Home Is Where the Heart Is

"Home is where the heart is," was originally published by WBEZ (91.5FM) on July 29, 2008

My house S'out of the ordinary That's right, Don't want to hurt nobody Some things sure can sweep me off my feet Burning down the house (Talking Heads, Burning Down the House)

Something's very wrong here. I just parked my car on the vacant street, packed up my outreach supplies and equipment, and have now mounted the hill looking over the Brickyard camp that Kevin, Laura, and Hoss have occupied. I described this camp in my first Brickyard story last week. I'm looking down on it from the railroad tracks. I don't see the Coleman tents. I don't see any chairs. But I do see Kevin, Laura, Hoss, Rico, and Precious milling around the campsite like pinballs seeking purpose.

As I make my way over the raised railroad track bed, Precious notices me. At first she appears startled, but then she recognizes me and hollers "Hey, Two-Thirty Dirty (my street name), come on in here boy!" I can see she's tweaking, her movements jerky and twitchy, a symptom of the crack cocaine injection she performed a few minutes before I got here. "Soul, 440 ... love," Precious says by way of standard "family" greeting. She's a general of a once powerful but now decrepit and wobbly street gang derived from the Black Souls. Three and a half years ago, the gang's current leader blessed me into the organization. "Black and white, Soul Love," I say back-the standard response. Kevin, Rico, and Hoss gravitate to the camp's entry. "See what they done to us?" Hoss shouts. Yes, I do see.

The camp has been destroyed. The tents are gone. Personal effects strewn across the tamped ground. Even for a homeless shanty village, the place is in disarray. For the first time since they staked claim on this ground, I see discarded used syringes lying on the ground. "What the f**k happened here?" I ask no one in particular. Kevin jumps in, "The [federal] railroad police came by two days ago, two of 'em, and they had their canine with 'em. They came up on us, lined us up, searched us, degraded us, and then told us we had three f***ing hours to get the f**k outta here. So we packed up, hid our tents and personal stuff, and now here we are."

For a moment I consider the possibility that last week's story on how the railroad police burn down the shanty homes of street addicts might have somehow prompted this. But then I realize that this sort of thing happens all the time, and that my little story probably didn't incite this sort of habitat violence. "So what are you doing here?" I ask. No one says a word. Finally, Hoss looks up from the ground and answers, "This is where we live ... it's the only home we got, Greg. Where else we gonna go?"

Yes, it's their home. Of course. That's what I keep trying to tell people. Nearly every homeless person I've ever known has made a home for her/himself. It may not look like your home or my home, and neither you nor I would want to live in a home like it, but it's home to them. "So did they arrest anybody?" Kevin's answers, "No, man, they didn't arrest us. See, here's the thing. They coulda taken us to jail, and all that. But they can't do it, they can't go by the book. The jails are full, man... and the courts will throw out this s**t, and they know that. But they got guns, and dogs, and the right to get rid of us by any means necessary. We're trespassing, we're on federal property.‚  So they yell at us, they tell us we're the scum of the earth, they treat us worse than animals. They know a court case ain't gonna hold, there ain't no charge gonna stick, so they use what power they got to degrade and humiliate us on the spot. And they make us move, they kick us out. I asked one of 'em where we're supposed to live now. You know what he told me? He said, 'I don't care, just get outta here.' He don't care. He just don't care that he just tore apart our home. Just don't show up at his home. That's all."

The junkies, crackheads, hookers, and hustlers living in this camp break the law every day. Their very existence on this land makes them law-breakers. And by proxy, the railroad police punish them. The patrol and investigative processes they implement, which we as taxpayers indirectly support, perform the functions of police, judge, jury, and punisher. The process is the punishment. "One the cops said to me, 'Hey, you guys keep it real neat around here. You had a good thing going here.' Can you believe that?" asks Rico. "Can you believe this guy had the nerve to tell us that we had a good home all the while he's tearing it down and degredating [sic] us? It's sick, man. The only way to treat a man like an animal is to first see him as an animal. How else can you do something like this to another person? You gotta first see them as less than human."

For six hours I sit with the group. We talk, eat, smoke cigarettes. They inject heroin, smoke crack, try to re-assemble a semblance of order to their personal belongings. I help them re-build their neighborhood, the habitat destroyed by purposeful institutional violence. On my way out at the end of the day, I hear Kevin shouting my name. He's running toward me, he stops next to me and shows me a brass candle holder. He hands it to me. I take it. "Hey, I thought you and your old lady might like this. We were using it at night, but we really can't stay here at night no more." It's a house-warming gift from a man whose home the police just destroyed in the name of safety, in the name of law and order.

As an American citizen, I feel deeply ashamed. As Kevin's friend, I am deeply touched. He wants nothing in exchange for this...except maybe for me to continue seeing him as a person who cares about things and about people.

What would you do if someone tore down or burned up your home in the name of a greater good? How do you feel about the annihilation of the Brickyard camp, accomplished on YOUR behalf as a taxpayer? What will you do about this? Applaud? Protest? Whatever you do, if you're reading this then you're likely to end your day in bed, comforted by the certainty that no one will burn down your house while you sleep.