ONE WEEK IN WINTER

ON A COLD Thursday cowled in mist and dark cloud, Lawrence Salinas finishes copying the definition of “delicatessen” in his notebook, closes the huge Merriam-Webster Dictionary, and prepares to leave his usual spot on the fourth floor of the downtown library. Picking up a green garbage bag containing a change of clothes, toiletries, Fritos wrapped in tin foil and his own paperback dictionary, he rides the elevator to the first floor and walks out into a chill wind toward the sunset.

If we had the hawk’s high synoptic view of southern downtown Dallas, we would see each evening at dusk our urban Bedouins- the homeless and down-and-outs-retracing their familiar routes to places that have become “home”: the Salvation Army on South Akard, the Dallas Life Foundation on Cadiz or the Union Gospel Mission near the Farmers Market, an old-fashioned “3-S” (soup, soap, sermon) shelter offering ’’three hots and a cot.” First come, first serve. Sermon always first, then soup. Lawrence Salinas1 destination was the Austin Street Shelter, sandwiched among warehouses between the Dallas Convention Center and the Belo Communication Center where by 7 o’clock, 250 to 300 others had gathered at the shelter’s steps.

Lawrence doesn’t fit the mind’s eye notion of a street person. No stained, baggy trousers or flopping sneakers for him. With his blue blazer and patterned shirt, white pants and good shoes, and an explosion of brown curls framing a sad face and penetrating marbly brown eyes, he looks like an El Greco Christ figure dressed as a college student.

He is a quiet, shy man of 26, not one to push to the front of the line like Neil or Herb or Joe Carr or Mike the Wino or funny Billy T., an old man who smokes pot and plays matador with passing cars. Lawrence lingers at the back, occasionally making conversation. He is a schizophrenic, one of the 30 percent of Dallas’ 3,500 to 4,000 downtown homeless who suffer from mental illness. He has a large vocabulary, and makes no grammatical errors. His speech begins and ends logically, but on the way he detours into incoherence. It strikes the listener as some sort of hoodwink parody, but it is Lawrence’s everyday medium of discourse. Tonight he tells a new friend about his frustrating day at the library:

“I can’t find the pattern of music I need to have down, looking at words of ’Bridge Over Troubled Water.’ I was looking for other ideals in music composition in written material they have for us, word emphasis, teutonic scale, ’A’ through ’H’ as well as ’I’ as well as the physical need and the methological and there’s also the idealism, the ethnological, which is basically earnest to the category of what one is able to perceive, to be able to view. And then I couldn’t find ex-actly what book 1 wanted.”

Lawrence pauses and offers a man some Fritos. The man stares at Lawrence for a long moment, curses him and turns away. Lawrence looks at the ground. He is used to such reactions. He smiles, revealing a gap from a missing tooth. From woeful El Greco countenance to goofy “Hee Haw” character, thanks to a stranger who hit him with a bottle filled with sand while he slept in a park.

Blonde Donna, an Austin Street regular, has spent part of her day in the women’s restroom at the Continental Trailways bus station where she made a nest of toilet paper in a stall and slept an hour curled around the toilet before getting the bum’s rush. Now she laughs and explains to a newcomer, “Honey, when you begin to understand Lawrence, you been on the streets too long.”

Milling around Blonde Donna and Lawrence Salinas are those who will stay with the streets until the crack of doom along with the so-called “new poor,” many here for the first time. Their previous lives have been strangled by bad luck, bad habits, a fateful job move or displacement by developers and land speculators who replace whole acres of modest homes with condos and shopping centers and who refer to the wholesale evictions as “passive relocation.”



IN 1984, THERE were 405,000 housing units in Dallas, including 6,000 occupied public housing units and a total of 70,000 sub-standard housing units. The city estimates that 8,700 units are not suitable for rehabilitation and will be lost over the next seven years. From 1970-81, Dallas lost 1,035 old units per year. Now approximately 13,000 people have no permanent place to live, and Dallas has just 400 to 500 temporary beds for the homeless poor.

