Deadly Lifestyle

It’s called bum fighting and it is all the rage in some of California’s bigger cities and in other parts of the country. Its perpetrators are teens and young punks. Often they videotape their fun.

Bum fighting is not really a new phenomenon. Only the participants have changed. Bums and street people have lived violent lives for some time. The streets of San Antonio were no safer than those of San Francisco when I resided on them from 1998 to 2004.

I remember leaving the Sallie (Salvation Army) well before 5 AM one morning so I could catch the first bus to the labor hall. I was broke and had a hankering to play the horses.

It was a cool crisp morning and the day would be a spring day that is very rare in the Alamo City one that is cool and dry. As I approached a nearby Presbyterian Church, I hoped my eyes were playing tricks with me. The closer I got, the more I realized they weren’t.

A homeless man was laying in the middle of the 12 steps that led to the locked sanctuary of the church. He was on his back, his feet and legs higher than his head, his arms outstretched. His neck was slit from ear to ear and bright red blood pooled at the bottom step from a stream that led from the back of his head.

The slit throat reminded me of a bizarre happy face. The murder victim’s mouth was closed tightly as if he was trying to stifle a useless scream and die like a man.

I had seen him before. He usually slept against the door to the sanctuary. He didn’t talk much but he was not dangerous, He was just one of thousands of anonymous, harmless, homeless men and women who call the streets of San Antonio their home.

I looked around to see if anyone was nearby who could call the police. The custodian of another church was placing trash cans outside on the sidewalk.

“Hey buddy, there’s a dead guy over here, can you call the cops?” I yelled.

The custodian looked tired. He didn’t even walk over to see who the dead guy was. He simply said, “Yeah, I’ll call the cops.”

A few minutes later a patrol car pulled up. He turned on his emergency lights, spoke some words into his radio, grabbed a notebook, opened his car door and slowly walked toward me. I told him what I knew, he wrote it down, looked at my driver’s license, asked if the address was correct and then wrote the Salvation Army’s address and phone number so I could be contacted by a detective. I never was.

Homeless people seemed to die in San Antonio every day. One woman was shoved under a moving VIA bus as it turned a corner downtown. A homeless guys was knifed at a bus stop on Austin Highway. Mexican kids in their low rider driving through town in the early morning taking pot shots at homeless sleeping on park benches.

The homeless have no value. Oh, they are convenient punching bags. Sometimes homeless women are unwilling receptacles for the sperm of homeless men and deviants who may or may not be homeless. Rape and mugging of homeless are probably the most common crimes committed in San Antonio’s inner city because they are such easy marks.

Sometimes they die like my friend Russell did, under the wheels of a freight train. Russell was a special and gentle person. He lived every night of his life in a box amid the tall office buildings of center city.

Russell refused to live in a shelter, although he would take his supper meal at the Salvation Army almost every day. He liked his freedom and didn’t care to live under anyone’s rules.

Russell was a compulsive gambler. Like me, he was a regular at the race track. Unlike me, he was just as happy winning a two dollar place wager on the favorite that paid $2.40 as was winning bigger bets, which he rarely did.

I’m quite sure Russell received Social Security, maybe even military retirement pay, like me. I do know he received donations he didn’t ask for from people who lived and worked near where he bedded down every night. Sometimes he would wake up in the morning and find 20 bucks lying next to him. People often left him take out dinners and cups of coffee.

I can’t remember ever seeing Russell angry at another person. At horses, yes, especially ones that didn’t finish the race in the place Russell wanted them to. I’ve seen him so furious at a horse that didn’t win that he could hardly talk.

I never knew Russell to drink alcohol. But when I returned to San Antonio in 2006 and tried to look him up, I couldn’t find him. The guys at the Sallie didn’t know what became of Russell. I drove the streets and looked at his old haunts but did not see him. I toyed with the idea of going out to the track to see if Russell was there, but thought better of it.

On Sunday, I went to the Methodist Church’s outreach program for the homeless, Caf Corazon, hoping Russell went there for breakfast. When I asked some of the staff about my old friend, I learned he had been run over by a freight train several months earlier.

“How could that happen?” I asked, “Russell wasn’t a drunk. Man, he had no reason to even go down by the rail yard,” I said.

No one could tell me how my old friend died. I will miss him as I will miss the other five homeless guys I used to hang with whom I found out are no longer living.

Homelessness is a deadly state. Most of the men I knew who were homeless made a choice to be such. Some didn’t. I mourn them all.