‘Rick’ has a sort of ho-hum attitude about him. His face is long, framed by the brown hair curling out the bottom of his cap. His weathered-white skin is dull, wrinkling slightly around a long nose and wide, grinning lips—a gnarled, red-yellow scab spurts angrily from his upper lip. His chin juts forward in a fleshy lump, wiggling slightly as he speaks. Eyes dark brown, covered by sparse eyebrows, seem to dare the world to screw with him.
Rick was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Upon graduating high school, he joined the Army branch of the U.S. Armed Forces.
“I was in Hawaii, I’ve been to Korea, Iraq, Japan.”
He enjoyed Korea and Japan especially, he said.
“It was cool. It was a new experience. It was good to travel too. Of course, it wasn’t like vacation. I didn’t go to any hotels. Our mission was to attack… And I had a job to do. But the good thing was, I was in aviation. I got to work on helicopters. I got to fly. It was fun.”
Now, days after Veterans’ Day, he reminisces about the military experience.
“I got to go to a parade and ceremony at the Capitol. I got to meet a lot of WWII veterans, a lot of Vietnam veterans. It was interesting. WWII veterans are up there—eighty, ninety years old. So they’re more talk-able than the Vietnam vets. The Vietnam vets are still kinda grumpy.
When I talk to the vets, most vets don’t—shouldn’t—don’t need to brag and talk about their service. But I’m another vet, so I talk to them and say, ‘Hey, how was it back then? Did you have this equipment, or this stuff?’ ‘We didn’t have that.’ ‘We had to do it this way,’ and ‘we did it that way.’ So things have changed. Some of the WWII vets I’ve met, they had to carry 80 pounds of equipment. Not including their own gear. That was all radios, and batteries, and ammo. And then in Vietnam, it kinda lightened up a little bit. But in the Vietnam war, the Afghanistan War, they still carry 80 pounds. But for that 80 pounds they carry more equipment. Things got smaller and lighter. More compact.”
He was in the military for eight years before being discharged honorably from his last station, Fort Hood in Kileen, Texas.
Afterwards, he settled in Austin and took a job.
“I did a little bit of everything, but mostly I did warehouse-type work. I was in inventory stock, shift leader, drove forklifts—all kinds of stuff like that. Inventory control.”
He ended up marrying—and divorcing—twice. During the second divorce, he lost his job, lost rights to his home and was separated from his family. He’s been on-and-off the streets ever since.
“Between then and now, I’ve bounced around, renting rooms. I’ve been everywhere from here to Waco, and everywhere in between. Pflugerville, Cedar Park, Round Rock, Georgetown.”
Once, he stayed at a church-sponsored shelter for two months, he said, but had to leave because he couldn’t quit his smoking habit. Recently, he stayed at a friend’s house for a reduced rent, but couldn’t continue to afford the bills.
In any case, he’s constantly moving around. The last stable job he had, he held from 2013-2015.
“Usually when I find work, I find a place to stay. and then everything stays good for a while. The last time I had a job for two years, I wasn’t making enough money. I was paying more in bills than I was earning, so I gave my boss an alternative. I said, ‘Hey, I need a raise, or I’m going to have to find me another job.’ He didn’t want to give me a raise, so I left the job.”
Then, he was back on the streets.
“Between 2015 and now, I had a part-time job [in Marble Falls], and I held that down for about a month. The month of August. And then work got slow, they kinda cut my hours, so I had to go back to the streets again.”
EVEN HOMELESS PEOPLE STEAL FROM OTHER HOMELESS PEOPLE. DANGEROUS. CAUSE YOU GOT TO WORRY ABOUT BOTH SIDES OF THE FENCE—YOU GOTTA WORRY ABOUT THE COPS, YOU GOTTA WORRY ABOUT THE HOMELESS PEOPLE WHO COULD ROB YOU.
His current bout with homelessness has lasted since.
“This last time, I’ve been homeless since August. It’s only November, so three months. But, I’m looking forward to getting the hell out of here again. I’m looking for work now, but now that I’ve got this [upper lip wound]—I gotta go in for surgery.”
The angry scab on his mouth.
“I got drunk one night, stupid, lost my balance, fell down, and smack my lip against something, poked a hole right through it. Not only that, damaged my tooth behind it. I really can’t eat.”
But he’s struggling to pull himself up out of this homelessness period.
“Because I’m a vet, I’m having help through certain organizations. One of them’s the VA [Veterans’ Association], the other’s the Housing Authority. I got an apartment coming. Right now I don’t actually have an ID, because one of the churches helped me pay for my ID—it’s in the mail somewhere. It’s been a month and a half now, and I ain’t got no ID. But once I get that, once [my lip] gets healed up, I’ll be working. Definitely can work.”
He said he absolutely loathes being homeless.
“Oh yeah, I don’t want to stay in this environment. I want to get out of here bad. You see some of these guys here, they’ve been doing this for ten, twenty years. They don’t wanna do anything else. They wanna stay on the street.”
Not only is it infuriating to live among people who don’t try to help themselves, he said, but also it’s incredibly dangerous.
“The last time I had a campsite—I had a girlfriend at the time, and me and her, we had a nice campsite, we thought we were safe. But one night, we ended up getting drunk, passing out, and someone came into our tent and started robbing us. They broke my jaw, obviously they knocked her out. Even homeless people steal from other homeless people. Dangerous. Cause you got to worry about both sides of the fence—you gotta worry about the cops, you gotta worry about the homeless people who could rob you. So you’re always trying to stay alert. If you happen to get drunk—drink, or use, fall out—I guarantee you all your stuff will be gone. Disappears. Your wallet, purse, phone, tablet, laptop.”
That very crime happened to him.
“I had it all taken from me. I got stupid one night and had a few bucks in my hand and I went to go get drunk. I only had a backpack, but I had a tablet, had my phone, had my wallet, all in my backpack. And I used it to lie down, like a pillow. I thought, I’ll stay secure. I’ll keep it with me. I must have rolled off of it, and once I rolled off of it, I woke up, and it was gone.”
But one of the worst aspects of it, he said, is the restlessness.
“Being homeless, you get in trouble easily, because you’ve got nowhere to go to do anything. Come tomorrow, you sit here [on this curb], the cops come by? Trespassing. It’s a trespassing charge now. You can get ticketed or locked up for that.
I can understand the reason why they don’t want people sitting here. People park their cars, people worry about people breaking into them, damaging their vehicles, whatever. But I don’t touch nothin’. I don’t touch nobody’s car. I’m not here to try to steal somebody’s car, rip somebody off. It’s just, sometimes, you get tired of standing.”
The other things to get in trouble for?
“Drunk, PI’s, open container, sleeping in parks—that’s a doozy right there, I got a lot of those. What harm are you doing if you’re sleeping in a park? Who are you hurtin’?”
He offered me final advice.
“The law is stupid. You ever become a senator, or something, change those laws.”