Long ago the wedding rings were sold, furniture pawned, life insurance borrowed on, money begged from relatives, car lived in and lost. No longer even believing their last 25 hand-picked illusions they stand, stunned, gazing at their destiny in dumb amazement like animals caught in a trap. The frightful feeling of impotence and despair is worse than anything except physical injury.

The doors to the Austin Street Shelter are guarded nightly by shelter director Harry Dailey, who at 6-foot-3 and 200 pounds gazes out at his guests shivering under the harsh light. Dailey decides who comes in for the night, and because of his ability to weed out the drunks, punks, junkies, the belligerent, those simmering with rage and those with capricious tempers, the Austin Street Shelter has a deserved reputation as one of the country’s safest, best-run overnight havens for the poor and dispossessed since it opened three years ago.

Just inside, one of Harry’s “program assistants,” Jay Dunnigan, waits to frisk each man and bundle. Dunnigan and his wife, Peggy, are Austin Street success stories, ex-street inhabitants now working and living in a small Oak Cliff apartment. The other unchallenged authority of this benign oligarchy is Bubba Austin, a woman who has worked 10 years in the street ministry and will soon be ordained as a minister in the Episcopal Church.

Because of the increased violence in recent years, Bubba Austin no longer roams the streets at night as she used to, looking in dump-sters, box cars, fetid alleys and frowsy huddles of slum for her “special people.” Now she works five nights a week at the shelter and at noon she helps her boss, Father Jerry Hill, at The Stewpot, the soup kitchen in the basement of the First Presbyterian Church. She knows everyone by name, by habits, by weaknesses and quirks. Her people are the boozers, losers, crazies, ex-cons, addicts, the illiterate and the accomplished. Some, she knows, can be trusted; others are drawn to trouble like wasps to ripe fruit. Bubba is a soul Mother Teresa who lives the famous nun’s motto: “Let the poor eat you up.”

Just before Harry begins admitting the 25 or so women who will shower and settle in an area separated from the men by long tables, Bubba Austin makes one last inspection tour. The 33,000 square feet of concrete floor shine; the showers and toilets gleam; the chairs and coffee can ashtrays are properly horseshoed around the two TVs up front. Tables near the south wall stand ready for the evening meal, brought this night at 8:30 by Epiphany Episcopal Church. The bedding flotsam of the regulars-the bedrolls, carpet strips, the foam pads, plastic sheets, blankets-waits for them.

Warm air pumps out of the 11 big ceiling heaters. Bubba sees that no one has defaced the sign “Your mother does not work here. You will have to pick up after yourself that hangs near the water fountain. Up front is the office where Dr. Cliff Cornette, a psychiatrist who comes each Thursday evening, sees patients and attends to minor medical problems.

Harry Dailey watches Blonde Donna enter the shelter. An angry young woman who occasionally works as a hotel maid, she is known in the street world as someone who almost never eats. Behind Blonde Donna comes Granny, a real bag lady who spent 30 years in Terrell State Hospital. In her 80s with matted silver hair, her face a puckered mass of wrinkles. Granny has a private room at the Dallas Life Foundation. After a short visit with the doctor, she is quickly sent to Parkland Memorial Hospital because of her head lice.

They stop at Bubba’s desk for a styrofoam coffee cup, or a Tylenol, or to leave their medicine (shelter policy), around which Bubba Austin wraps a small piece of paper with a name. The “new skid-ders”-those displaced by urban sprawl-represent one of the three major changes in the plight of Dallas’ homeless in recent years. The contents of Bubba Austin’s middle drawer neatly symbolize the other two: One side is filled with knives, the other with Thorazine, Stelazine, Lithium, Haldol, Mellaril, Prolixin-psychotropic wonder drugs to control mental illness, Poverty is old; what’s new is the vast increase in violence and in the numbers of the mentally ill on the streets.

“You forget how hard it is to get some things women really need,” Bubba Austin says. “Sanitary napkins, a pin to repair a broken zipper, panties, a clean brush. And most of our women regulars are retarded.”

After the women have settled, Harry admits Vincent Big-Horse, an Oklahoma Indian who suffers from terrible epileptic fits and long ago served time for murder.

“How are you tonight, Vincent? Here, take your cup and let me have your medicine,” says Bubba. “Do you want a shower number?”

