- A decade or so ago, Disney came out with a toy called
"Steve the Tramp". A description on the package said, "You'll
smell him before you see him". Steve came complete with a nailed board.
Me, working with the homeless, naturally took great umbrage to this insult.
Why? Because many of the homeless that I dealt with, were not the stereotypes
that you see on the media; a minority person in a Cadillac ripping off
the system with her two books of food stamps and living the high life.
That is what you are supposed to believe. Yes-these welfare Queens with
their scamming the system have led us into billions in deficits. Right,
and the moon is sitting on my porch waiting to toast the evening!
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- The homeless that I dealt with had their rip-off artists,
just as proper society does. Only thing is, corporate rip-off artists,
moneyed dope addicts, substance abusers, murderers, perverts, rapists etc.,
are all of them, protected by oodles of money or legislative protections
and loopholed laws.
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- The homeless (per our Steve the Tramp) are always presented
as crazed, threatening, ner' do wells, bums, whores, or parasites. Well-so
too are the rich. Let some politician's wife, a sports star, radio host,
blue blood families offspring, be caught drinking and driving, or with
stashes of drugs, zoned out on the ballfield, or causing mayhem, and next
thing you know they're in a $30,000 per month drying out or detox lavish
retreat, applauded for their fortitude, excused because of their immeasurable
suffering, and then a book and movie about their heroic epiphanies. They
have substance abuse problems, stress, are alcoholics. Not so, on the other
side of the tracks. The po' folk are drunks-bums-dope addicts, with a lock'em
up and throw away the key attitude. Just as wealth is inherited so too
is poverty.
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- A child born in chemical alley in the south, in Appalachia,
a tenement, or rusted mill town with its echoing streets, boarded stores
(manufacturing shipped abroad), is hardly on equal footing with our Little
Lord Fauntleroy; born into pampered ease, coddled, and given every opportunity
to succeed. That or an inheritance (that others earned), that sees him
spending the days of his selfish-gorged life on entertainment and recreation.
No decaying schools for this little darling, sent off to private enclaves,
with acres of science buildings, computer labs, libraries, on-site clinics,
heliport pads (for visiting parents) and specialty courses in trips abroad
or sailing the high seas. College, no problem even if you're brainless.
Daddy's money will see to that titled degree.
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- What to do about "Steve the Tramp"? With a
huge fortress mall in the city where I worked, filled with toy stores selling
this insult, the solution was easy. Being of an artistic bent, it took
me no time at all to create my own huge poster depicting Mickey the Rat,
complete with huge bloodshot eyes; carrying a huge nailed board announcing,
"You'll smell him before you see him". Then I gathered all the
homeless and concerned citizens in town, and we had ourselves a protest
at the mall. I'm not sure if the toy was pulled that day or the next but
in any event no more "Steve the Tramp".
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- Disney deserves full credit in righting a wrong. The
holiday season was upon us and I had written a play to be performed in
the park adjacent to the mall. I called it "Homeless For Christmas".
The theme was an update of the first Christmas. Mary was a Native American
Indian, Joseph was from Jamaica, baby Jesus was my three month old nephew,
and the Wise Men were homeless veterans, bringing their gifts through the
shadowed park to the Holy Family in shopping carts. They presented the
baby Jesus with a blanket, cans of soup, a candle and some flowers, which
looked much like funeral arrangements, complete with satin bow? The ending
of our play had us handing out the $30,000 dollars worth of toys Disney
had shipped to us for the poor children in the area. The veterans singing
Silent Night gave them out. Some protests are a little more successful
than others.
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- Corporate welfare, subsidies, and off-shore tax free
banking is never shown in its luxury cars, trophy homes, finest of foods
and wines, splish-splashing in exotic resorts. No, better that you think
that a bunch of unemployed bums and homeless veterans and the elderly are
driving us all to the poor house.
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- One day in my various escapades, protests etc., for the
dispossessed and poor, the New York Times picked up one of our stories.
A free-lance reporter called me and asked if he could follow me around
as he wanted to do a story contrasting the great gulf between the rich
and poor, most especially in an area identified as the Gold Coast. I told
him no problem. The result was a story done for Rolling Stones (with pictures)
called "The Big Empty". Darcy Frey(the reporter's name), thinking
he was going to do a Haves and Have Nots story, instead ended by writing
of the suffering and death of those he came to know.
