Down on Their Luck: A Study of Homeless Street People

University of California Press

It is a mid-January afternoon. A chilling "Blue Norther" has blown down from Canada into central Texas. A raw wind blows in the alleys and near-freezing rain pelts the streets. Not a day to spend outside. No matter, a twenty-five-year-old man in cowboy boots, a grimy denim shirt, and an oil-stained vest is sprawled on a rain-soaked piece of cardboard beneath his rusted-out black '65 Cadillac parked down the street from the Salvation Army. Aside from two short breaks to get warm, he has been lying under the car since breakfast, trying to install a secondhand starter. If he had had the right tools, he might have gotten the starter in by 10:00 A.M. Now time is getting short for making it to the plasma center before it closes. "If I don't get this car running in the next half hour," he mutters, "I'm going to have to walk the whole three miles to the plasma center in this rain."

Up the block from where the young cowboy is struggling with his car, nearly two hundred people have taken refuge from the cold, driving rain in the Salvation Army's drafty, run-down transient lodge. The Sally, as people on the streets call it, is an anomaly in the renovated downtown area, a diminutive tattered structure dwarfed by glittering highrises. Inside the Sally's Big Room, some of Austin's most destitute citizens are waiting out the storm. With 200 people, mostly male, the so-called Big Room is bursting at its seams. At the front it is standingroom only.

By the door, several young men with rumpled clothes and unkempt hair pass a cigarette around and peer through the steamed-up windows.

They discuss the dismal employment scene. "People keep saying this is the workingest city in the country, but you couldn't prove it by me," one of them laments. "I haven't been able to get a day's work since I been here."

"And you can write this week off," replies one of his companions, a middle-aged man with a wandering eye and a week's stubble on his face. "You ain't getting nothing in this weather."

Their conversation is interrupted by shouts from the audience of a game show that is playing on a small black-and-white television perched on a card table. Two Sally workers and several of their friends sit by the TV on the few chairs in the room. Behind them stretches a sea of disheveled bodies, discarded newspapers, cigarette butts, and wet paper bags filled with mildewed clothes. Many lie asleep. An acrid blanket of cigarette smoke hangs about four feet off the floor.

A few pockets of animated conversation punctuate the somber mass. Four men in the middle of the room are playing a lively game of hearts. Periodically their banter is halted when their eldest member, a sweettempered black man who reeks of stale urine, has such a violent coughing fit that they fear he will pass out.

Nearby, a couple of long-haired young men with two sets of earphones connected to one Walkman pretend to play guitars as they sing along loudly to a rock song no one else can hear. Behind them stands a heavily bearded young man with wild hair and a crude tattoo of a twoheaded snake stretching the full length of his right arm. He is throwing karate punches and arguing with an unseen foe. All the while a blond boy who looks to be about twelve years old darts around the room, stumbling over sleepers and leaving a muffled chorus of curses in his wake.

In a back corner of the room, half a dozen men and two women surreptitiously pass around a couple of joints. As the twelve-year-old sails into the back of the room, he sees what they are doing and begins to chant, "People back here are smoking joints!" Suddenly he is pulled to the floor and punched in the side. "Shut up, you little shit!" yells the man who pulled him down. "You're gonna end up dead if you don't shut up now. What the hell're you doing here anyway? Don't you have a mother or something?"

Squirming and whimpering, the kid slips out of the man's grip and shoots off through the crowd. The man shakes his head disgustedly, then gets up and worms his way through the crowd to the restroom. There he finds a long line of men waiting to use the single toilet. "What's

the problem?" he asks, after five minutes during which the line hasn't moved.

"Some guy in there's puking his guts up," a man at the front of the line informs him.

"He better finish pretty soon," the man behind the first says, pounding on the door. "Hurry up in there or I'm gonna go in my pants!" After another minute he steps out of line and heads for the door. "To hell with it," he grumbles. "I'll go outside." He winces as his bare feet hit the wet, cold pavement, and he vows when he goes back in that he'll "find the bastard" who stole his shoes.

As the barefoot man shuffles off to the side of the building, the young cowboy-mechanic sloshes into the Big Room. His clothes are soaked, he's shivering, and his right hand is wrapped in a bloody rag. In his left hand he holds the ratchet set, pliers, and screwdriver he's been using all day. Slowly he weaves his way to the back wall, where several older, crippled men are lying on cots.

"You look like a drowned rat," a little man with a dirty cast on his left ankle tells him. "What happened to your hand?"

The young cowboy drops the tools on the little man's cot. "I sliced it up when the ratchet slipped," he answers wearily. "Still haven't got the starter in. Can I bum a smoke?"

The little man reaches under his blanket, pulls out a package of Bugler tobacco, and rolls them each a cigarette. The man on the next cot watches them enviously. Finally he gets up the nerve to ask, "Can I have a couple of drags?"

"Here, have the rest of it," the little man says, passing him what's left of his cigarette.

The young cowboy slumps down by the cot. His mind is still focused on heading up to the plasma center to sell some blood, but his body is too weary to follow through on it. He's starting to warm up now, but his cut hand throbs and his throat feels scratchy. "Please don't let me catch a cold," he mumbles to himself. "It's for doggone sure I don't need that." He closes his eyes and imagines working a roofing job on a spring day: the smell of hot tar and the sun beating down on his back. Just as he is about to fall into a peaceful dream, the rambunctious blond boy stumbles and falls into his lap. Before the cowboy quite knows what hit him, the kid is up and running through the crowd again.

"No use going to sleep anyway," he muses. "Any time now they'll want us to get in line for dinner." He slouches against the cot, staring blankly at a large, gray-haired woman in a tattered dress. He's been

watching her for several minutes before he realizes with disgust that she is tearing scabs off large sores on her arms. The sight disturbs him so much that he gets up and wanders off to the front of the room. He's about halfway to the front when a commotion erupts by the bathroom. "Call an ambulance!" someone shouts. "I think the guy in the bathroom's had a heart attack!"

One of the Sally workers heads over to the bathroom; another goes to call 911. In a few minutes the Emergency...