ON THE STREET AGAIN : Some People, Like Sammy McGuire, Choose to Be Homeless, Even if It Almost Kills Them : On the Street Again

It’s hard for my mom to ignore the pleading gaze of a panhandler. Not that she’s a soft touch, it’s just that before she can yank her eyes from a ragged figure with an outstretched hand, she always sees my brother staring back.

People who view the homeless from a safe emotional distance can file them under a neat heading: Lazy, Crazy or Out of Luck. Once categorized, a street person can be dismissed and forgotten. My family doesn’t have that luxury because of Sammy McGuire, the only brother to four sisters. He taught us it’s more complicated than that.

My sisters and I all have jobs and children. Sammy took a different route. For 20 years, he has hitchhiked across the country, slept in woods and scrounged through dumpsters for dinner. He loves it. Street life dishes out what my brother wants--the freedom of untethered days and drunken nights.

My mother and sisters and I have never gotten used to the idea. “OK,” we used to say, “if he’s really happy.” But underneath, we shared the suspicion that the street would kill him.

Still, my stomach churned when I got the phone call, as if I hadn’t been expecting it for 20 years. Sammy was in critical condition in a Gainesville, Fla., hospital, viral pneumonia ravaging his lungs. His body--much older than its 36 years--wasn’t up to the battle. He would probably survive the night, the nurse said. Beyond that, they couldn’t say.

This wasn’t the way we planned it, I thought, cramming clothes into a suitcase. For the first time since he left home, I had intended to visit Sammy the next month, to meet his friends and discover why he lived the way he did. Then I would write about it. Sammy, who called me collect occasionally, had laughed when I told him. He was greatly amused by the vision of his sister from Newport Beach digging in dumpsters for the sake of a story.

Mom and I flew overnight from Los Angeles to Gainesville. For the next month, with Sammy restrained in a tangle of tubes, I learned about the streets on my own, without my brother for a guide. I met people who lived in the woods and former street people who now have an uneasy life indoors. I talked to police officers and shelter workers. Some things I already knew--that the streets are filled with people whose options have vanished: single mothers and their children, hungry men without jobs, runaways and the mentally ill--the ones the rest of us lump under the category of “homeless.”

But Sammy is in a different, more perplexing category. He is among those who choose street life and are forever altered by that choice.

I learned that street life is hard and addicting, that even if street people eventually move inside, they are always inching toward the door. Street people are both exposed and invisible, part of a community and completely alone. As my brother’s pal Jim Evangelist, a Gainesville artist, put it, the street is where “life happens.” It’s a place where freedom is more valuable than security and time more valuable than money, where a backpack and a swagger are the measure of a man.

Most of all, I learned, while machines forced life into my brother’s shrunken body, that the street is a place where you take your chances: If you lose, you die; if you win, you get another day. A day, as Evangelist described it, of “brittle serenity.”

WHEN WE ARRIVED at Alachua General Hospital, a nurse gently prepared us. Sammy was “very critical,” tied down and heavily sedated so he wouldn’t rip out the tubes that were barely keeping him alive. Sammy had respiratory syncytial virus, a pneumonia most healthy adults can fight off.

Wearing masks, gloves and gowns, my mother and I entered the glass-walled isolation room. There was Sammy, a ventilator hose spouting from his mouth, tubes and needles snaking into his body--Sammy, who could grind out a cigarette with his bare foot. Machines heaved and sighed while lines jumped rhythmically on a monitor above his head. His long, tangled hair was dark against the white pillowcase. His mustache had been shaved, the goatee spared. His cracked, callused feet crept from beneath the sheet. From the waist up, he didn’t seem as small as he is--5-foot-4, 135 pounds. When he was admitted, Sammy had 40 cents in his pocket and hadn’t eaten for five days.

How had it come to this? Images of Sammy played in my head: the rosy-cheeked baby, the potbellied toddler with a shock of white hair, the bespectacled schoolboy whose sisters would bolt after anyone who picked on him. The most affectionate member of our family. Other memories crowded in: the slow-moving, stubborn child who once played a harmonica while I spanked him, proving he would not be budged; the teen-ager, tirelessly defiant, a 10th-grade dropout.