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- Excerpts: from "The Big Empty"-Rolling Stone,
April 18-91, by Darcy Frey.
- The first part of the story describes the corporate headquarters,
and the gentrification of a city, to make way for financiers and corporate
honchos. The places where people had their stores, historical homes, neighborhoods,
were all bulldozed under.
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- "On the other side of the Post Road the city has
hidden away nine of its fifteen housing projects. The largest-home to 2000
tenants. The high rises and a group of bungalow apartments have sunk into
the kind of disrepair one associates with East Los Angeles or the South
Bronx. To cross the Mill River on the Post Road is to move not merely from
privilege to poverty but from one era to another, and to see what happens
when a town transforms itself into a city. Other cities, of course, have
wealthy and poor sections, but few have so many wealthy, so many poor and
so little in between."
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- "Last year, I became friendly with Judy Moriarty,
an advocate for the city's growing population of homeless citizens. Nearly
anyone who has spent a night on the streets knows Judy by sight-a slight
woman with a helmet of straw-colored hair, lively brown eyes and blazing
lipstick."
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- "Once, Judy took me to one of the city's shelters
to meet a client of hers, a young man crippled by spina bifida. Shelter
officials allowed (they called themselves Christians jm) him to stay only
if he was bathed and diapered each night, a task that fell on Judy. 'Hold
this', Judy said, shoving a plastic bag full of urine into my hands. It
was a manipulative gesture--the table next to her would have served just
as well-and it made me angry at first. But, it was Judy's way of showing
me what she is up against: how the richest city in Connecticut-itself the
richest state in the country-can't find a more suitable place for a mentally-ill
and incontinent young man than a shelter where he is said by nurses to
have a better-than-even chance of dying."
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- "Police regularly "shag" the homeless
off park benches in the heart of town, and the city's Commission on Aging
once told a sixty-two-year-old woman who was searching for housing after
her pension had run out to get on a bus and go to another town---'Greyhound
therapy', Judy Moriarty calls it."
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- "Though Judy keeps tabs on as many as 150 people,
two or three of them seem to demand most of her energy. One of these, Teresa,
was walking toward us in the parking lot. It was a raw March day, and Teresa
wore a long and filthy maroon parka, but even from a distance I could see
she was rail thin and round shouldered from clutching herself in the wine.
She walked up with a stocky, bearded man named Tom. When Teresa stopped
to talk to us, he passed by silently and stood across the street."
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- "Some faces seem to have two aspects at once-a past
and a present existing simultaneously. Teresa's was like that. You could
look at her and thin, "God, she must have been pretty" with her
bright green eyes and long red hair pulled back in two barrettes and her
habit of running a wisp of it through her mouth, like an anxious schoolgirl.
Teresa grew up in Kentucky, and when Judy introduced us, she offered me
a sweet, cockeyed smile and said in a soft Southern voice, 'A pleasure
it is to meet you sir'. But Teresa's face also showed a second history.
She had arrived here by bus eight years ago, looking for friends she never
found, and had lived at the shelter supporting herself by collecting cans
and bottles and by occasional prostitution. The homeless community knew
her story, and for some she made easy prey. After taking her bottles and
cans to the redemption center, she was often robbed."
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- "From her forehead to her mouth her face was laced
with scars. Her skin was burned from and the cold, her hair was matted
with grime, and her long fingers were caked with dirt. She looked about
fifty years old. Judy told me later she was thirty-one. Throughout her
years on the streets Teresa had remained devoutly religious and had attended
Bible Study at one of the shelters. In the parking lot Teresa spoke frantically,
her arms flailing about and her eyes rolling back in her head as she beseeched
Judy to protect her from Tom. Last night in an abandoned building with
him--something about being robbed, two knives at her throat, her can money
stolen, all her belongings. 'I'm gonna kill myself. You know Judy, I could
do that, I could.'"
"'A lot of good that will do you or anybody else', Judy replied. Then
she grabbed the collar of Teresa's coat and leaned in close, unfazed by
the sweetish smell of alcohol. 'Teresa what did he do to you?' But Teresa
pulled her head away and simply stared back at Judy. There were some things
she wouldn't discuss in front of a stranger. Suddenly, Tom started across
the street. 'Teresa, you coming?' This only made Teresa more hysterical
and she began to wail Judy's name over and over. 'What do I say to him?'
