Cole is an affable and handsome young African-American guy standing on a corner downtown singing with his guitar and trying to make some money. He has a part-time job, working mostly weekdays, leaving him free to be on his corner (and other locations depending on baseball games and other events) where there are people around on the weekend. People walking by will often sing along and dance, and he says late night is when he makes “a killing” from drunks and families getting on and off the train.
Cole is tall and has a great smile. He is 28 and looks like a professional athlete. He played basketball in college, and has one year left to get his BA in Communication Studies. He says he might get a degree in something else, and he might move to some other country too. When asked why he would move away from Chicago, he laughs and says he is just “messing with you.” He thinks he is funny. He is pretty charming. He is a good singer. He knows so many different songs. He takes requests.
By working his burger job and singing those requests, he says he works a lot more hours than some of the “kids I used to hang with in college who now have regular full-time jobs.” He says he is always tired, has only bad places to sleep, and wants to get off “that magical merry-go-round.” Then he smiles and starts laughing.
Homeless for three years now, he has had his wallet stolen, his guitar scraped up, and “his ass kicked pretty good” while always running to get away. He does not consider himself a fighter and broke up with his girlfriend when he lost what he calls a perfect job and got evicted. “She moved on to greener pastures,” he jokes.
Like many poor Americans, Paul has a good part-time job that keeps him in cheeseburgers, chocolate shakes, and of course his essential large morning coffee. Almost everybody he works with is part-time, just like he has been doing for over a year. He will not say the name of the place he works.
Cole admitted he has had his phone stolen and has gotten jumped late at night at a CTA stop. He felt sick one night and got off the Red Line at Roosevelt because he thought he was going to vomit. He did not see anybody around, at first. Suddenly, a guy “who was not very big” came up to him and started yelling he wanted a cigarette. The next thing Cole knew, somebody came up behind him and hit him over the head with something. He staggered, and some more guys started kicking and punching him. Luckily, a train pulled up going the other way and he ran on. The guys did not follow him onto the train.
The next day, he was trying for money at a bus stop and some guys were circling him. Right when they went to grab him, he jumped on the bus and ran far to the back. He prayed all the way to work. He only had to work four hours that day, and riding the bus back to the corner where he hangs out he suddenly realized he could get killed.
“I was getting really nervous, and my heart started beating really fast,” he explained. “I wanted to find a place to go so bad, to hide, to sleep, to count my money in private.”
It was then he decided he would go and ask his cousins if he could sleep at their house, trading space for shoveling snow or mowing the grass or anything he could do.
They agreed, and they let him sleep in their basement on a couch. There was an old TV that did not work but there was a little cheap radio. Mostly, he had to listen to the washer and dryer a lot at night. He did not care. He spent many hours down there. He said, “All I wanted next was a good place of my own, where I could go home and close the blinds and nobody could kill me.”
Cole was surprised a couple weeks later when he went to work and the boss asked if he wanted to work full-time instead of half-time. Two employees were gone – one fired and the other went to a new store. Cole jumped at the chance.
He said it was by far the best day of his life.
Cole seemed so different. He was clean. His shirt looked good. When I had first met him, he was kind of a mess. Dirty clothes and hair – kind of like a wildman. Cole joked, “The best thing about my cousin Clare’s house is that I always have clean shirts!” His sleeping next to the laundry machines came in handy, after all!
He has been working full-time for six weeks now, and he looks so happy. Soon, he will get someplace to live.
“It won’t be a real apartment, like with separate rooms and fancy appliances,” he said. He confided he will live in one of those “cheap-ass cribs” where you can only get in by going in somebody’s back yard and going down some old stairs. He thinks there might be a bathroom, fridge, and maybe a stove. “The coolest part is, I can lock the door and relax.”
When I ask for details, Cole is evasive: “I don’t know man, I just heard of a place and it might work out.”
Cole is like almost every homeless person you meet on the street – he wants to “wind up living somewhere” as he says. He wants off the train, out of the snow, and off the streets. Though he was very lucky and he will spend most his time now away from his buddies he has survived with for many years, he will not forget them.
