Interview with Henry

“You don’t what it's like when your life changes.”

Henry has come to me, wanting to be interviewed.  Pristine white t-shirt, Cubs cap, and black jeans, he looks like half the guys you will see waiting for a bus or carrying furniture into an apartment or walking down the sidewalk.  Henry has been homeless “bout twenty years,” he tells me.

I ask him why he wants to be interviewed, and he answers that people need to know how hard it is to be homeless.  He wants to help other homeless people by telling what it is really like, he explains.

“White people don’t ever understand how hard it is, livin’ on the streets,” he mentions.  “They just don’t get it.”  He goes on to tell me of some of the wild adventures he has had – like almost getting killed and then almost getting his ass kicked one night recently.

Henry was carrying two heavy bags—one with his clean laundry and one with food and a variety of items from a can opener to some bottles of beer and some cans of Coke.  They were “heavy as f**k,” he laughs.  He was trying to cross the street, and right near his storage locker building, he made a shortcut across traffic, thinking a brand new Dodge Caravan would let him cross.  He was wrong—in fact the driver sped up and veered toward him.  Windows down, the van was full of young White guys who laughed and screamed things like “Get out of the street, you f**king N****r!” and “Move your ugly bla*k-monk*y ass out of the road!”

When the van roared past, Henry acted like he was spitting on it.

“Not a smart move!” he confided.  They turned into a parking lot and three of the guys came running after him, saying they wanted to talk to him.  “Well, that is not really what they said,” he laughs again.

He ran to the back of his storage building, entered his code, and ran inside, almost knocking down a guy who was tying some boxes to a cart so they wouldn’t fall down.  The guy was right in the way, and he pushed the guy and his boxes and cart out of the way.  The guy yelled at him, but Henry was overjoyed to get inside the door and get it closed and locked behind him.

He thought he did something very funny, but the guys in the van did not share his perspective on it at all. 

I ask him, “Why the fake spitting?  You know people in Chicago are crazy these days and will fight for any reason at all.”

First, he tells me I am not his “f**king dad.”  Then he tells me he thought it was funny as hell, and he also said to himself when he was doing it, “F**k them for not letting me cross!”

I sit there and I look at him.  He is a Black guy walking across the street, cutting across traffic, in racist-violent-crazy-dangerous Chicago.  His bags might make it look like he is homeless—a terrible condition to be in. Meaning… he is even more of a target as a homeless-looking guy, potentially.

So I ask him, “Why didn’t they let you cross?”

He glares at me and responds, “This city is racist as f**k!  They would have run over me if they could have gotten away with it.”

I argue, “Maybe it was just some stupid kids, out drinking beer and being crazy – seeing you thinking maybe they should scare you because that would be funny to them…”

Henry is still glaring, and he tells me that is not how it was.  “It wasn’t like a game… it was more like revenge to them.”

So I ask him, “If you know there are lots of racist White people, and you are cutting across traffic and they make it clear they don’t care if you have to carry heavy bags, not giving you a break, why don’t you take a clue and keep moving out of the way?”

His response?  “I shouldn’t have to move.  They should have let me cross.”

So I want to see how far I can take this discussion.  I add, “They could have carried the bags for you, given you a beer, patted you on the back, given you a hundred bucks, and said ‘Have a nice day, brother’ as they drove off.”

“Now you are the one who is not funny,” he answers.

I have known Henry for about five years.  I am not sure why he uses this kind of an example to show how racist White people are, or how they treat people badly, or how they harass the homeless.  It is a brief example, and it is not all that clearly one-sided.  Henry does not want to hear me say that, so we talk about other things for a while.

I ask him how he became homeless.  He responds that he was working and had a nice apartment with his brother who is two years older.  It was a really nice one-bedroom in Uptown, he tells me, and they shared the bedroom just like they did when they lived with their mother (who passed away many years ago now).  He says they always shared the cleaning and mostly ate burgers—both of them worked at McDonalds—two different ones.  Henry’s brother Terry kept working there and would bring home food every single night (was usually free) and so they did not cook much but they both can “make basic food like scrambled eggs and beef sandwiches and mixed drinks—important because of all those vitamins!” he jokes.

Then two big events crashed Henry’s world.  First, he got fired for “various reasons,” he said, at the store where he was working.  He was making good money and got to dress up, “even wearing a f**king tie!” he tells me.  But he got into that trouble at work, and then another huge event shook his life.

Henry’s brother got married.

Henry got along well with the girl, and she “was really cool.”  Or so Henry thought.  The moment things were “signed, sealed and delivered,” according to Henry, she forced Terry to cut all ties with his younger brother.

She didn’t want him around.  He was a liability, somehow, is how Henry thinks she saw him. 

“No more hanging out with my brother,” Henry explained.  “I was banished, like when they get banished in a movie.”

His brother told him he had to move out. Immediately.

At that moment, Henry officially became homeless.

I ask what was going through Terry’s mind during all of this.  What would he have been thinking then?

Henry responds, “Well, I was not working but I was drinking more… I was hanging with some women who were kind of into drugs and who also loved to drink…”

I ask what was happening with friends or other relatives.

He tells me there were no relatives around… there were no “cool friends” only people into getting high and “f**king around all day” instead of working or going to school…

I ask why he didn’t try to find a job again and try some other things, like volunteering at a shelter or somewhere else where they might know about low-priced rooms or where they might help him get a roommate or into an apartment of his own eventually.

He says to me “You don’t what it’s like when your life changes.”

I sit there and look at him, unsure how to respond.  So I offer, “Your life changed and you weren’t sure what to do…”

He says to me “It was like a chapter in my life ended… and I didn’t really know what to do next…”

I ask if he has ever told anybody this, and he says he has not.  He looks down at the floor and is quiet.

I try something… “Well, now that you have told me, you can tell other people about all this.”

He keeps staring at the floor.

I ask him to please tell me more about what he has been through.  I promise him I will write it down and tell other people so they can see what it is like to be homeless.  What it is like to go through hard things.

Henry goes on to tell me more of his adventures.  More about his life as a young Black guy who is unhoused, unroofed.

Twenty years of wandering the streets.  Drinking beer.  Being broke.  Sleeping on the train.  Getting knocked out.  Getting thrown out of Burger King.  Getting banished.

So I go on, “Maybe if you told some people they could help you and you could get a place to stay for awhile… at least… and maybe other things you need.”

He says to me, “Maybe if somebody goes with me… I could try to get some sh*t I need…”

“Yeah, well that is a start, Henry.”  I think about how so many people in his life dropped the ball on him twenty years ago, “banishing” him, giving up on him, and throwing him away like an old McDonald’s wrapper. 

So ends another conversation on the lovely streets of Chicago. 

But there is hope.