“I came out of prison looking for a dime pay phone.” Eti
That’s how long I stayed in jail. 45 years. From 1970 to 2015. Bank robbery, nobody hurt. I could have come out in the 80s, but then I got into drugs. I don’t do that stuff no more.
When I came out, the world was totally different. I felt like I fell off a cliff, I didn’t know what to do. I was looking for a public phone, you know, where you put a dime in, but they didn’t have them no more. The world was very confusing for me.
“If it wasn’t for the Downtown Street Team, I’d be back in prison.”
It was hard to get a job, or anything, because I didn’t have any papers. The Downtown Streets Team helped me get a job that pays $16 an hour, down by the water. I do reservations for birthday parties and so on. DST means a lot to me. It’s like a second family. If it wasn’t for them, I’d be back in prison, because it was the only thing I knew.
I’m a volunteer for DST, leading a team of street cleaners. Many of them are homeless, and dealing with them isn’t easy. You be too hard on them and then they disappear. I’m learning how to communicate with them. From my own experience, I know homelessness is a tough life. Something happened to all these people and they need help.
“Shelters are not safe, but prison is a lot tougher.”
I’m still living in a shelter, waiting for a place to stay. There are a lot of bad people in the shelter, it’s not really safe. But prison is a lot tougher. Prison is like the jungle. People are like animals in there, they can eat you alive. Only the strongest survive. You got to know the rules there, live by the rules. You don’t trust anybody, just to stay alive. Now, I don’t have any friends, and I don’t put myself in a situation where you can take advantage of me.
I know my kids want me to go live with them, but I don’t want that. They have their lives, I live mine. My son is in Hawaii. One of my daughters is in San Francisco, and one is in Denver, Colorado. I got six grandkids from the young one and eight from the older one. My wife is gone, she left me in 2005.
I was a bad man in the 60’s, you know? Now all I can do is to help the homeless. I’m slowly starting to get used to life out here. But it’s still hard for me to communicate with people, and to use the mobile phone.
Shared periodically on Medium, and soon to be published in a book, ‘Stories Behind the Fog’ is a compendium of 100 stories of people affected by homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area. The project was triggered by one man’s story that will be released next year in the form of a feature-length documentary: www.mosesdoc.com
This story has been written by Arjanna Van Der Plas and Fran Guijarro, and photographed by Juli Lopez in collaboration with our partner organization Downtown Street Team.
