Shuffling from place to place, the homeless camps stay hidden but near
by Joe Tarr
When Doug first saw the place, he knew it was home.
He'd begun his sad skid into homelessness years before, but until then he'd managed to stay off the streets. He would stay with friends or girlfriends. But he was living the party life, and one by one those friends got tired of putting him up, so he wound up living out of his car, a reliable '86 Ford Tempo.
As his problems with drugs and alcohol got bigger, he'd started hanging out with other homeless folks. And one day some of them took him to a bridge in downtown Knoxville.
Staring up at the concrete, he saw "Doug's Cave" spray-painted on it. "My middle name is Doug, I thought it was a sign," he says.
So he moved in.
There were already people living there, friends he'd met on the street. It's right near downtown, but up on that ledge underneath they were perfectly hidden. There was room for several of them to stretch out and sleep as cars thumped overhead.
One day the police chased them off, but a few weeks later Doug went back. Nobody was staying there so he claimed the camp as his own. He lived there for about two years, even in the winter.
"Get a little mattress, get a stack of blankets about that thick," he says, holding his hands about 6 inches apart. "Maybe you got a [kerosene] furnace. Get you a woman. My little camp was very dry. The rain and snow couldn't get you. It's very warm."
Camps like Doug's old one exist all over the city, hidden in the nooks and crannies that most of us ignore. They're all around downtown, in abandoned industrial areas and even in the suburbs. The people who live in the camps live in a kind of shadow culture. The camps are frequently uprooted and demolished, but there's no shortage of homeless campers.
Roosevelt Bethel steers the slightly weathered Ram pickup into a parking lot near the Cedar Bluff exit of I-40. The rain has let up so Bethel and his partner, Carl Williams, shed their jackets and head out across a field stranded by highways and busy arteries. The grass needs to be cut, and their pants and shoes soak up water. Cars speed by in every direction.
They wander over to an overpass and wade through the slick weeds to climb up underneath. Williams yells out his usual greeting: "Hello in the camp, hello in the camp."
Inside is bedding and gear for two or three people. Williams says they're probably off panhandling at busy intersections.
They walk down to another overpass where they spotted a guy sitting out of the rain. He sips from a bottle—it's hard to tell from down below if it's soda or beer—and stares down at them over the steep incline and thick jagged rocks.
The two yell up that they work for an outreach program and wonder if he needs any help—finding shelter, a doctor, a job or maybe a ride. The guy says he's only been here a day, passing through on his way to Florida from Kentucky.
They smile and wave. Bethel yells up, "Be good," and the two are on their way. "You see that board he had with him?" Williams says as they walk away. "He's using it to climb up and down again. He's been here more than a day."
The Cedar Bluff area might seem like an unlikely place to search for homeless camps, but these two have seen them just about every place around the city. As outreach workers for Community Action Committee's Homeward Bound, it's Bethel and Williams' job to get to know the homeless in Knoxville.
The homeless living out in the suburbs tend to be more transient, Williams says. They hitch rides from truckers on the Interstate and stop in busy suburban areas like this one, panhandling from cars at stoplights. Many will sleep up under bridges; some will have tents and camp in woods off the interstate. There used to be a rather large camp off Lovell Road, but it was dispersed by the interstate expansion.
"Out west [Knoxville] is more of a transient crew. There are more panhandlers," he says. "You rarely get to know them because they're so transient."
The more gregarious and talkative of the two, Williams is prone to waving at nosy motorists who stare at him as they pass.
The two go out once a week to see if anyone needs help, if they're looking for housing. It would take weeks to hit all the camps they've been to, so usually they stick to one section of town.
"I'd say about 70 percent of the time guys want help," Williams says. It might just be to get their ID back from the police or help with a ticket, but most of them have some needs.
