Monday, June 11, 2007
Off the Street and in an Apartment, but Unable to Escape Homelessness - N.Y. Times
For years, Johnny Five lived not on the streets but below them, in the dark underworld beneath an abandoned train station in the Bronx. Johnny uses two pieces of plywood as the door to the place he has called home for 21 years. He had to crawl in the dirt at the edge of a concrete platform to get in and out. He bathed with rubbing alcohol, but still his skin was covered with insect bites and infections. He said God talked to him there, sometimes through a portable radio, yet he considered his cave a kind of hell: overheated in the summer, frigid in the winter, a sunless place hard on the body but worse on the soul.
It was Christmas Eve when he first heard the news: Someone was offering him a way out. After reading an article about Johnny in The New York Times, Peter D. Beitchman, the executive director of the Bridge Inc., a nonprofit group that provides housing and services to mentally ill homeless people and others, immediately arranged for him to move into an apartment.
Days later, Johnny celebrated with the one person who had looked after him, Sister Lauria Fitzgerald, a Roman Catholic nun who helps the homeless in the Bronx. They ate dinner with another nun at an Italian restaurant in the Arthur Avenue section, three miles from the cave and around the corner from Johnny’s new home. He feasted on a plate of eggplant parmigiana and enjoyed his first taste of tiramisù.
But he didn’t want to touch the white linen napkin on the table. It was too clean.
...
For the next several months, Johnny would drift between his old life underground and his new one above it, struggling the way a man freed from prison must readjust to society.
...
Johnny’s homelessness was not about a lack of housing. It was more complicated, a result of a variety of spiritual, psychological and emotional causes. “Everything just bothering my conscience,” he said of the reasons he was homeless. “How can I ask God for forgiveness when I don’t forgive myself? So I’ll torture myself and go to the cave.” ...
For years, Johnny Five lived not on the streets but below them, in the dark underworld beneath an abandoned train station in the Bronx. Johnny uses two pieces of plywood as the door to the place he has called home for 21 years. He had to crawl in the dirt at the edge of a concrete platform to get in and out. He bathed with rubbing alcohol, but still his skin was covered with insect bites and infections. He said God talked to him there, sometimes through a portable radio, yet he considered his cave a kind of hell: overheated in the summer, frigid in the winter, a sunless place hard on the body but worse on the soul.
It was Christmas Eve when he first heard the news: Someone was offering him a way out. After reading an article about Johnny in The New York Times, Peter D. Beitchman, the executive director of the Bridge Inc., a nonprofit group that provides housing and services to mentally ill homeless people and others, immediately arranged for him to move into an apartment.
Days later, Johnny celebrated with the one person who had looked after him, Sister Lauria Fitzgerald, a Roman Catholic nun who helps the homeless in the Bronx. They ate dinner with another nun at an Italian restaurant in the Arthur Avenue section, three miles from the cave and around the corner from Johnny’s new home. He feasted on a plate of eggplant parmigiana and enjoyed his first taste of tiramisù.
But he didn’t want to touch the white linen napkin on the table. It was too clean.
...
For the next several months, Johnny would drift between his old life underground and his new one above it, struggling the way a man freed from prison must readjust to society.
...
Johnny’s homelessness was not about a lack of housing. It was more complicated, a result of a variety of spiritual, psychological and emotional causes. “Everything just bothering my conscience,” he said of the reasons he was homeless. “How can I ask God for forgiveness when I don’t forgive myself? So I’ll torture myself and go to the cave.” ...
Labels: compassionate people, forgiveness, homeless
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