While life had certainly bruised Sammy, we all had adjustments to make. Our mother, Louise Otero, a gambler by nature, has married three times. She took her first husband at 15 in the tiny town of Huntington, Arkansas. I was her first-born, Pamela came next. When our parents divorced in their teens, Pamela and Dad stayed in Arkansas while Mom and I headed to California. I lived with my grandmother; my mother remarried and had three more children--Micki Lynn, then Sammy, then Lori. I moved in with them when I was 13. But somehow, Sammy’s path always seemed to have more potholes. Even his birth--Mom’s only Cesarean delivery--was a struggle. At 18 months, he almost died after gulping ant poison, and at 7 he was injured when a garage door fell on his head. But there was no indication that Sammy was damaged by his birth or later incidents. He seemed different only in that he was smaller and less emotionally mature than most children. But recently, Mom said, after rifling through her son’s earliest report cards, she realized that he had always had an aversion to rules. “The writing,” she now says, “was on the walls.”

When Sammy was 8, Mom divorced his father; four years later, she married Ted Otero, a hard-working man who took on her brood as his own. Tension quickly surfaced between Sammy and Ted, whose Depression-era work ethic grated on my brother. Over the next few years, Sammy was kicked out of two Long Beach junior high schools for insubordination and transferred to a continuation school, which he quit in the 10th grade. As far as Mom is concerned, her only son--who turned 13 in 1967--was lost to the drug-saturated ‘60s. He turned on and dropped out. At 16, Sammy stuck out his thumb and headed east.

Months would pass without any word from him, but we could count on seeing him around Christmas and on his birthday in June. One year, when he was about 27, Sammy joined the family at my home for New Year’s Eve. He offered the toast: “If only the next year is as good as the last.” As the years wore on, Sammy was usually drunk when he called. Was it alcohol that kept him on the streets? I asked him. No, he said, it was the people.

OVER THE NEXT MONTH, these people, whom Sammy referred to as his “adopted family,” streamed steadily into the hospital. Tom blasted into the waiting room wearing dirty jeans, a biker T-shirt and black motorcycle boots with worn heels, a half-smoked cigarette tucked behind his ear, his wild mane tamed by a bandanna. A can of Milwaukee’s Best beer jutted from his black leather jacket pocket. “You want to write about street people?” Tom asked, as if it were a challenge. “Start taking notes.”

He and Sammy had been “partners” for seven months. Tom had called for help when Sammy collapsed. They are close, Tom said, but different: “He doesn’t have a mean streak like I do.” Tom--who asked that I not use his last name or describe his tattoos--said he is on the streets for the same reason many people are. A former heroin addict who sold drugs to put himself through 3 1/2 years of college, Tom said he is wanted in three states. “Most of the people I know are a bunch of drunks who want to have a good time and don’t want to be bothered by anybody,” he said between swigs of beer, swearing steadily. Tom, who is about Sammy’s age, says he drinks simply because he always has, even before kindergarten.

Sammy was worse the next day, panting, coughing silently. Herb Benson, a 61-year-old sign painter whom Sammy referred to as his “adopted dad,” ventured into the intensive-care unit. He had a present for Sammy, the nurse later told us--a box of barbecued ribs. The nurse assured the visitor that her patient was in no condition to eat ribs. She recalled Herb’s sad response: “The last time I saw him he was hungry.”

His friends said Herb had been a designer for Ford Motor Co. before abruptly ditching the rat race decades ago. Herb was known in Gainesville for his hand-painted signs outside many of the town’s businesses. He was off the street, living in a trailer. He was the closest thing to a mentor that Sammy had.

In California seven years ago, Mom and Ted had given Sammy a paint box and brushes so he could work with Herb. Hitchhiking back to Florida, Sammy got off the freeway in Needles and hid the box in a bush near the on-ramp. But he was arrested for being drunk in public and hauled to jail. “Sammy begged the guy to take him by and let him get his box,” Mom remembered later, “but the cop wouldn’t do it.” At 11 p.m., Sammy called Mom from jail, crying. She and Ted left for Needles, 200 miles away. They searched all night for the paint box but never found it.

Other friends of Sammy called and visited the hospital, including the barber who cut his hair last year when Mom came to town. One frail, red-eyed man came straight from the woods to the hospital, pulled a soiled, tattered bandanna from his pocket and--rather ceremoniously--handed it to me. A gift for Sammy. He flung his arms around my mother, then me, and cried. His beard scratched my cheek as I patted him. When he left, the sweet, sickening smell of alcohol clung to my T-shirt.

I decided to go panhandling with Tom. Gainesville, a college town centered around the University of Florida, felt familiar already. Several major highways pour into the city, a natural stopover for transients who migrate south as the temperature drops. The woods scattered throughout the city provide cover. This had been Sammy’s home for most of two decades. The students are generous with panhandlers, and their trash bins are bloated with riches for “dumpster divers.”