On a rainy day in September, they tour a number of camps around downtown. They hit some old familiar spots and look out for new places, looking up at the sides of every bridge they drive under, or for clothes dangling on a fence along the highway, usually a sign someone is living nearby. Many of the camps are empty when we get there, the camps occupants gone to do day labor or scrounge for food.
Early in the morning they roust a man who looks to be in his 40s or 50s from a tent in an industrial section of East Knoxville. He's not far from a road, but you can hardly see his camp because of the thick rhododendron growing around it. His tent is on platforms. The man's from Texas and has lived in Knoxville before. "I like sleeping out," he says.
They aren't judgmental and don't try to talk him into finding housing.
At many camps, the residents have already gone for the day, stashing their clothes and bedding in bundles behind bridge columns.
Williams and Bethel have known most of Knoxville's chronic homeless of the last decade.
"Most of the people I've met are good people. I've not met too many who are mean-spirited," Williams says. "Most of them try to work. With a lot of them, the alcoholism and mental illness keeps them from working a steady job."
Larger camps usually have a social structure, Williams says.
"There's usually one guy who controls the camp. He's been out on the streets the longest, and everybody respects him. He's got the most gear. He sets the rules in the camp," Williams says. "He's usually got three or four enforcers with him in the camp."
The rules vary with each camp, Williams says, but are typically things like no stealing—food, booze and drugs must be shared. Sometimes women are shared, Williams says.
In the nine years since Bethel's been doing this work and the seven since Williams started, they've noticed some changes. They're seeing more women and children camping out. There used to be more cronyism among the homeless, they say. It was mostly older men, who would all look out for each other.
It's not so chummy now. "Now you're getting crack and meth addicts, young kids, and they're crazy. They prey on the homeless," Williams says.
Often the camps have booby traps around them, cans strung to wire to warn them if a stranger approaches. They've never been attacked themselves, but once in a while they've felt threatened. At one camp, a homeless man dangled a large knife and said, "I sure would like that watch of yours." In another they were almost jumped from behind by two men with bricks.
There's evidence of the trouble all around them. We visit an old camp at Tyson Park where a woman burned to death one evening. Her old mattress is there, next to the fire pit, and the log where her charred body was found.
Although most people stay homeless for only a short period, there are also a number of chronic homeless, ones who stay outside in all conditions.
"There are a lot of people who lived for an extensive time outside before we convinced them to come in," Bethel says. The longest was a man named Sarge who lived for 27 years before he let them help him find housing. "He said it finally got too rough," Bethel laughs. The man died a few years later.
Williams and Bethel are careful about who they show the camps to. They don't want people preying on their clients, and they also want the homeless to trust them. "[The homeless] think you'll hurt them just as much as you think they'll hurt you," Williams says.
However, they gave tours recently to some groups. Word must have gotten out because a few of the camps were cleared out shortly after that.
The two pass through a number of old spots where camps were recently cleared out by the city. There was a large camp of about 70 people underneath the maze of highway interchanges sometimes called the Spaghetti Bowl. The city cleared the camp out.
"We used to be able to go to a large camp like that and get the word out. But since the city went through and cleared the camps out, people don't trust us as much. They've started camping farther out," Williams says.
Camps have also gotten smaller. Williams and Bethel say they've noticed the camp clearings have become more aggressive after downtown development. They try to stay out of the politics involved and just help the homeless. They know they also need support from government officials as much as they need the trust of clients to do their outreach.
"I understand cities and growth. But there's a humane and an inhumane way do to it," Williams says. "The city came in and cleaned them out. They just throw away whatever's there."
Bob Whetsel, Knoxville's director of public works, says city workers clean out homeless camps about once a month, responding to police reports or complaints.
"We wait until we have three or four camps that we need to get to. [We] put together a little crew with gloves and pitchforks. You have to go through by hand and clean them out," Whetsel says. "If somebody's there, [the crew] asks the KPD to come out and talk to them and give them time to get their stuff. If they go and nobody's there, we just pick it up and move on."
No advance notice is given, and whatever the workers collect goes straight to the dump, he says.
