James

James Forristal, 40, was born in Kansas City. He was a typical kid who loved sports and had friends at school. But his family life was turbulent. His father had anger issues, and his mother wasn’t around much because she worked odd hours. His sister ended up moving in with her boyfriend. He joined JobCorps and got his GED.

He had an apartment on his own and did clerical work at a bank for a while, then for Hallmark in their corporate office. He loved numbers and organization. But he soon found corporate work boring. He tried moving to nearby St. Louis to make a life change, but that wasn’t enough of a change.

San Diego had always loomed large in his mind ever since his family had traveled there for a family vacation. It spoke of good memories. So he got support from his parents, who sent him $500 each month for the first three months after he moved to San Diego. The money dwindled after that, since they had their own bills back home. He found work as a barista at Twiggs in North Park, and a few other jobs that paid the rent. Life was moving along smoothly until last fall when his uncle in Kansas City fell ill with colon cancer.

James returned to be with his uncle. “It’s tough to watch someone you love die,” he said. “There’s really no easy way to deal with it.”

And it made him realize some profound things about himself. “I’m an introvert,” he said. “We really think about big issues. They affect us. Like Fukushima. And the refugee crisis. I feel for those people. I get stressed out, run ragged, wondering how we can help them.”

After his uncle passed away, James returned to San Diego and hasn’t found his footing yet. Frail and still wearing his hospital bracelet after two days treatment for pneumonia, he pushed a stubborn cart full of plastic bottles through across the trolley tracks as darkness began to fall on the city’s center.

“Keeping a blanket out here is hard. Every three or four days I lose everything. It gets stolen or I lose it,” James said. The money he gets from recycling cans and bottles sustains him. Once in a while his sister will send $50, but his mother can’t help because she is living off SSI. And in the course of his dumpster diving he often finds things he can sell or trade, like a laptop whose battery has exploded, or a half-eaten donut from the Donut Bar, or unopened beers, which he can sell because he doesn’t drink.

He has also been beaten up on the street. “I was sleeping and these guys started beating on me. When I woke up and rolled over and they saw my face they realized I was mistaken for someone else, so they stopped then, but I got cut up pretty bad,” he said. So James just tries to quietly stay away from madness and make enough money to buy the opiates that make life on the street more bearable.