to be avoiding face-to-face conversations. Never in my adult life have I experienced the level of degree of shared community I’ve observed with some homeless people and realizing that astonishes me. When I mentioned this to my 90-year old father who served as a combat Marine in the Korean War, he remarked it was obvious to him: it was like serving in the front lines of a war where you and your buddy pull together in a foxhole. You help out. You share the illicit pear hooch you found on patrol. I thought about what my father said. There is an internal one going on in the United States; the casualties are everywhere.

In the aftermath of John Kennedy’s assassination, newspapermen wrote millions of words trying to fathom the tragedy. Most of them took the conventional editorial path and composed homilies about America’s loss of innocence and hope. New York Herald Tribune columnist Jimmy Breslin, however, went another direction; he interviewed JFK’s gravedigger at Arlington National Cemetery and turned in one of the best columns in the history of journalism. He was looking where no other writers were looking and I have taken to calling that method the “Breslin Angle,” meaning a writer should seek out the silent margins of a critical, unfolding story and investigate places where other writers aren’t looking.

I want to believe I am applying the Breslin Angle with my writing about the homeless, finding the JFK gravediggers in this tragedy.

It was a bright Sunday morning. I sat on a park bench that overlooked the Willamette River and watched the captain of a dilapidated sail boat called the Now Voyager complete a graceful maneuver of turning the vessel 360 degrees around with his hands and ropes.

In the past year, I have sat on this same bench and regularly observed the captain living on the New Voyager and perform routine maintenance on his floating domicile. Several times I have seen him ride his BMX bike away from the dock, presumably to a store for supplies.

This turning-around-the boat initially confused me and then I identified the reason: the Now Voyager now had a solar panel installed on the stern and the captain had positioned the vessel to enable the panel to capture more direct sunlight. Of course the panel’s installation raised a dozen questions and one day when I’m in the mood, I’ll walk down to the dock and ask the captain. He seems like a gregarious guy because he’s always talking to anyone on the water who rows or paddles or motors by within conversation range.