This is a dangerous and beautiful city. It's not supposed to be a cold city. Tonight is a "freeze" night. I've learned a lot in the 6 hours since I decided that I was going to save the homeless population from certain death by giving them jackets. This is not how my night went at all.
4 PM: I'm buying Queso Fresco from my friendly neighborhood grocer, watching what looks to be one man and one woman, pushing a cart full of cans down the street. A toddler sits atop the cans. Jesusfuckingchrist, if I'm freezing my arse off in my house, what are they going to do?
1 AM: I am in the back of a paddy wagon with 4 bums. We are freezing
our asses off, but thawing.
5pm: I go on a run for jackets to Dr. Annie's house. She heaps blankets into my car, saying, "this is great, but I work with these folks, and no kidding, some of them are dangerous, I'll make some phone calls, there's probably a group or something who does this stuff." An hour later I'm riding around with the homeless unit of the police department, which appears to be exactly 2 people who work 20 hour shifts.
A freeze night is when all the missions in the city are open all night to everyone. Even the rehab opens it's cafeteria floor to whomever stumbles in. Homeless people sleep on the street with their shoelaces tied together behind their heads. If they didn't, their shoes would be stolen off their feet. I met several people feet first. Some of them were batshit crazy, and some of them were sane and pleasant, some were drunk and some were stone sober. The sane ones slept near the crazy ones. It's dangerous to sleep alone, but some do.
It's illegal to beg for money. ...And to block the sidewalk, and sleep in public, and mill about, and to trespass, and to take food out of dumpsters, and to be ugly in the tourist part of town, or the residential part of town, including the strip malls and abandoned houses. Everyone I met tonight had an intimate relationship with the municipal court system.
What does it look like when you see a cop approaching a human-shaped pile of blanket and cardboard, with socks? Not ever, not even once did I think it could possibly look like this.
"Hey, hello, is that Ted? wake up, are you up? We got a freeze tonight, let me take you in, which mission you wana go to? Oz or Sisters? Hey Raquel? How about you?"
Ted concedes, Raquel refuses. Ted: "Awright, fine by me, it's cold out here." He emerges, a young kid in a baseball hat, from a pile of crap. He says, talking to himself and me, "Couldn't pay the rent." He's apologetic. Raquel, sleeping 6 feet away, starts swearing and cursing God and Government. She confides to me, that in fact, she was a paralegal from Maryland. I looked in her wild shattered-in-the-middle eyeballs, she was, once, I believe, a paralegal from Maryland. She needed medication. And both she and I know where to get it; from Dr. Anne at the free clinic, 30 minute walk from where we were standing.
The cop, I call him that, but he's uncomfortable both being a cop and not being a cop. For all intents and purposes, he is a cop. He's 10 feet tall, at least. He's got a bullet proof jacket, a shiny star, a mustache, carries a gun, and runs red lights when he deems it important, which is always. But he won't arrest you, call you a fucking punk, hit, grab or shoot, but he could. He apologizes when he curses. If you are deemed arrestable, he calls the cops. 5 people in 4 years, not bad eh? he brags. The cop, and me in tow, spent the night ferrying people from the bridge to the mission, from the station, to the mission, from the street corner, to the mission. He knows them, they like him, and he lives to help them, even if they are goddamn...excuse me...impossible fucking assholes sometimes! I was regaled with 10 years of 20-hour day stories about rescues, and impossible assholes, and rescues of impossible assholes.
A whiskered old carp of a man tells me when Officer Cop is very far ahead, "He's good. Watches out for us."
By the end of the night, I got one blanket to one person who really wanted to have a blanket, and watched a variation on what happens on cold nights when I'm usually buried in my bed, in my house. I felt dumb giving a man a blanket that will get stolen from him in his sleep, but tonight, one man, with a difficult name to pronounce, will be sleeping under a roof with a Pier-One silver-blue shoal with 100 other men, but out of the freeze.