NEOCH Volunteer
Editor’s
Note: Street voices is a Speaker’s Bureau made up of homeless and
formerly homeless individuals who speak about their experiences in order to
inspire their audience whether they’re a classroom, a church congregation, or
a charitable organization. If you wish to have a speaker from Street Voices talk
for your group, please contact Community Organizer Joshua Kanary at (216)
432-0540 x106.
A
conversation with Street Voices Speaker Don is so open, honest and compelling
that it is an experience to remember. Don holds nothing back. He tells of his
failures and his triumphs in the same low key. The quality of frankness in his
speeches at High Schools, churches and community centers is certain to be highly
inspirational, especially to people mired in lost hopes, loneliness, or tough
addictions.
Don
started life fifty-five years ago as the youngest of seven children in a
Cleveland Irish Catholic family. Large families often treat the youngest member
with advice, special care and gifts, all of which Don enjoyed. Yet, one
unfortunate trait passed down to him was the family’s love of alcohol, and
their lavish access to it. Don saw family members become alcoholics, almost as a
matter of course.
In
High School, Don’s superior intelligence was discovered. His teachers skipped
him a full grade ahead of his original class. As a result, Don graduated from
High School at age sixteen. However, the early graduation, coupled with
separation from friends in his previous class, did not serve him well. He found
himself in a complicated world, a world expecting him to be a completed,
self-possessed adult. He worked at whatever jobs he could get, but began finding
solace in whiskey, just as his brothers and sisters had done.
At
age seventeen, Don became seriously ill. Diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, he
spent the next several years enduring multiple surgeries and long painful
periods of recovery. By that time, though, he had added marijuana and other
drugs to his intake of liquor, and sometimes his medications mixed with the
remains of drugs and alcohol in his system.
Finally
well enough to work, Don held jobs as a salesman, carpenter and library aide,
but now he was a confirmed drug addict and alcoholic. At age twenty, he married
a girl who was also dependent on drugs. The marriage lasted nine years (with no
children), but eventually they broke up and went their separate ways. Now,
looking back, Don realizes that they were both too young and naive to make a
success of it.
Throughout
the next decade, Don’s addictions deepened. His fine mind still worked, and
his natural empathy to the needy still drove him to respond, but the drugs and
liquor were paramount. He became homeless, unwilling to use his paltry earnings
for food, rent, or clothing, but only to feed his addictions. Yet, a day came
when he realized, with a jolt, that he had hit “bottom”.
It
happened when a man, a stranger visiting the shelter, saw Don walking down the
hall. The man’s voice was loud, and something about Don’s presence in the
shelter prompted him to ask pointedly, “Why is he here?” When Don heard that
question he stopped walking for a moment, as if it had been a block of wood
thrown his way. “Why is he here?” The question echoed in Don’s
consciousness and took on a special meaning he could not ignore. He knew why it
stayed in his mind and he knew what it meant, but at first he couldn’t look at
it. It was too big, too powerful. The question stayed with him. It would not go
away. Only later did he find the courage to admit to himself that he would have
to change the ways he was living. He’d have to break the addictions, the
alcoholism, the dependence. But how to do it?
That was the question. He tried cutting down, but the nights went by, the
miserable nights without the comforts he’d become accustomed to. Then
NEOCH’s partner organization Bridging the Gap gave Don the chance to
participate in a special program designed for shelter residents over fifty years
of age.
Through
the program, Don met Danny Kerr, a law student at Case Western Reserve
University. Danny recognized Don’s sharp intellect at once, as well as the
value of his experience as a client of temporary labor agencies. At the time,
temp jobs were taking over the labor market, companies offering jobs listed as
“temporary”, a locution obscuring the extra profits to employers from
cheaper labor, with no commitment to better, long-term careers. Danny
interviewed Don in connection with research for his thesis on the rise of
temporary labor agencies.
Discussions
with Danny made Don’s difficult days and nights without drugs pass more
easily. He also took great pride in the knowledge that he has been able to help
Danny with important information. As Don’s general health improved, his
association with Bridging the Gap also expanded, and he soon learned all the
particulars of effective speech-making. He had always had a fine vocabulary, so
before long, he became a spokesman for Bridging the Gap.
With
the spirit of his new activities, Don felt a desire to leave the shelter and
find a quieter place to live. Bridging the Gap helped him obtain a subsidized
apartment in the heart of a community that satisfied his needs. Now in his spare
time, Don goes on errands for house-bound neighbors, or walks to the Farmers
Market nearby. An accomplished cook, he often makes meals and takes them to
those in his building who are crippled or shut-in. Comfortable in his new home
environs and free now of his cruel addictions, Don revels in his work as a
Street Voices public speaker. He’s been a Speaker now for almost six years. It
fulfills his desire to contribute positively to society.
In
one of his most significant talks, Don gives his audience a rare glimpse of
human nature’s ability to see and not to see at the same time. He does it by
asking the audience to close their eyes and picture in their minds a homeless
person. It is an apt suggestion, since few people have a chance to enter a
shelter and see homeless people as they are. After a minute or two, he asks them
to open their eyes and describe the person they saw when their eyes were closed.
He then explains that in the past, he had pictured homeless people exactly as
the audience reports: dirty all over, in raggy clothes, and carrying lots of
bags. Most important, it was not anyone they knew, or had ever known. It was
someone apart. Then he tells them of his amazement to discover, when he himself
became homeless, that everyone in the shelter looked very much like him.
In
this way, Don achieves something seldom achieved by highly-paid government or
corporate speakers. He puts a universal face on homelessness, a face silently
attesting to the relatedness of all, whether homeless or mansion-housed, clean
or dirty, rich or poor, all connected by the undeniable bond of humanness that
can never be undone. That is clearly Don’s message, and the reason people walk
out of his sessions with a lighter step and a brighter look in their eyes. And
(at the risk of sounding trite), all looking very much like one another after
all.
Copyright Homeless
Grapevine Issue #86 in November 2008 Cleveland Ohio.