“Thank you, Bubba. Can I have some checkers?” Vincent Big-Horse answers in a slurred voice. Bubba Austin’s tone and the reaction from the men evokes the image of a teacher and fourth grade class: firm, fair, gentle; her “pupils” dependent, respectful.

Melvin checks a pair of pliers and a knife with Bubba. Perry, two knives, scissors, a fingernail clipper; another man, a can of Mace and a straight razor. Dudley, the cynical poet laureate of the Austin Street Shelter who signs his work, “Guess Who?.” wears his usual blue jumpsuit and asks for playing cards. Jay Dunnigan frisks Leroy and uncovers the long bent wire he uses to fish for dollar bills in parking lot slots.

“Leroy, I’m ashamed of you,” Bubba says, trying not to smile. She shakes her finger at Leroy, a large black man with gray stubble, who stands crestfallen.

“You know how it is, Bubba,” Leroy says, throwing his vocational tool in the large trash basket. For the third time tonight, Jay Dunnigan douses his hands with rubbing alcohol. He doesn’t want what those people have.

In they come carrying all they own in duffel bags, suitcases, backpacks, plastic bags, rope-bound valises, flight bags, five-gallon buckets. Some carry nothing. James, a neatly groomed man, turns over $100 to Bubba; Jay Dunnigan witnesses the envelope sealing.

More regulars: Dewey Robertson in his green cowboy hat; James, a schizophrenic who spits all the time, in his old overcoat; Ted Hasten, another schizophrenic who deteriorates rapidly without his medicine, looking like Grizzly Adams with his thick beard and wide-brimmed mountain-man hat; Richard Werling, recently released from Terrell, who raised five children by himself; McKeon, a bad psychotic but cairn tonight; Richard Yoganananzi, a tall black man with three suitcases, one of them full of books; Frank, who resembles an SMU marketing major, a teetotaling diabetic who spends his days at the First Baptist Church’s Inner City Chapel on Ross, praying for the other street people and witnessing full-immersion baptisms after Brother Bobby Worthington’s sermon; Norman Branch, Coleman and William, always together, all three always wearing green down jackets. Randall, Lawrence Salinas, Sam, Morris, Mike Watts-more hard-core just-sober winos with clicking store teeth file past.

“Harry, you dirty m , you s-of-a-b–, come out here, you’reafraid to face me. Come out here, Harry you b . I don’t need youor anybody else.” Old George is furiously drunk, standing on his crutches in the parking lot, his right leg missing below the knee. He curses Harry Dailey with such passion that his face, burnished and creased by decades of street life, changes from a faded grapefruit rind color to mottled red.

Harry, an intensely religious man who has just received his third cussing of the evening, rolls his eyes heavenward. “Throw me a rope, Jesus.” Finally he yells out, “Get out of here George, back off!” Ten minutes later George quiets down, wipes his mouth with bits of newspaper and collapses onto blankets just below the shelter steps against the wall, occasionally lifting his head up to curse the huge man who won’t let him in. To no one in particular, Harry mutters, “With booze you lose. With dope there’s no hope.”

By 9, the 265 residents of this particular pauperdom have settled in, spread across the floor on their bedding. Some are already snoring, some reading, working crossword puzzles, polishing shoes, playing checkers, gossiping about scams, possible work, new restroom or free telephone locations, cheap eats, lucrative panhandle corners. The screech of TV chairs on concrete means the serving line is ready, and Harry Dailey demands quiet and removal of hats for the prayer. FOR YEARS, psychiatrist Cliff Cornette has been dealing with the tragic after-shocks of “deinstitutionalization,” that failed, noble plan to have state institutions serve as acute treatment centers while community halfway houses and out-patient clinics care day-to-day for patients stabilized on drugs. From 1955, when Congress set up the Joint Commission on Mental Health to oversee this policy, until 1982, the number of patients in U.S. state institutions shrunk from 558,922 to 125,200. Terrell still releases more than 2,000 to the Dallas area each year. But the proposed local facilities never materialized because of shrinking federal funds and the usual niggardly allocations approved by pebble-hearted politicians in Austin.

