Street talk

From our overstocked archives
 
Sam Smith - My morning walk in Washington would take me past Starbucks, where customers at sidewalk tables enjoyed the final products of the postmodern food chain. As I approached, I would pass a woman in front of the pharmacy just down the street. All her possessions were wrapped in plastic, and she spoke determinedly of things that shouldn't have been or shouldn't be. I tried saying good morning to her a few times, but she didn't see or hear me.

As I reached another corner, a man who looked a bit like Ray Charles except that he saw everything that passed, called out a greeting. "How you doing?" I reply, "I'm hangin' in there." He shouts back, "Don't worry. You'll make your move."

I wasn’t surprised by the encouragement. A regular near my office to whom I had never given more on passing than a quarter and a greeting approached me once in the magazine shop at the corner. "Come here," he said, "I've got something for you." He reached in his pocket and handed me the thirty cents that came out, adding, "You may need a cup of coffee." For several days thereafter, he refused any change from me, indicating that I had done my share.

I had the same office at one end of the block for 23 years. At the other end I had my conference room – my own table at La Tomate restaurant.

So it was my street, too. I seemed to hit it off with the other street folk, perhaps because they sensed in me a homeless mind. Once a regular gave me a Christmas card. Another stopped me to complain that Jesse Jackson had passed him without a donation. When my picture -- featured on the cover of Washington’s City Paper - lay on neighborhood shop floors for a week, one of the street men assured me that he was taking a copy to the shelter to read that night. Another said, "I didn't know you were a printer."

"I'm not, really," I said. "I'm more like a writer."

"Well that's even better. It's about time you got the attention you deserve."

When some years later I read what Joe "Professor Seagull" Gould had said to Joseph Mitchell, his New Yorker biographer, I felt as if it were me speaking: "Down among the cranks and misfits and the one-lungers and might-have-beens and the would-bes and the never-wills and the God-knows-whats...I have always felt at home."

Social pathology doesn't always live up to its reputation. There were, for example, the Wednesday night meetings of a group trying to organize around local issues. It gathered at a 1400-bed shelter, the largest in the country. As I walked up to the third floor, one of the residents was sweeping the steps and another was on the loudspeaker saying that too many people had congregated in the lobby and would they take their business elsewhere. There was a grimness to this place, but also a sense of order being recreated and -- even more important -- a sense of shelter, not just from the heat and the cold and the rain, but from a city and a nation that didn’t care.

The shelter had been started by Mitch Snyder, another good person in Washington who had grown tired of trying and in 1990 had taken his own life. I wrote a commentary for the local public radio station about it:

This spring, when homeless activist Mitch Snyder announced he was going to retreat to a monastery for awhile for reflection and renewal, I felt pulled to drop him a note thanking him for his witness, for the good it had done, for the wisdom and encouragement it had given others. In the note I quoted Emerson: "The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency."

I can not comprehend Mitch's last tack that ended in suicide. But the average tendency of his life has been as inspiring as any I have known. At times humbling, at times guilt-provoking, at times incredibly catalytic and at times -- yes -- aggravating, this one scruffy amalgam of love and anger, intensity and gentleness led us to care far more about what it was easier to ignore -- the homeless refugees of the puerile, avaricious American dream of the 1980s.

Lately we've been falling back to easier ways. The DC city council has just ordered a cruel retreat from the decency towards the homeless we overwhelmingly supported in Initiative 17. In San Francisco, on the very day Mitch died, Mayor Agnos ordered the arrest of homeless people sleeping in public places.

What effect this had on Mitch I don't know. I do know that in his last days he was organizing a massive drive for a referendum on the council action. As he met in the shelter to discuss the referendum last week, he patiently explained to a man reciting some of the new cynicism towards the homeless that no one in that 1400-bed shelter wanted to be there. Not even Mitch Snyder.

And I do know that we talked on the phone on Monday. He told me enthusiastically of the law suit being filed against the council and of the lawyers who were working on the case and would I be one of the plaintiffs. I said, sure, and he said -- as he did so often to so many people he had pulled to the cause in that soft gentle voice -- he said: "Thank you, my friend."

But I also know that Mitch lived a life in painful proximity to modern society's cruelest results and carried a terrible trusteeship for its victims. And in recent months, there were voices -- most sadly among those in power and in the media -- indicating that we no longer needed to care.

But for me, Mitch -- controversial, blunt and irrascible as he was on occasion -- fit the best definition of a saint I’ve come across, which is to say that Mitch Snyder was a sinner who kept trying.