As a soft rain began to fall, Tom offered me his jacket. Along the way, he stopped men and women. “ ‘Scuse me partner, could you help me out with a little spare change? Thanks anyway. Have a nice day.” He bummed cigarettes. Passing pay telephones and newspaper racks, he punched knobs and jiggled coin returns, fingers searching the slots. Together, he and Sammy could make about $40 a day, Tom said.

At one point, against the red light, Tom darted into traffic. I caught up to him, cars zipping past us. “I forget, you guys don’t have the same rules we do,” I said.

He stared at me. “Rules? We don’t have any.”

SAMMY’S CONDITION worsened over the next couple of weeks, improved slightly and worsened again. His temperature regularly spiked to 104, and his body stopped absorbing nutrients. He developed blood clots. Although he seemed mostly oblivious to us, at one point he looked in my eyes and held Mom’s hand tightly. That night she dreamed he recovered miraculously. I spent part of one day with a group of Sammy’s friends in a small home rented by Tecka Boudreaux, who had worked her way off the streets by cleaning toilets and picking up garbage. The house was furnished from dumpsters, Tecka said proudly, even the picture frames. A small American flag hung on the front porch. This was where Sammy had celebrated the previous New Year’s Eve with a group of his friends.

Tecka is a strong, friendly woman with 16 tattoos, including a two-headed wolf on her left forearm, which covers a “property patch”--a kind of brand chiseled by a former boyfriend before he left for jail, she explained. Tecka said she hit the streets eight years ago after her mate bashed her across the eyes with a 2-by-4. For five weeks, Tecka and her infant son had lived on a Ft. Worth rooftop, the safest place in town, she said. Street life is awful for women, frightening, “but you do pick up a family,” she said. “You’ve got friends. You’ve got real friends.” So far, Tecka, who now lives with a boyfriend and her son, has been unable to find work in Gainesville. She thinks the tattoos discourage prospective employers.

As six of us sat comfortably around the coffee table that afternoon, my brother’s friends reminisced about him. The group included the nucleus of Sammy’s adopted “family,” including Red, a 68-year-old man with one leg whom Sammy considers his “adopted grandpa”; 26-year-old Matt Wingate, Sammy’s “adopted son,” and Herb. The men took turns wiping tears from their eyes as they talked about how Sammy wandered, barefoot and bare-chested, playing “bluesy kind of stuff” on the harmonica, with Red Dawg, a part-pit bull mongrel, straggling behind. Wildly protective, the dog had slept sprawled across Sammy’s chest.

We talked about what to do if Sammy died. These were his best friends; they would know. Cremation would be fine, they agreed. Sammy believed in “Mother Nature,” Matt said. “He believed in the forces of good and evil, and he was on the side of good.”

Sammy is not to be pitied, they reminded me. “He’s out on the street because he wanted to be,” Dave said.

“To tell you the truth,” said Matt, who was obviously pained by the grief Mom and I were feeling, “I feel sorrier for you guys.”

SAMMY LAY STILL the next day, but his legs seemed to be shrinking under the sheets. His fever continued to burn. Mom stayed at the hospital or near a phone.

The next day, a nurse delivered more bad news: Sammy’s lungs were severely damaged; if he lived, he might need oxygen for the rest of his life. Red joined Mom and me as we again watched my brother from beyond the glass. Red tried unsuccessfully to comfort mother. “You may feel bad about him living the way he does, but it’s a choice he made about his life,” he said. Red, Sammy’s friend for 19 years, lived much of his life on the streets and moved indoors only after losing his right leg as the result of a blood clot. Now he lives with Tecka and her boyfriend. “I live according to the plan of the house,” he said. “If I were on the streets, I’d make my own plan.

“Hey, Sammy,” he shouted into the isolation room. The machines pulling air from Sammy’s lung cavity gurgled. Sammy was silent. “Nah, he’s out of it.” Mom fidgeted. She had never forgiven Red for unhinging one of her son’s front teeth in a drunken brawl years ago. Red was unrepentant, and the two kept fighting. After Red’s leg was amputated, they would sit down to trade punches.

“I really miss it bad,” Red said, lamenting his lost freedom in a loud, gravelly voice. “I’ll always be (a street person) in my mind.” Transportation is the difference between today’s street person and yesterday’s hobo, he said. Hopping freight trains has been replaced by hitchhiking, a more profitable venture. A hitchhiker worth his salt will have a full stomach and some cash when he slides out of a car, he said.

“When it gets about noon, you say, ‘By gawd, I haven’t eat yet,’ ” Red said. A pitiful tale will coax some of the driver’s money into your pocket, he said. “You can always think of some hard-luck story people will go for.” If your story’s not working, he said, adjust it a little. “You’re supposed to do that, it’s expected of you. A guy that don’t do that should catch a bus.”