After “deinstitutionalization,” thousands of the chronically ill ended up in bus stations and walking the streets with only a 500 milligram-a-day prescription for Thorazine, a drug Cliff Cornette says should only be used in acute psychotic circumstances. Weary doctors like Cornette, who works a 40-hour week for the Acute Treatment Program (administered by the Dallas Mental Health and Mental Retardation Center) and four hours a week at the shelter, become equivalents of pit stop mechanics, forced to medicate and release huge numbers of very sick men and women, sending them to overnight shelters. Or worse: Many must seek the corners of abandoned buildings littered with bunches of crumpled newspapers, broken glass, wine bottles, cardboard boxes and human droppings. DMHMR has fewer than 30 apartments in its program for patient care.

At the Austin Street Shelter, Cornette also attends to a medical dictionary’s span of minor injuries, among them tonight a man with a knuckle busted from swinging at an ex-friend and connecting with a tombstone over in Pioneer Cemetery south of the convention center-’Kill Hill,” as it’s known because of its danger at night. To the old men, it’s still a “marble orchard,” as cemeteries were called in the Depression.

Other patients give out hacking coughs announcing lung disease and tuberculosis (12 percent of Dallas street people have TB, a disease long associated with poverty, deprivation and thin clothes). Then come the scabies, lice, venereal disease, and with winter, the inevitable foot disorders associated with dirty socks, wet feet, athlete’s foot and that special stigma of long-time skidders, leg ulcers.

But it is the precarious status of his mentally ill patients that most worries Cornette. He worries about Lawrence Salinas, who suffers from what Cornette calls schizoaffective disorders, a wastebasket term that includes some symptoms of schizophrenia.

Cornette faces what he calls “a real moral dilemma” with Lawrence. Medication, which Lawrence hates, might help his linear thinking, but perhaps at the cost of his good nature. Cornette has him read the ingredients on candy bars to practice logic skills.

Cornette is also worried about Paul Clark. 45, who sits next to Bubba Austin keeping the tally sheet and wake-up times for those leaving before 5 a.m. Clark, an ex-shipyard worker and a U.S. Navy veteran, has an ex-wife and four kids in Garland. An ex-alcoholic, dry now four years, Clark is a rambler who never put his wander-years behind him. He’s also a severe manic-depressive with a history of nervous breakdowns.

On the streets for the eight years since the disease invaded him, Paul Clark has slept in flops, dumpsters, cardboard jerry-builts, abandoned cars, spending year after year in hopeless, muddled, self-forced migration. He has twice tried to kill himself.

Paul has been living at the shelter for a year. Each morning he cleans the tables, then catches the bus to the Goodwill store on North Hampton where he works, courtesy of a Texas Rehabilitation Commission program. There, two counselors watch his progress and show concern. “You know,” Paul says, “the average person never asks how you feel. They do.” Looking up from his work, he stares straight ahead. Much more than his own life, Paul loves his four children and especially Amy, his favorite. Often their memory cuts through his usual tranquil stupor. “I get to call home each Sunday at 10 and talk to Amy,” he says with enthusiasm. “I look forward to that call all week. My therapist told me I was real dependent and needed mothering because I’ve had a lot of rejection. I don’t want my kids to fee! that.”

Since his illness began, Paul has often thought that life is not short but terribly, terribly long. Endless. Why cannot one just fall asleep, he says, and never, never again wake? But…the kids. Amy’s voice on Sundays, his counselors, Bubba, Dr. Cornette and Harry. He would miss all of them.

Lights out at 10, TV silent an hour later. Harry Dailey walks through the quiet, billeted guests making sure the aisles remain clear, that there is reasonable law and order, that no one is pestering the women or in the shower room, that the gathered can be safe and clean and warm for a few hours while they ponder The Question: What next?



EIGHT HOURS LATER, overhead lights blaze on. All guests except the very sick or handicapped are out by six, a raggle-taggle peasant army walking north in the dark toward the glittering downtown buildings. Many are headed to the McDonald’s on Commerce or to the Trailways restroom (not the Greyhound, which requires a token); or south to an already opened grocery for a jug of MD 20-20, Thunderbird or “Diamond Red that hurts your head.” The only criteria: lowest price with highest muzzle velocity.

