Seeking Safe Haven

Anticipation rises with the cold for warm beds inside

By MICHAEL R. SHEA
mshea@modbee.com

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TURLOCK — At 7 o'clock on a cold November morning, Mick Matthews rolls awake in a four-person tent in the middle of a field in the middle of the city.

"We had a start last night, now didn't we?" he asks in his deep Australian drawl, sleep caked in the corners of his eyes.

Long after the construction workers at the next-door subdivision went home, long after the children in the old row houses on the other side of the field closed their eyes for the night, the signaling started. Whistles and whoops in several octaves from as many voices in as many directions traveled around the neighborhood. Signaling to each other or someone else hidden in the dark — an adolescent or gangbanger or drug dealer — in childhood Morse code.

After the whistling stopped, the silence seemed heavy. The tall grass, high between the ties of the nearby railroad tracks, waved in the cool night breeze. With a crash, a pickup jumped off West Avenue onto the railroad tracks. It tore down the rails at 40 mph. The brakes locked, and it slid to a stop. Mick would later say he could feel his heart beating in his throat.

The door to the truck creaked open, then slammed shut. Silence. For five minutes, there was only silence. Then the door swung open with a metal-on-metal screech and slammed again. The truck took off backward down the tracks, sped up West Avenue, toward High Street, and into the night.

"I was a little concerned for a second there," Mick says in the morning. "Thought one of those loonies decided to get his rocks off whooping up on some homeless. Maybe the dude was drunk and took a wrong turn or just needed to take a leak."

He digs around in a pink plastic pencil pouch for loose tobacco and rolling papers. "You have to use your sense of humor out here, not your sense of imagination, or you'll scare yourself to death."

Mick's girlfriend, Marlene — a local woman uncomfortable with using her real name — wakes up next to him after a late night of "shopping," code for a nighttime tour of local donation boxes.

It's an atypical day for the couple. There is an invitation to breakfast at his friend Mike Parker's apartment and, in the evening, perhaps the most anticipated evening in their eight months on the street, the city's cold-weather homeless shelter will open — hot food, a warm bed, friends and maybe even a movie.

Mick and Marlene sit around Parker's cluttered living room table. An outdoor pond pump lies dried and dusty next to bird food and a Chianti bottle with a candle stuffed in the top, wax melted down the neck. "Blue Bike" Mike Roark, Parker's previously homeless roommate of two months, had left for work — walking neighborhoods with satellite TV fliers. In the bedroom, a homeless woman sleeps on a mat on the floor. Parker — a teacher at Turlock Adult School — fries eggs and potatoes and toasts bread on a small George Foreman grill.

"Homelessness is a strands thing," he says. "Like there are strands of kids in a high school. You've got the mentally ill kids, the A-plus students, the college prep kids, you've got the D and F students, you've got the fighters, you've got the druggies, you've got the gang guys, you've got the jocks ... "

"You got the lovers," Marlene says.

"You've got the lovers, yeah. The high school population has strands," he says. "Homelessness is like that, you've got many strands of homeless, so you need to avoid making one statement about 'the homeless' and having it apply to all homeless people, 'cause it won't. Another mistake we make is thinking, 'If you just build this, it will help all the homeless.' That's not true. It will only help a couple strands."