"I'm an asset, not a liability!"

California Dreaming: Between Utopia and Homelessness

I live in all those California tensions @TheRestHistory was talking about. Glorious weather this morning. The wooded hills that ring the valley have not yet started to burn for the summer. There is a drought but we have water for today...

Heading into the office I need to run the familiar gauntlet of homelessness. The pandemic adds the strange iconography of medical masks as part of the normal shopping carts, feces and beer cans...

Because I'm a pastor, and have Jesus' story of Lazarus and the rich man haunting me I can't push it aside as nuisance or social problem. There are people living in and bringing the filth.

After years these aren't "random" individuals. We know each other. We are the strange sorts of friends who share stories over food, lend money, and sometimes put our friends into jail or locked psych wards.

There is a restraining order against this particular individual from being here. Three years ago he attacked an elderly church member who was moving much of "his stuff" to the garbage can.

He served some time for the assault and after I put him back in jail a few months ago has mostly lived at the grocery story next door. Yesterday I got an SOS text from our church plant meeting on the lawn. Drunk, despondent and scary to the young families.

When I got there he had already passed out and so I let him sleep. We chatted later in the afternoon. "Yeah, I'll go. But this is my home. This is the only place I feel safe! I kept an eye on the place when I noticed you were gone..."

So all the familiar choices I've lived with for 20+ years here are on the menu on my first day back in the office. 1. Clean the mess up myself 2. wait and try to get him to do it 3. text his probation officer (again) 4. Report to SacPD another violation of the RO

All of the options have relational/friendship and ministry implications. Why do I leave Billy undisturbed on the property and not him? D takes regular offense at this but Billy makes less mess, is out of the way and has never assaulted a church member.

Any of the options I choose are complicated and will lead to one sort of confrontation or another. I've become an expert at managing these confrontations but they are seldom satisfying or fully effective. We avoid catastrophe another day until death do us part.

So I'll go about my work in my office until he knocks on the door or I hear the familiar shambling outside the door or I smell the smoke from the weed wafting in. Then we're back at the game.

"Don't try to fix me" is his frank and repeated liturgy. At one point in his life he had a wife, four kids, and was a loyal member of the LDS church although there are many signs he's always struggled with stability and sobriety.

He's a musician and was an athlete in his youth excelling in gymnastics and competitive skiing. I regularly facilitate phone calls to his elderly parents in Utah and an occasional cash birthday gift to one of his now young-adult children.

He used to work for Sacramento county mental health. He has both run crack houses and worked with those trying to beat their habits. He regularly tells me "I use, I don't abuse" but it's a hard case to make when you're swinging from despondent self-hatred to productive euphoria.

He's a case study that psych meds can help even with good insurance and regular attention from the best resources Sac County has to offer our panoply of solutions is insufficient to hold him.

I had a hard time keeping a straight face when the intervention specialist I arranged to meet him afterward excused himself by saying "I can't talk to him he's crazy!" Um, well. What did you expect?

I've watched the decline for about a decade now. I wonder if he could manage this today.

Now at the age of 61 his body is no longer tolerating all the abuse he regularly gives it, or gives itself. He will pass like others I've known before. Gets hit by a car, then into some shitty nursing home until death.

I of course watched my father do this work before me. I didn't realize I was learning his craft as I watched him do it. I never thought I would pick up the trade.

He of course learned it from his parents. Feeding "hobos" at the kitchen table during the Depression. Welcoming the traumatized Dutch to Canada after WWII.

What is the church but the place where this happens. The one door besides prison that will open when you have caused even your own family to throw up their hands.

He may not show up today. He might have figured out a way to get into the hospital or was arrested for violating his ban at all the local shops. If the mess sits two days I'll clean it up, throw it all out and when he gets out he'll scrounge all new bedding, etc.

One of his favorite lines is "I'm an asset, not a liability!" He's right, but really quite a peculiar sort of asset.