After I "graduated" from the mission, I spent two weeks at the Winter Shelter. I was glad it was only two weeks. There were some fights between the homeless. The ambulance was a common sight. One guy got beat over the head by a dud grenade in a sock. My friend Bruce got beat up for asking another guy to turn down the volume on his radio. Another guy froze to death outside, because they wouldn't let his dog come inside with him. I said goodbye to my friend Mike who moved back to Ohio.
When the weather got warmer, we had to fend for ourselves. One of the cardinal rules about being homeless was not to tell where you slept on the street. You didn't want the police to hear about your place and make you move. But, I can tell about them now, since the areas have changed. The first was on Gregg St. on the porch of Mirci. Kevin, Bill and I stayed there. The porch was kind of small, so Kevin and I slept on the concrete. Bill slept on the wheelchair ramp, which was made of wood. Kevin gave a sleeping bag to me to use. He also slept with four steak knives for protection. The area had a problem with crackheads, which is why we needed the knives. Sleeping on concrete is very difficult. It makes your back and hips hurt. There was a reason why the homeless slept in the library during the day. It was impossible to sleep at night.
One night, we walked a couple of blocks to a man's house. Kevin knew him. We just wanted to sleep under a real roof, because it was going to storm. While we were talking with him, we saw some black SUV's pull up into the driveway of the house next door. The guy told us that we might want to get on the floor. He said there might be some shooting. As it turned out, the police raided that house for drugs. We heard some pops. The three of us decided that we would rather brave the storm instead of getting shot, so we walked back to our porch.
I would leave our porch around 6am to get some breakfast at the hospital. After I left one morning, Kevin and Bill got robbed. They thought I might have gotten tipped off about the robbery. I hadn't. It was just one of those things, but they didn't want me there anymore. So, I hooked up with two other friends--Sandy and another Bill. They were sleeping at the amphitheater in front of the art museum. It was a strange place to be. It was diagonally across from the Marriott. Anyone with a room could see us. It was behind some bushes, just steps from the sidewalk. Police would drive by but not see us. I slept on the stage. Even though it was still concrete, it was a little easier to sleep. When it would rain, we moved to a spot just outside a bank next door with an overhang. The janitor would wake us up at 6am, when he came to work, but he didn't care if we were there overnight. We had a couple of attempted robberies, but we fought them off. Our place got so popular with the neighborhood that we had other guys staying with us.
If we pooled our money, we would get a motel room about once a week to sleep in a real bed and take a bath. My friend Mark had a room at an extended stay motel on Two Notch Road. He offered to let me stay there with him. I had to pay him half of the rent for the place, which I was glad to do. He had the double bed, and I slept on a fold-out couch. He would want to watch late-night TV, which was right by my bed. He would fall asleep watching it, and then I could turn it off, so I could sleep. After a few days, I found out that Mark's father was paying for the room, and Mark was using my money to buy drugs. I left one morning early and hiked three miles to the nearest bus stop. Mark called me and asked me where I was. I told him that I had decided to go back downtown and stay with Sandy and Bill. He thought I was crazy, but I didn't want to pay for his drugs. I would rather have the hard concrete than the temptation of using drugs again. It was the best decision that I made during those days.
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