Richard Worley and Randall turn west toward Industrial where they collect cans- 25 to a pound. Don and Perry will bus it to Exposition to Mickey Thompson’s Industrial Labor Services, hoping to “catch out,” get on a day job. Morris walks toward his panhandle spot near Sol’s Turf Bar, where he cadges $35 on a good day. Some have even sunk below begging, given up. They go to the zoo, or ride buses all day, or walk Jefferson Boulevard.

The first-floor restroom of the Earle Ca-bell Federal Building is the destination of Al Heist, who leaves the shelter dressed in a brown plaid sportcoat, Dior shirt and socks, shined shoes, pinecone-brown slacks and London Fog trenchcoat carrying a Federal Express envelope. Heist, 44, is another sort of down-and-outer, a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, former middle-management executive in the wholesale schmatta trade, ex-married man, ex-resident of Richardson where his ex-wife and two kids still live. “There are some of us in this organization who don’t go to McDonald’s,” Heist says disdainfully.

Inside the men’s room, another Austin Street colleague sits on a toilet, using soap and handfuls of water from the bowl to wash his genitals and buttocks, then his shorts in the basin. Another combs his hair with nine fingers and brushes his teeth with his right index finger. Reek washed away, stubble shaven, Al Heist consults his daily notebook, a habit retained from his vice-presidential days: “Fed. Bldg., 7, Stewpot, 8, Police Station, 9, Work. 10, Lunch, 1-2, Post Office.” Like many street people, Heist faces a Catch-22: Just to get on a waiting list for an apartment, you have to have an address. Al Heist uses the post office-400 N. Ervay, General Delivery-as his address.

Later, at The Stewpot underneath the First Presbyterian Church on Park Avenue, Heist and some 30 others move inside for coffee and doughnuts when Big John Bell raises the door at 8 a.m. All week Heist worked at Main and Akard handing out Benson & Hedges cigarettes ($15 a day), a perfect job for a man who. because of one bad habit, is now a reduced version of his former self trying to make ends approach-not exactly meet-by working dead-end jobs and selling his blood.

Many of the homeless are martyrs to money, failure, weather, women or bad luck. Al Heist is a martyr to booze. In particular, to a double green chartreuse in a brandy snifter, that most sophisticated of herbal liqueurs. “1 am an alcoholic,” Al says. “I like to drink. I admit it. No one can stop me if I want to get drunk.” And, he adds, with a touch of defiance: “I love to work but the job must be right: profitable, challenging, self-satisfying. So I move around a lot. The last time, too many gays. I can’t work with gays.”

One week ago, Al and some other street people earned $20, cigarettes and breakfast for standing all Friday night in line for concert tickets. One of the guys found some wine, not the swill that cauterizes all the way down, but good Italian red. A little taste to lubricate the soul. That night Al slept in the Parking Company of America garage just north of the shelter, his head pillowed on a concrete ledge. Sometime past midnight, Al woke up facing a long knife. He cursed his tormentors and resisted, but he was blurry and slow. His friends did nothing to help him. The muggers took most of his money and his watch and left him bloody, insensible and leaking through his torn clothes. The next day he discovered half his resume blotted out with dried blood.



IN 18 YEARS of street ministry work, buried under a never-ending wave of down-and-outers, Father Jerry Hill has heard every con in the book from people like the 150 or so men and women sitting outside his office in The Stewpot, the 10-year-old soup kitchen that served over 60.000 meals last year. Everybody’s momma died on Christmas Eve; everybody’s baby just died in Valdosta, Georgia; everybody’s a Presbyterian or Episcopalian and what kind of Christian are you anyway if you won’t gimme that bus money? Father Hill, also in charge of the Austin Street Shelter and of Genesis House, the Presbyterian home for battered women, has seen and heard it all.

For the impoverished and homeless, Hill says, skid row is a society in itself, meeting its people’s basic needs. “Most skid row people have been rejected all of their lives, have an overwhelming sense of failure and no self-esteem. This world gives them a society,” Hill says.