'You tell him I'm your counselor, and if anything happens to you, I'll
know exactly who did it'. Then Judy arranged to meet Teresa that night
with a sleeping bag so she wouldn't have to stay with Tom."
"On a Wednesday afternoon in January, Judy left the shelter with some
meals for homebound AIDS patients. A few hours later she returned and found
a padlock on the door and a health department notice that read, UNFIT FOR
HUMAN HABITATION. Citing two clients of the shelter who had been hospitalized
for Legionnaires' disease, the city closed the building indefinitely. Shelter
workers could not get in to retrieve their files, or the food left to rot.
Had someone notified them, shelter staff could have told the city that
neither man had stayed in the shelter for months. But that would have missed
the point. The Legionnaires scare allowed the Mayor to follow through on
a long-standing plan to demolish the building to make room for a park (really
businesses jm)."
"Some of the older residents went back to living on the street. Some
didn't comprehend what was going on. One woman showed up at the sheltered
soup kitchen every day at noon, clutching her lunch ticket. Teresa didn't
fare well. She stayed out of the shelters for a while, but on a particularly
bitter night, her ribs badly bruised, she showed up at St.Luke's. She was
told she couldn't come in. Since the West Side Shelter had closed, a new
set of rules required women to register at Rice School and then ride to
St.Luke's in a van. Disoriented in the best of times, Teresa never grasped
what she was being told and interpreted her expulsion as an accusation
that she'd done something wrong."
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- "I caught up with her a week after her suspension,
on a cold, rainy Saturday night in March when she showed up in front of
city hall looking for a safe place to spend the night. The city hall was
a massive ten-story building with a pillared entrance and a green-tinted
plate-glass facade. It was past ten o'clock and raining hard when Judy
and I found Teresa there. She was curled beneath one of Judy's sleeping
bags, leaning against the front doors. Inside the cavernous lobby, which
glowed darkly from the light of a single desk lamp, a security guard paced
restlessly. In panicked tones, Teresa told us how the guard had come out
and tried to move her along, and how her snarls had apparently turned him
back."
"'If someone does that, Teresa, you can't get upset,' Judy said. She
gave Teresa some coffee we had picked up for her at the diner. 'Just play
the stupid, helpless, hopeless, homeless person. This is public property,
and they can't kick you off unless you give them an excuse.' 'But Judy.....'
'Do you trust me?' 'Yes'. 'Okay, then do what I say.'. After Teresa had
calmed down, Judy told me of Teresa's Kentucky childhood. Judy had just
about finished when suddenly Teresa began to moan, something about not
wanting to go to jail again. Judy looked up and said, 'Shut up and let
me do the talking', and by the time I had turned around, there were three
police officers striding toward us. 'Evening', said the first officer,
a sturdy man with a standard-issue cop's mustache. 'What's going on here?'
Judy explained that Teresa had been suspended from the shelter and had
nowhere to go. 'Well you can't stay here' he replied. 'We're willing to
move. Where do you suggest?' The officer went through a list of places
he assumed Teresa could spend the night."
"Judy patiently explained why each place either refused to shelter
the homeless or refused to take Teresa. The officer assured Judy he could
find Teresa shelter and was about to make some calls when he took another
look at Teresa. 'Aren't you Teresa Walters?" "Teresa Wallace,
My name is Wallace." She looked at the ground and repeated Judy's
words to stay calm. 'Oh excuse me Wallace'. A second officer, with ill-concealed
amusement, stepped forward. 'Better get that straight,' he said to his
partner. 'Not Walters, Wallace'. By now three more patrol cars had pulled
up and three more officers were on the scene. Teresa, wet and shivering,
started pacing while Judy stood off to the side trying to determine where
the situation was going and how to get there first."
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- "'What's up?' said one of the new arrivals. 'These
guys on line for Stones tickets?' Four officers now stood in a line facing
Teresa. 'Where's your tent?' 'Yeah, where's your tent?' 'You had the best-looking
tent I ever seen'. 'Finest address-I-95 Connecticut.' 'Best Zip Code in
town'. This was too much for Teresa to bear, and she exploded in a burst
of curses and hissing and sputtering wrath, which caused ripples of laughter
among the officers. After a few more taunts and after failing to find Teresa
shelter, the first officer gathered up his crew. 'Well, I suppose you can
stay here.' His partner gave Judy a stern look. 'Just keep her out of the
building'.Teresa howled at the police as they drove off and threw herself
against the side of the building, sliding down like the plate-glass front
and collapsing like a marionette onto her sleeping bag. 'Judy how come
every time I ask for something it's no?' her face was contorted with rage
and disappointment and she cupped her hands to the sides of her head like
blinders. 'They let the drug addicts and the crackheads stay in the shelter,
but when I ask, it's 'No no no no. No Teresa, you're on your own'. Judy
how come men are always beating me? Judy, why doesn't anyone love me? Judy....'
