Ray is a black man with a slight build, odd gaps between his teeth and an earnestly friendly expression. He's the type of person who will gladly sit and play cards with strangers for hours.
He used to do odd jobs wherever he could find them in Minneapolis, helping out here or there for a few days until the work ran out and then moving on to look for something else. He never graduated from high school, he doesn't know how to speak anything other than Ebonics and for most of his life he has been homeless.
I knew Ray when I lived in Minneapolis; I hung out with him sometimes at the homeless shelter and tagged along on a bowling trip they organized a few years back for the men staying there. He had spent some time that day panhandling and loved the fact that he was able to buy me a soda. It made him feel like a normal person, and he smiled so hard that you'd think someone had just given him a hundred dollars.
Guys like him don't think about anything beyond the day they're living or where they're going to sleep that night. It's a fact that makes them remarkably generous people, when they have anything to be generous with. Most of them are looking for enough money to buy a sandwich and have an excuse to sit somewhere warm for a while. When you think about it, panhandling is really no different from telemarketing; it's just colder and you can't put it on a resume.
Ray's lack of education and sporadic housing arrangements from the time he was very young left him without a respectable work history and no permanent address. He was rarely able to afford proper health care and was only able to shower when he managed to get a bed at the homeless shelter for a night.
Forget about finding money to pay for a dentist. Ray was lucky; never convicted of a felony, he didn't have to face the slammed door that prison time gets you at an interview, but it's hard to find someone willing to hire a black man with no high school diploma, no nice quality clothes and dirty, rotted teeth.
Faced with working a stressful minimum-wage job with no chance for advancement and a high likelihood of ending up on the street anyway due to illness or the loss of said job, some people make the choice to live what they consider to be the lesser of two evils. Sure, being homeless leaves you vulnerable to freezing, hunger, arrest and abuse, but a miserable job for miserable pay with a miserable future can look pretty bleak as well.
Ray got beaten up so badly a couple years ago that he now suffers from a traumatic brain injury. He's incapable of taking care of himself, but he isn't able to recognize it. If it hadn't been for the intervention of a local attorney with connections within the homeless community, he would be dead.
Ray got a bittersweet ending; his disability allows him to live in a home for the mentally disabled, but he can't understand why he has to be there. He still has that earnest smile, and the man who once bought me a soda is still in there somewhere, but he isn't able to reach it anymore.
And when you ask him, he still says he'd rather be out on the street than a prisoner to the TV set and the restrictions of a group home.
Minneapolis and Madison are two cities that have spent years turning a blind eye to their most vulnerable population. Ray was never even angry over it.