Like his co-workers at the shelter, like the Rev. Bob Lively, the torch bearer for the homeless who was a co-founder of The Stewpot and was instrumental in establishing the Austin Street Shelter, Father Hill has seen the disturbing changes in his already disturbed milieu: the frequent beatings, the rapes, the new poor. “Five years ago. 80 percent of my time was spent with alcoholics,” Hill says. “Now, 80 percent is spent with the mentally ill. We have almost nothing in Dallas for either group.”

Father Hill looks anxiously around the room for a six-year Stewpot veteran, Marly Martin. He would not soon forget Marty’s feet: gangrenous, maggoty, with a stench that hit you like a slap in the face, the encrusted and filthy bandages that looked like instant tetanus.

Marty Martin, 58, is no vagrant, no drinker, no wanderer. He knows no Bumdom lore like sprinkling black pepper in bedclothes to get rid of bugs, yet his is a classic vagrant personality, a compound of freedom and feckless dependency. His life’s downward spiral began in 1958 when he quit his job at Chance Vought Aircraft to take care of his widowed mother. Except for odd jobs, Marty simply didn’t go back to work. “I couldn’t do anything else and Mother was sick all the time,” Marty explains. After her death Marty married a woman with five children. They soon left him, and hoping to lure them back, Marty sold his parents’ East Dallas home for ready cash. It didn’t work.

When the money ran out. Marty began a devolutionary descent that ended in the Austin Street Shelter: a neighbor’s garage apartment to a backroom of a barber shop to a small room in a friend’s house to an abandoned pickup near the entrance of Grove Hill Memorial Park where his parents are buried. Then real disaster: After sleeping in a storage room in back of a house on a subfreez-ing January night two years ago, Marty woke up with severe frostbite.

After three months in Parkland’s burn center, Marty bounced from a Grand Prairie nursing home to a soccer field and bleachers of Samuell-Grand Park until park police ran him off. When Father Hill learned about Marty’s condition from Bubba Austin, Marty was living in a yellow Honda Civic in a Texaco back lot behind Debonair Danceland.

“See, my hobby is country-western dancing and if my feet aren’t hurting, I go inside and two-step a little bit. But my feet got real bad last fall.” Marty pauses, glances up with a morbid leer. “You ever seen maggots? They were in my left heel wound. They don’t bother you during the day, but at night… You know what, they do some good. They eat infection.”

After lunch, Mike Watts and Frank begin walking back to the Inner City Chapel. Phyllis and her nine-year-old, Roy, his blond hair a tangle, his face smeared with chocolate and already looking like a miniature street person with his small sack of toys and hard rolls, also walk south to the Plasma Donor Center to let the “draculas,” the phlebotomists, draw two pints for $14 instead of $8 since she has her coupon from the GreenSheet and it is her second time that week. (Donors may give blood only twice in a seven-day period.)

Thus they spread over the downtown area, the three-time losers the second time around, yellowing old women, drunks, old men bird-necked in dirty collars, whose wrinkled hands and veins stand out like gnarled spreading roots; the new ones, scared and living unimaginable aftermaths, banging pay phones in frustration and in hopes of dislodging change, not yet willing to admit they must beg. Very few say anything; the street life burns away small talk.

The veterans know that the lamp of humanity flickers low on the street, that their well-being and often their very lives depend on the selfless work of Father Hill, Bubba Austin, Harry Dailey, Cliff Cornette and others. They are lucky that a rich inner glue of compassion, love, caring and the desire to do the true work of Christ permeates all these people and holds them together. One marvels not that the homeless poor are dirty, but clean as they are; not that so many are sick but that any are ever well; not that they love to get drunk but that they can bear to remain sober.

Lawrence Salinas walks toward the library, ignoring the advertising come-hither in passing windows. He seems to vibrate between doglike trust and slight suspicion as he talks about religion to a friend. Lawrence wants to be a preacher like Father Hill and Bubba Austin, to communicate the word of the Lord that may set men free:

“My Father’s name and his righteousness and the religiousness to work for oneself and to be oneself in the face as well as in the mind and of the total body and of the generousness that one receives…”