She tried to finish but nothing came out except a soft strangled noise,
and then suddenly she was sobbing, fully and openly, her hands curled limply
in her lap."
"Judy pulled herself close. 'Teresa you can get yourself off the street.
You're a smart woman. You just need to get cleaned up, you know, and you'd
be a pretty woman, too'. Teresa smoothed her hair with a grimy hand. 'Do
you think so?' 'Of course. Now, Teresa, listen to me. If I got you a bus
ticket, would you go back home?' Teresa gave her a teary smile, 'Yeah,
I would go. I'm strong Judy, you know I could walk. Sure, I'll walk the
whole way'. Suddenly the image of this pathetic scarecrow walking resolutely
down the side of the interstate made us all begin to laugh. 'Look what
I found in the garbage', Teresa said, happy now. She reached into her pile
of belongings and pulled out a tattered book. It was called The Be Happy
Attitudes: 8 Positive Attitudes That Can Transform Your Life! Haltingly,
but in a voice full of churchly solemnity she read from the table of contents....'I
need help-I can't do it alone! I'm really hurting-but I'm going to bounce
back! I'm going to remain cool, calm and corrected.....'. The wind had
picked up, and the rain whipped in sheets against the empty building. Inside,
the security guard walked over to the plate glass and stood inches away
from Teresa looking over her shoulder."
"As winter yielded to spring, Teresa played cat and mouse with the
police and tried to stay clear of Tom. Finally, Judy sat her down and reminded
her of their previous conversation: that if Judy bought her a bus ticket
she'd go home to the country. Teresa would leave for good. Every other
time Judy had tried to get her out of town, Teresa had resisted. But the
night outside city hall had changed her. Judy arranged to meet her at the
diner the following week to giver her a bus ticket and some money. Teresa
handed Judy a note, which Judy read after she had left promising to meet
us for her ticket home. 'Judy, I appreciate the help you is trying to do
for me. I am trying to do what I am ask. Maybe Judy this will bring something
for me. Judy I know in my heart that you are very concern about me. Judy
I really don't know how my life is going to turn out, but with the grace
of God things will work out. When I leave here I will probably have to
find some garbage food because I miss lunch. I am very hungry and wish
that I had an umbrella so I can stay dry and eat. I love you Judy. I will
be there (for the bus jm) even I am soaking wet. Love always Teresa'."
"I was planning to return one last time to say goodbye to Teresa before
she left, but Judy called to tell me I hadn't made it in time. One evening
in May (near the yacht club jm) two children playing on a hillside in the
park stumbled upon Teresa's lying in a little grove. Her hands were folded
demurely across her waist, and her throat was slit from ear to ear. Judy
was notified and she rushed down to identify the body. Teresa was still
lying in the woods, half-covered with decaying leaves and broken branches.
It was a balmy spring evening and the police major-crimes van and a dozen
cruisers were pulled up on the hillside. While police loaded Teresa's battered
body into the van, a company softball game continued twenty yards away--the
thwack of balls being hit, the cheers of fans, drifting over the crime
scene."
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- "The police didn't have to look hard. A few interviews
with Judy and with some street people led them to those who had murdered
Teresa. When police took the man Tom in for questioning, he told them that
he and another homeless man had set upon Teresa after she refused to hand
over a deck of playing cards! 'I cut her throat....and she didn't die',
he explained in a videotaped statement. 'I took her pulse and she didn't
die'. So the two men finished her off with their fists."
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- "My last trip to Connecticut was for Teresa's memorial
service held on a Wednesday morning in the park, just yards from where
she was found. As I handed out programs to the crowd huddled under their
umbrellas, I asked how each had come to know Teresa, but it turned out
that few had ever met her. They were ministers and rabbis, members of the
social-service community and representatives from the mayor's office. Not
surprisingly, the eulogies had an abstract quality. There were readings
from the Scriptures, reminding us that Jesus too, was homeless, and remarks
by an expert on domestic violence, who said: 'Teresa is everyone. Teresa
is any woman who has known the terror of violence."
