Robert L. Terrell

Big Mike, the wheelchair-bound, homeless man I have been intensively photographing for years, is dead. I was recently informed of his death by his hard, drinking street people colleagues. I knew he was in serious trouble for more than a year. His health was declining, and his strong, fierce will to live was slowly, inexorably, fading. Mike was big, black and impressively dignified. Unlike most of his homeless, hustling buddies, he never begged, and he always exuded immense pride and self-confidence. Despite his broken body, twisted legs and awful living conditions, he handled himself like a Prince.

Thus, he was always cordial when I approached and tried to get him to talk. But he was a man of few words, and it was obvious to me that he had little interest in getting people such as myself to understand his situation, or his take on life in this brutally exclusive society. As a result, he was never got completely comfortable with my efforts to document his situation via questions and photography. He once told me he was from Texas. But I found out later that he had relatives in Oakland and Bayview Hunters Point. After photographing him for a couple of years, I created a special photo file consisting of shots featuring him and his closest friends. The file was titled “Texas Mike.”

With the passage of time, he became more comfortable and accepting of me. He signaled this by lettering me shoot from closer angles for longer periods of time. He liked alcohol. And so did his buddies. They constituted a close-knit clan, and I learned a tremendous amount about the culture of poverty in this ostentatiously wealthy city by closely observing their poverty-stricken, street side living conditions. Many of the men and women who belonged to Mike’s ragged crew of friends and colleagues moved in and out of their tight circle over the years. Sometimes one of them would disappear for a few weeks, and return cleaned up and outwardly prepared to resume life in mainstream society.

But more often than not, those who had been missing for a while returned in worse condition, smelly, dirty and dazed in the manner somewhat unique to hardcore, street side alcoholics. But Big Mike was the group’s anchor. Excepting occasional trips to the hospital to detoxify, he was pretty much always there, and easy to find in the three-square block territory over which he presided, and in which he slowly relinquished his fragile grip on life.

His friends say he lived on the street for seven years. They also say he loved drugs, and had no aversion to using them in combinations that would have killed a lesser man years ago. In response to my questions about why he lived on the streets, and whether he had options to leave, his friends said he had strong, supportive, loving family members who did everything they could over the years to get him to leave the streets. Mike’s friends say he once attended college. They say he was highly intelligent, and extremely articulate. Then he had an accident.

“It tore up his whole body,” said one of his buddies “After that, he was always in the wheelchair. After that, he was a different person. I loved Mike. We loved to hang out together. He slept under the bridge. Sometimes his family would take him away, clean him up, put nice clothes on him, comb his hair. But sooner or later, he would be back on the street. He loved it out here on the streets.”

He loved it out here on the streets? I shudder. We should all shudder. It sticks in the mind. “He loved it out here on the streets.” Leaving aside the fact that life on the street destroys good judgement, Big Mike’s friends repeat the claim so frequently that one is forced to face the reality of its stark ramifications. All societies produce individuals who chose to live outside the close embrace of mainstream life, and they frequently congregate together in ways that lead to the formation of shared, norms and traditions.

For reasons I will never fully understand, Big Mike was such a person. The fact that he loved life on the streets, including the drugs, drama and adventure that come with it is not the thing that most disturbs me. Excluding his tragic, unnecessary death, I am most disturbed by my recognition that he considered life on the street superior to all the available alternatives. With all due respect to Big Mike’s life and memory, we might use his death to address one of the most critically important issues associated with persistent, long term, chronic homelessness.

That is the fact that many of the chronically homeless people who inhabit our streets have consciously decided that it is the best possible form of life for them. They have experienced the mainstream womb inhabited by the rest of us, and rejected as dehumanizing and profoundly inadequate. Far too many of them feel the same way about the terribly modest forms of assistance that we offer. And their rejection of that paltry assistance is indicative of their overall disdain for us. The struggle being waged here in San Francisco to eliminate chronic homelessness is epic, and, for better or worse, success or failure regarding this signature problem will define the soul of this era just as much as the New Deal legislation defined the generation that was of age during the Great Depression.

In any event, I would like to acknowledge that some important things have been achieved in San Francisco under the leadership of Mayor Gavin Newsom. Moreover, the Mayor has put himself way out on the line in a high profile manner regarding the problem. He is paying his dues. Thus, it seems appropriate to extend modest kudos to Mayor Newsom for the manner in which he and his administration have gone about getting San Franciscans to take chronic homelessness more seriously.

It also seem appropriate to note that to the extent that more has not been achieved up to this point, the rest of us should share the blame. Thus, the following observations are about those of us who are not Mayor Gavin Newsom. Eliminating chronic homelessness will take a change in attitude and behavior by a critical mass of citizens. Moreover, all concerned persons should understand that success is about something more than comfortable, aloof citizens all too casually saddling government officials with inadequate resources and expecting them to eliminate complicated, endemic social problems such as chronic homelessness. In other words, we need to stop setting up public officials to fail.

We clearly aren’t living up to our responsibilities as set forth in the proverbial Social Contract. According to the Contract, citizens are entrusted with responsibility for working together honorably, efficiently and effectively to eliminate grave and serious threats to overall community health and stability. Given that, it is clear that we are miserably failing where the issue of chronic homelessness is concerned. Somehow or another, we have to develop the capacity to understand that chronic homelessness will eliminate itself if the available options are sufficiently improved. Affordable housing is a necessary component for success. But I have begun to seriously consider the probability that that even if we provide the resources necessary for housing each homeless person in our community, the problem will persist.

That’s because chronic homelessness is about something more than inadequate housing. It is also a result of a catastrophic tear in a community’s social fabric. In other words, chronic homelessness in wealthy societies such as ours represents human failure on a large, entrenched scale. Given this, we can’t hope to make definitive progress toward eliminating the plague of chronic homelessness until we make life inside mainstream society more attractive than life outside on the streets, in the garbage, with the rats and vermin, lodged in the low, nasty interstices of our buildings and neighborhoods.

Unless and until we manage to accomplish this feat, alienated souls like Big Mike and his friends will continue to haunt our lives. Their dark, brooding stares, which follow us with utter disdain and silent scorn as we go about among them tending compulsively to our insulated, self-satisfied lives, will continue to reflect our clueless ignorance of the fact that we are the problem.