The Thin Blue Safety Net

As far as I can tell, there isn't a single solitary commercial streetcorner in all of Tallahassee that's not manned by a homeless person with a sign, and many of them have several. The fast food joints, convenience stores and Walmart parking lots are also full of them, sometimes panhandling and sometimes "between shifts", stuffing down a burger or burrito from the value menus or just cooling off in the air conditioning or using the restrooms. Every city park has it's contingent as well, and a few of them have barely-detectable shantytowns hidden off in the brush, accessible only by makeshift trailheads hidden behind dumpsters and public restrooms.

Factor in the fact that Tallahassee is the state capital, home to hundreds of politicians and bureaucrats, and it's very likely home to more deadbeats than all the other cities and towns in Florida combined.

And no, these aren't down-on-their-luck transients, folks who've gotten a bad break or made a bad decision and found themselves struggling temporarily. Most of these guys have been here for a couple of years, shuffling around town to "work" different streetcorners, cot surfing the shelters until they reach their day limit or do something beligerent and get kicked out, again. One guy I know lives under a collection of tarps behind the sluice at Martha Woodman Park, another lives under an old wooden sign leaning against the back of a Dollar General.

I frequent a McDonald's next to the interstate. I buy their tea and poach their WiFi between clients, and almost always get to play witness to Street People Theater, the 21st century equivalent of Beggar's Opera, sans music. There are loners, and there are cliques. The cliques are usually centered around this one woman, and they seem to comprise a group of men all jockeying to see which one can be her "boyfriend". Or maybe it's because she's the only one with a cellphone, who knows.

The cliques are uniformly obnoxious, but the loners are just sad. These people are human wreckage, used and spit out by the machine, with nobody left with the financial ability or emotional strength necessary to be their caretakers. This leaves them at the mercy of the streets, or the state. And by "state", I don't mean the mental health facilities that are the laughable excuse for a safety net that only the well-connected and well-established can afford to navigate. I mean the police.

Some of these folks are borderline scary, and might be comical if they weren't so devastatingly heartbreaking. In one 24-hour period I witnessed two who were carrying on animated conversations with invisible companions. One guy (white, twenty-something) was speaking in the clipped, officious tone of an interrogator, taunting his victim that he knew damn well about his activities at Roswell and that he couldn't fool him because he was from Venus too. Another white twenty-something, this time a woman, was adamant that her companion was "Lucifer", and that he/she was the one responsible for "sending all those niggers over to rape my womb." Both of these dialogues caused ripples of concern and hilarity in the McDonald's, and the woman smartly ejected herself before management had to intervene.

Perhaps the saddest of these transients is a guy whose name I learned is Josh. Josh smells bad but never says anything, preferring to sit at the bar next to the endlessly-looping "McDonald's TV". I'm guessing he can recite the hour-long collection of gameshow snippets, Big Bang Theory scenelets, and McDonald's commercials by heart now (I might could myself). Josh always buys something, and I've never seen him panhandling. I have, however, seen his difficulty managing space. Josh is dealing not with imaginary friends, but imaginary barriers. They seem to be mathematical: when he goes to sit in his seat, he must first go through a ritual where he "almost" sits, but gets back up again, over and over. Four times, sometimes more, he goes through this ritual. I see this outside as well, as he approaches the sidewalk to walk over to the Circle K next door: he walks to the curb, turns around, and walks back four steps, then turns around and walks back to the curb, etc. Josh has a hard time dealing, but he's dealing.

Last night I found myself back at McDonald's, over in the corner updating a client's training plan before bopping home, when I saw Josh getting out of a car outside. A brief flicker of alarm flitted through my brain--he drives? I guessed he lived in his car and was probably all he had, but it was still concerning to think about this guy--who can barely walk without difficulty--driving unaccompanied on the road. It took him a few minutes to make it in. When he did, I noticed the people at the counter were directing him to use the kiosk. This distressed him, and I wondered about the cluelessness of the employees who didn't realize that this simple exercise might very well be beyond his capabilities. Just take his damn money, I thought to myself, he's only getting a McMuffin and a drink and there's nobody else in line, forgodsake. But to the kiosk he went, and fumbled there for a good minute before I decided to get up and help him. I asked him what he was trying to order and he told me, and I punched it in and totaled it and asked him how he wanted to pay. He had cash, so I closed his order and gave him the little ticket, which he had to take to the counter anyway to complete his order and pick up his cup. In other words, I did their job for them, but they took his money anyway.

I sat back down and tried to wrap up my evening's work. After about ten minutes, the police walked in. Four of them.

One of them approached Josh and asked if he had some ID. You could see his body language change immediately. This came totally out of the blue to him. He was just eating his damn McMuffin, watching Drew Carey hand out cash prizes, and up walks a group of Men In Uniform to Interrogate Him. Who wouldn't be distraught?

"N...no" he stuttered (and I immediately thought of Billy Bibbet from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). "I don't have my ID."

"What's your name?"

"Josh (something, I couldn't make out his last name)."

"Well Josh, do you have a home?"

"Yes." Really? I was flabbergasted again. For weeks I'd assumed Josh was homeless. But then I find out he not only drives, but has a home. Wow.

"Josh," the cop continued, "do you realize you have a restraining order against you?"

"No, no I don't....I've talked to the managers here, they're cool with me..."

The cop continued on, using the modulated voice of an interrogator--not unlike the guy from Venus I mentioned above...and not unlike Nurse Ratched, actually--and he continued to grill Josh, who was visibly shaking and obviously distressed.

"I don't have a restraining order!" he insisted.

"He does," another cop chimed in.

"My partner says you do Josh."

"Well I don't know anything about it. You can't do this."

"Yes we can Josh. I was told you have a restraining order and you've come back here anyway. Why shouldn't I take you to jail?"

Now Josh was about to lose it. "This is illegal! You can't do this!" His voice had moved up a few octaves, and sweat was starting to bead up on his forehead.

"Josh it's not advisable to resist."

"I'm NOT RESISTING!"

Well that was all I could take. I jumped up and got between the cops and Josh: "Josh, don't do this," I pleaded, trying to remain as calm as I could to offset his obvious panic. "You won't win, just walk away. Please."

He never even made eye contact with me. He was too agitated by this time. And then the piglet intervened.

"Sir I'm only going to ask you once to sit down."

I gave him a glance and looked back at Josh. "Please Josh, please." Then I sat down.

A few minutes later they had Josh in handcuffs. He was still protesting that they "couldn't do this", and that it was "illegal". That's the last I saw of him.

I packed up my laptop and headed to the door. The manager on duty--the one who called the cops on Josh--called out to me in a chipper voice: "All finished?"

"Fuck yeah I'm finished." Her smile froze. She had never seen this side of me, obviously.

I was livid, too distraught to manage the speech in my head I would've liked to deliver. But I did manage this:

"Did you ever see To Kill A Mockingbird?" I asked. She didn't respond, just stood there frozen looking at me, probably wondering if she was going to have to call the cops again. "Remember the character Boo Radley? He was the gentle simpleton who everyone was scared of and taunted, even though he was actually harmless and kindhearted. Remember? Yeah, well, you just called a group of violent criminals out to harass and kidnap Boo Radley. Congratu-fucking-lations."

It was lame, but I guess it will have to do. I'm not going back. There are plenty of places with WiFi. And with better food as well. And better people