Cole pledges to take them gifts and go visit them, buy them a coffee or a bacon cheeseburger. “They are my buds,” he jokes, and “I will have their back.” He just does not want to be outside anymore.
He has been very lucky indeed and has succeeded in following a very middle-class fashion of getting off the streets, namely working, earning more hours, and soon securing lodging of his own. This status helps him get donations and food from people who are “pulling for him” and hoping he will keep “working hard…”
People pray with him and for him. They reportedly tell him all the time “You should not be out here!” Because he looks preppy and handsome and built, people often say he “does not look homeless.”
Cole is glad to have supporters who give him money. He knows some people have been his supporters since he first wound up on the street. They still help him out. They give him little gifts, small amounts of money. Cole thinks most people are afraid that homeless people will go buy drinks and drugs. On a good night, he will get a “slice and a coke” and meet some nice new girls and some friends.
Unfortunately, his supporters have not learned much about homeless people. Cole is not a typical long-term or chronic homeless person. He is more like “half-homeless” as he says. But he has made at and will soon be living in his own spot. People who have been helping him have not grown a lot in their understanding of homelessness and poverty but have in fact helped him.
“They don’t know much about the streets, but at least they do believe in me….” Cole reflects.
It is that inkling of hope, that bit of dignity that help self-starters like lucky Cole break a cycle, break a pattern, and through his own hard work get to where he needs to go. At least for now. Maybe he will be “living a little higher even,” he suggests, if he keeps working hard and he does not spend his money “on stupid shit like beer and weed.”
Cole tells me he has done his share of partying, drinking hard when in college and smoking too much weed. He mentions he has had some nights partying where he does not remember some of the details. His girlfriend is not a big drinker and is “one of those serious college students parents love,” he jokes. Open and real, Cole says there were some nights he got “pretty wound out.”
“One morning I woke up undressed next to a dude and I thought, OH NO, this is going a little too far,” he laughed. He said, “I am completely straight and so is the other guy but that does not mean we need to be sleeping naked together or should be having sex.”
When pressed for more information, he confided, “Well, he is a hot guy but I am not into guys.” He said he knew the guy and he told Cole he really enjoyed having sex and wanted to do it again soon. Cole said he was “pretty surprised” he did that stuff to a dude. Although the guy has tried to convince Cole to “get with him that way” again, he does not want to. “I know the dude is very liberal – and horny – plus he likes me, and I know he liked what I did to him…”
Cole says he has many very liberal and sexually fluid friends and does not judge them – is just not “into them that way” and does not plan to explore that world.
He jokes and says he guesses he is so sexy even dudes like him, and then he bursts out laughing. “It is hard to be this hot, everybody after me for some of this hot lovin’!” Cole keeps laughing and says he is just not interested in any more of those kinds of nights.
He becomes more serious and tells me he needs to “get real” and keep his act together. He does not really remember everything he did that night, and that seems to scare him a little. After those college days, he has become bent on surviving, enjoying his music, and of course “forging a home out of the wilderness,” as he calls it.
Cole feels so lucky he has experienced interesting things and has been able to go to college on a scholarship – so no loans at this point – something his two older brothers cannot claim. They had to pay for college and have loans “like most people,” Cole advises. They both live in a city out east and do not know he is homeless.
“They would kick my ass if they knew I was sleeping on a train and I used to be partying so much,” he told me. Cole also said his brothers are not that “liberal” in their thinking and did not think he should “waste time on music,” as he reported they would say. They are both very conservative, one being a minister and the other being a high school counselor who mentors young African-American males. They were always very rough with Cole. He does not stay in close touch with them.
Since his parents died when the boys were young, Cole feels he never became confident. He never became sure of “how he should be.” Now, he looks forward to life slowing down enough he can sit in his new room – he hopes to have with the arrival of one of his next paychecks – and quietly play his guitar and learn some new chords.
He looks at me and smiles, asking what I am thinking.
I simply respond, “Good luck with your safe space, man.”