"Judy was the only speaker who had known Teresa well, and she kept
her comments brief. She thanked those who had donated money to ship Teresa's
body from the corner's office back to the city, and she thanked a carpenter
friend who had built a box for Teresa's ashes, which rested at Judy's feet
collecting rain. For a moment, words failed her as she looked out over
this group who had done so little to help Teresa when she was alive. Then,
in a flat voice that she may or may not have meant ironically, she said
what she thought Teresa would like to have told them: 'Thanks a lot. I
didn't know so many people cared'."
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- UPDATE: Nov 21-03. Darcy Frey's article came out in Rolling
Stone magazine some months after Teresa's death. Darcy, is one of those,
like Teresa, shadow people who come into your life for a season and change
things forever. After Teresa's funeral I never saw him again or heard from
him. I wanted to tell him that when the magazine (I had never seen the
story till then) came out the city was in an uproar. Every politician-local
and state called me ranting and raging. "How could I--how dare I etc."
Finally after dozens of these calls, all similar, I told the state representative
on the phone, "I have received dozens of calls this day and Darcy's
story confirms the indifference and egotistical arrogance of you all. Not
one-not one of you, has said one thing about the horrific murder of Teresa,
nor mentioned the fact, that in the richest state in the richest city in
our nation, there could be such outrage over "image" and nothing
for life. Sums it up for me."
I, and a group of homeless people, attended the sentencing of Teresa's
murderers. I had requested the right to speak on Teresa's behalf but was
denied since I wasn't a relative! I instead, submitted a letter which added
two years to their five year sentences! As for speaking. There was no way
I was going to leave that court room without speaking my outrage. Arrest?
I could care less. Just as the last words were being spoken by the Judge
to these two depraved killers, I stood up behind the railing and SHOUTED
their names; "TOM-BILL, YOU THINK YOU'RE GETTING OFF LIGHT TODAY--BUT
WAIT-THERE'S ANOTHER JUDGEMENT AND TERESA WILL BE AT THAT ONE"...by
then I was surrounded by police and escorted from the court room. I felt
a little relieved.
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- Teresa is only one story out of millions across the land.
It is easy to judge the lifestyles, behavior, and physical or mental problems
of those we step over or drive-by. Easy to label the bum, the whore, the
crazy one, the drunk. Plenty of rich fit the same description; only thing
is their wealth protects them from vomiting in that same gutter. That,
and connections and dream teams. It is inexcusable that our poor, dispossessed,
evicted, elderly, veterans, AIDS persons, and mentally-ill and mentally
retarded, have been "kicked to the curb" and disappeared. Our
prisons and streets, are our new treatment centers for those suffering
mental problems. Bridges, parks, and abandoned cars are now home for our
traumatized veterans of past wars. With millions becoming unemployed these
past few years, as jobs are shipped to Third World nations; the auto worker,
steel worker, miner, fisherman, ship builder, carpenter-electrician-truck
driver-airline employee-farmer etc., that you pass living in their car
may be your neighbor or you. NO, there is no safety-net. We're on our own.
Kicked to the curb. Billions for wars to kill, destroy and maim. None for
the living to protect, educate, house and feed. "Am I my brother's
keeper?" Doesn't appear so in our new corporatized America.
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- Comment
- Alfred Lehmberg
- AlienView.net
- 11-22-3
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- There are a lot of -good- people in this country who
are revolted and otherwise offended by the idea of a "victim society".
Were more people to "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and
take more personal responsibility for their condition" there would
be fewer -victims- in our culture and more -victors- these reason.
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- It remains that there -are- victims, though, victims
robbed of their "bootstraps" and scourged socially for their
honor and personal responsibility. The few (and it -is- the few) who ill
advantage themselves of the aggregate egalitarian national attitude (evolved
since Roosevelt and the New Deal), are used, scurrilously, to deny the
many... Moreover, these few welfare cheats are an absolute -delight- to
those among those of us who don't want multinational corporations held
to account, want to cancel school lunches and support for single mothers,
or provide a person a meager stipend in welfare until they can get back
on their K-Mart feet... (Gucci never goes out of business)...
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- Yes, it remains that there -are- victims, after all.
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- Lehmberg@snowhill.com
- www.alienview.net
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