homeless friend

when we lived in philly there were a lot of people getting involved in trouble. we had some amazing friends die directly due to drugs, and that was hard to live around. after we left a lot of things changed. the places we and friends lived gentrified, and a lot of money poured into parts of philly for a while. many of our friends in bands and bars bought businesses, went to grad school, had kids. i haven't been back in many years. we had one friend there who was more of a frequently seen acquaintance. we'd go get coffee at this cool little place, they had old-fashioned looking machines and roasted their own beans. our friend worked there and was a funny, kinda manic coffee guy. i won't describe him too much for privacy...a few years after we moved out here he came to visit and stayed with us once. a good guest.

i won't get into details here but he was involved in some risky business (risky to him) that was lucrative enough that he had seed money to buy a house in philly and a big warehouse for a small business. he hired a bunch of friends and things were going quite well.

this is a guy from a family of teachers and lawyers. maybe a little bit eccentric, but not mentally ill, i really don't think.

anyway, rich ran into this friend the other morning and told me he was living in the city,that he looked pretty much the same but with a big beard. today after i returned from my 2nd work day the bell rang and i heard rich greet him. instead of our friend coming in as expected i heard a wierd little conversation with the words bag, behind the hospital, shower. then he left. i knew something was up. rich told me the friend didn't look so good today, his arm was swollen from a spider bite and he looked dirty. he was homeless. he looked like one of the army of homeless guys in our neighborhood. he asked rich if he could leave his bag here while he went to the hospital for the bite and then went to get the bag.

we had to run a little errand in the car and left a note that we would be back soon. we saw the friend walking by the hospital and i just got a glance but he did look bad. i felt freaked out. what if he was crazy now? what if we did him a favor and then he wanted more and more. my mom brain started going into little scenes, a guy in our house making things dangerous for the kids somehow. a dirty guy, a crazy guy, a needy guy, an unclean guy.

i don't want to think this way. i don't want my kids to think this way. we picked up our first eatwell farms delivery at the neighborhood house up on potrero hill and when we got back the friend was waiting outside. he ended up coming in. it was a little wierd at first, but we ended up on the back deck and he told us the riches to rags story and a little bit about how he was living on the hill above the highway, being a homeless mountain man, basically biding his time until he could make some more money in the fall with the risky business plan he implemented years ago. right now he is collecting recycling and making thirty dollars a day. he said he didn't need anything.

it sounded like everyone turned their backs on him in philly when he lost all the money. a finagling lawyer who moved to germany was involved. he lost his fiance. the whole scene depressed him and he did some drugs which made people mad at him. i'm sure there is much more to the story but he did say our good friend and social worker in philly was the one friend who stood by him and we trust her. i'll be calling her tomorrow. he didn't ask us for anything and didn't want any of our dinner, but did take the chocolate ccovered banana miles offered. rich gave him our number and said he could come over if he needed to use the computer or something. the friend said he might. he hadn't communicated with his family for a few months and wanted to email them. he said he might want to take a shower sometime because that was one thing he hadn't been able to find here. this made me a little anxious but less than earlier because he was just a real, live, sad and beat down looking friend, not a totally unknown quantity.

he left after a half hour or so. he said it was the most he had talked to anyone in a while. he didn't seem too keen on his homeless buddies but said he was getting tougher, and that was good for him. he said one night after he first got here (he said he was robbed of his last money) he bumped into another old friend from philly very late who treated him like a leper because he was homeless. he was trying to be kind of neutral, not embarrassed, but i could tell this incident had depressed him further.

it was a pretty unreal encounter after a day of chit chat and inservice with my new and old co-workers at sfusd. i'm sure there will be more to this story. it makes me a little jittery that there might be more stress in our lives but i'm also glad we weren't afraid to open our door to an old friend, dirty and homeless as he might be.

whoa.