Doctors performed a tracheotomy on Sammy that night, transferring the tube from his mouth to his neck. Maybe now they would let his mustache grow back, a nurse said, as she replaced a rhinestone stud in Sammy’s left earlobe. Sammy took pride in his few ornaments--our late stepdad’s wedding ring, for example, which he pawned when desperate and then retrieved.

At one point, Mom and I went to a dilapidated house rented by two of Sammy’s friends to collect his worldly belongings. They were contained in a shirt box. A flea leaped out when I cracked the lid. Inside were a collection of wheat pennies, a cribbage board, two decks of cards, family pictures, poems and stories he had written, a newspaper article by me and what appeared to be every card and letter Mom had mailed to him for the past 10 years.

The next day, I wandered through Gainesville, tracing Sammy’s footsteps. I visited Babalou’s, a funky little record shop with albums displayed in cardboard boxes. The owner, Charlie Belfiore, wore cutoffs and a tie-dyed shirt. I was told by a friend of Sammy to ask Charlie about homelessness. Why?

“Because I’m one of them,” Charlie told me. He grew up in the Detroit suburbs and took to the streets in 1971. “There was nothing else interesting to do,” he said. “I just hit the road.”

But now you have an apartment, I said, and a business. “It’s kind of more like an attitude rather than a physical condition,” he said. “There’s no short answer to a real complicated thing.” A breeze toyed with moss dripping from a huge oak above us. Neil Young filtered from a speaker balanced on a plastic crate--”Everybody knows this is nowhere. . . .”

ONE DAY, AFTER Sammy could open his eyes again, Jim Evangelist, a street muralist and Sammy’s “brother” for a decade, came to the hospital. He was a burly man of 33 with full, dark hair and a beard. He didn’t wear gloves or a gown. “They made me wear this,” he said, apologizing for the mask while clasping my brother’s hand. His tone was intimate. “I love you, brother,” Jim said. “I’m praying for you.” Sammy smiled broadly.

I began looking for someone who had a different opinion of my brother. I found Beatrice Halpert. “You never call a cop up here that they don’t know Sammy,” said Beatrice, 63, manager of a launderette next to Babalou’s. “Sammy’s the type, he won’t listen. Ask him to leave, you’re just wasting your time.”

A mother of four herself, Beatrice was sympathetic to Mom. “You can raise a child, and I don’t care how good you raise them, when they get growed, they’re gonna do whatever they want to,” she said.

No question, it was Mom who suffered most over Sammy. “I never got used to him leaving,” she told me one afternoon in our motel room. Sometimes she would drive Sammy to Arizona before letting him off on the highway. The last time, she said, “I sat there as long as I could, watching him go along that on-ramp. Then a car came up behind me and I had to go. I said, ‘I ain’t never doing this again.’ ”

After about a month in the hospital--to everyone’s surprise--Sammy haltingly began to mend. The day I flew home, Sammy was able to sit but still couldn’t talk. I handed him paper and a pencil. Weakly, he scrawled, “Write a good article about the folks on the streets.”

He had dropped to a skeletal 104 pounds but continued to recover. Almost seven weeks after he was admitted, Sammy stood up for the first time. The ventilator was turned off the following day. Slowly, with a raspy voice we didn’t recognize, he began to talk again. As he gained strength, old tensions resurfaced between him and Mom. This, she figured, was her last chance to take him home. Finally, Sammy said he was not going with her. Mom left the hospital without saying goodby.

But before she pulled onto the freeway, she stopped at a phone and called him. “Goodby,” she said. “Take care of yourself.” She called twice more before she got to Pensacola, less than 300 miles away. When Sammy was released from the hospital, Mom sent him a plane ticket. He came home for a short, turbulent visit and then returned to Florida.

A couple of weeks later, on his 37th birthday, Sammy called to tell us that Herb had died of a heart attack. A local newspaper article about his death quoted Jim Evangelist, who called Herb “a hero of legend in Gainesville.” Another friend said, “Herb was a bum, but he didn’t hurt nobody but himself.”

In Florida, seeing Sammy encapsulated in the hospital, apart from his friends, Mom could pretend that he was different from other street people. Back home, she finally released that fantasy. “I used to hold on to the thought that maybe he’ll change,” she said the other day. “I finally had to face the fact that he is what he is.”

We still believe Sammy will die young. In a way, Mom and I have already survived that heartbreak. Despite doctors’ warnings that the drinking and the grinding exposure of living outside may kill him, Sammy has again chosen the streets.

“That’s the way I feel happiest,” he said the last time we spoke. “I feel at home that way.”