Many cities around the country have similar practices. Some cities use much harsher tactics. In Cleveland, Ohio, city workers used to drive the homeless out of town, says Donald Whitehead, spokesman for the National Coalition for the Homeless.
But courts have found these practices illegal, Whitehead says. Because of lawsuits some cities are now required to give advance notice if they're going to clean out a camp and if no one is there, they're required to hold onto the possessions for a period of time. (In Pittsburgh, it's a year.)
"It really is a myopic solution to homelessness," Whitehead says of the camp clearings. "When you take people and destroy their belongings and sweep them away, it does nothing to end their homelessness.... It often times exacerbates their homeless situation."
Another abuse that Knoxville's homeless frequently say happens is police take their IDs and don't return them. It's something that goes on at communities throughout the country, Whitehead says.
"You would hope it's a mistake. But once a person doesn't have an ID, it makes them, at that point, illegal. They become vagrants, and they can be arrested for vagrancy laws. Their ability to access services at that point is almost zero. Very few providers let someone access services without some form of identification."
Doug is trying to get himself off the streets. A native of Alabama and an Army vet, he first came to Knoxville in the 1980s to attend Knoxville College.
When he started smoking crack, things started to go downhill, he says. "When I messed with it, I had to have girls, it was like Viagra for me," he says. He's vague about the breakup of his marriage, the wounds still a bit too painful. His daughter was hospitalized at one point, and he told his wife to move their children away from Knoxville.
He panhandled occasionally, but preferred working. Usually it was day labor, but he held a job a Buddy's Bar-B-Q for six months while he lived under his bridge. He'd shower every morning at the VMC before going to work.
When he had money, he'd celebrate. "I'd go get a hotel room for the night, get me a woman. Next morning I'd wake up with $20 or $30 in my pocket. I didn't care. I lived for pleasure. But you don't feel bad about it because you know you're not going to get a place," he says.
Doug's an odd mix of vulnerability and menace, the latter no doubt a useful tone cultivated over years on the street.
"When you're out there living the street life, you don't let anybody come on your turf. They will try to rob you. That 5th Ave. Hotel, the last time that guy got killed there, it was over a dime bag of rock," he says. "People who are weak are vulnerable. Older people who have money—they'd better not be caught walking alone along the railroad tracks.
"You have to let them know, dude, I will hurt you," he adds. "It's just like another lion will come up and invade your turf... I'm a wolf and you're gonna get ate. You have to be that way."
One look at him will tell you how menacing those streets can be.
It was back in 1997 when some men came looking for him. They had been arguing over a woman. Doug was asleep up on his bridge when they found him and one man swung at his face with a metal crutch. A piece of it knocked out his left eye and blood spurted out of his socket.
"For some reason, when he hit me, he stopped because he knew I'd lost my eye," he says. He was stunned, and the other men ran.
The injury has disturbed him greatly. In one breath he talks about his fury at the man who did it, in another he's weeping about it.
He hasn't seen the man who attacked him since and says he isn't planning on revenge. But asked how he'd react, he says, "The guy who did this to me, what do you think I'm going to do when I see him? You know what I'm going to do."
Since the assault, he's been unable to face his parents. It took years before he could even tell them what happened. But he wants to visit them soon and starts crying thinking about it. "It took me this long to get strong enough to talk about it," he says.
A six-month stint in jail—he won't say for what—woke him up.
Doug's working now, doing day labor jobs, and trying to stay out of trouble. He says he was also just hired at a fast food restaurant. He says he's no longer homeless, but a friend says he's actually squatting in an abandoned building.
He said he went back to his old bridge a few times, but it didn't feel right. He wants his own house.
"I have to be strong now. I know I can do it and I don't want that [street life] anymore," he says. "I like going home, taking a hot bath, watching TV late at night. Opening up the fridge at 2 or 3 in the morning and having a snack and there's beer in the box."
September 18, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 38
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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