Trying to Do Right: Part 1

Being homeless is not an easy thing. Being homeless with federal probation on top of it is unbearable.

Day four after being released from federal custody. 

I am under a bridge next to the Miami River on a walkway that borders it. 

Many other homeless call this home.

It seems rightfully unfair that I am risking having my probation violated by being homeless. According to their own rules, they are supposed to have placed me into a halfway house to allow me time to get on my feet. Alas, this is not the case. They feebly attempted to place me into the Miami homeless shelter system which is beyond overwhelmed and has a waiting list that is months and months long.

As per the conditions of my probation and keeping them, finding employment while being on the streets is a serious challenge. Just how will I maintain this versus the looming threat of an even longer incarceration? I am very stressed that the rigors of an “on the streets” kind of homelessness, combined with the inability to follow my probation conditions, is weighing so heavily upon my shoulders. I do not wish to return to prison. Who in their right mind would?

I pray for some kind of miracle. That some door or window of opportunity will avail itself unto me. I have applied for employment through the computers at the library. Yet this in itself is not enough. The job search is made even more difficult by the fact that I currently own one pair of prison-issue blue jeans with a broken zipper, a stained white cotton polo-style shirt, and a now dirty black t-shirt which is wildly inappropriate for my job search.

Being homeless is not an easy thing. Being homeless with federal probation on top of it is unbearable. 

That unsettling feeling has struck again. The feeling of abject loneliness as I lie once again under the drawbridge abutment.

I think back to just a mere ten months ago. I was comfortable and safe in my apartment. I had a job, a dog, a car, a sweet loving girlfriend, and everything was normal. I felt like I could hold my head high again, unashamed of the taint of homelessness.

Now look at me...lying on a cheap, green sleeping bag with a blue plastic tarp under it. Back to eating in the soup kitchens and the Miami Rescue Mission. Lining up to take a shower at a homeless shelter. Arguing with frustrated fellow homeless people, now in charge of doling out donated clothes over a pair of khaki cargo shorts that are missing the button to fasten the waist. Listening to former homeless pastors preach unto deaf ears; telling horror stories about their special crack-addicted Christianity. No one on our side of the fence is impressed with a crack addict turned preacher.

I avoid everyone. I talk to no one at length. I’ve learned that nine times out of ten, that guy sitting next to me in the soup line is an idiot. I’d like to give some of them the benefit of the doubt; yet in another bout of homelessness, my overwhelming urge is to use my fellow man as cannon fodder to better my own place in the concrete jungle of which I was rudely thrown. It is sheer survival of the fittest.

Am I so wrong with these thoughts? Even with these thoughts in the soup line, I bandaged a man’s foot with my own limited medical supplies. I can’t let them suffer even if I despise most of them.

Now as the sun begins to set, a chill begins to settle into me. The wind whips through the abutment. Another night under the drawbridge.

I hope the things I’ve been doing to alleviate my current situation pan out. It’s really my only hope that I alone will pull myself out of this situation. I’ve never met a former homeless person who’s said, “Yeah, someone said to me ‘let me get you off the street.’” It’s always someone who is willing to end the cycle themselves. “Gee I hope a house falls out the sky from the homeless fairy,” said no sane person ever.

I don’t want to sound bitter, even though I feel bitter. I can’t hide my feelings through my words. Resentment filters into me like a burning hatred which I cannot seem to rid myself of.

Whether I am lonely, frightened, angry, embittered, or just tired, you can find me under this drawbridge. You can find me however you want. You won’t find me hopeless.

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Illustrations by Haley McCord