Matthew, aka Shadow, 31, has a Hollywood profile. He could be the guy who rescues someone from a crazy person on a New York subway train, or he could be a Samuel L. Jackson sidekick in the Hateful Eight. A winning smile and clear eyes, he sits cross-legged against a signal box near downtown’s main shopping square with a cardboard sign folded over so many times it’s about to split in half, asking for spare change.

Matthew is a poet. He writes lyrics to songs, records dialogue in videos on his phone with his fiancé. He does yoga to calm his frequent epileptic seizures. That, and medical marijuana, have been working for him.

When he was 14 months old the doctors told his mother he has a rare diagnosis of Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome, a neurological disease. They told her he wouldn’t live long, and he would be about 70% delayed in all things motor and cognitive as a result. They said he’d only be able to feed and dress himself. His mother wasn’t too concerned. She was more concerned about her drug habit, and not getting too bruised by her husband, also an addict and alcoholic.

“I was in her arms one time when he hit her,” Matthew said. “Family?… Too bad you can’t return them.”

His parents split up and Matthew lived primarily with his father, attending a special school for kids with disabilities until he was 17. Needless to say, being a teenager with an abusive father made for a strained home situation. But he made it better by swimming at a club in La Mesa. In fact he was a natural athlete in the pool. His 50-meter freestyle time was 30.30 seconds; and his 100-meter time was one minute, five seconds. “That was when I was the happiest. I had an outlet.” He got a tattoo on his arm “swim with the best.” He swam competitively for two years before his grandfather pulled him out of the program. “He told me I wasn’t trying hard enough. He thought I was supposed to swim as hard in practice as I did at events. So to punish me he pulled me out of the program.”

He couldn’t take it any more and went to live with his mother.

He developed a rebellious attitude as a way of self-defense. “Pretty much if they told me I couldn’t do things, it made me more determined. ‘Can’t do that? Watch me!’ I’d tell them,” he said. “I’m hard headed.”

That hard-headedness didn’t serve him well when he got married in 2009. His wife was just as hard-headed. He calls the relationship “passionate,” because they were always either fighting or having sex. The marriage lasted six years and created two children, while landing him in jail after an incident where he thought his wife was about to suffocate their child, and lost his temper. She put him in jail for a six month stint. A psychiatrist said he was “projecting” his mother onto his wife, due to his childhood and the case was thrown out. He’ll be off parole in December this year.

Matthew has learned to keep calm in the face of crazy these days, he said. He writes lyrics instead of speaking his frustrations. “You can have a bad day with a good attitude, or you can have a good day with a bad attitude. I choose the former,” he said. And as for surviving on the street, he says it takes tenacity and the ability to adapt. “I’ll never be an alcoholic or do drugs. I just look at my dad and that’s all I need as a reminder.” That, and his new girlfriend.

He had a girlfriend when at school and recently met her all over again on Facebook in December 2014. They lived together at a motel in Lakeside, where she was getting rental assistance, until the manager ran a background check on Matthew and didn’t like that he had a felony. He’d been carrying a buck knife on his belt in public, unaware, he said, that it was a crime. He was arrested on a weapons charge. The couple then rented a room from a friend until that friend lost his house in late 2015. They’ve been on the streets ever since.

Matthew had been homeless before, so he knew what to do. They spent the last of his SSI check on a tent, food, rain tarp, canned foods. His fiancé Deanna, aka Hands, because she’s good with martial arts, didn’t take too well to a life on concrete even though she is a high functioning autistic. She also suffers from depression. So for now, she’s living with family in Tucson. Matthew panhandles money to go see her as often as he can, until he gets off parole and can re-apply for SSI. Then they hope to get a home together again.

Sometimes people will give him a few dollars, many just walk by, but he always tells them to have a nice day. “They’d rather avoid you than show compassion,” he said. “Not many people stop and ask my story.”

He feels the mayor doesn’t have a plan for the homeless; just forces the police to shift them from one location to another to make it look like they’re doing something. And the police are rarely quick to respond when the homeless are in trouble, he said, relating one time in the middle of the day when 11 non-homeless young men jumped a group of six homeless sitting around a parking lot. He ended up with a black eye and bones fractured around his eye and cheek. His girlfriend, “Hands” dropped most of the assailants by herself. They fled. The police didn’t show up for 20 minutes.

Pointing at a woman talking to a trash can while waiting for the street light to change, he said that was another reason he doesn’t do drugs. “I don’t want to be arguing with invisible people.”
Then he said, “If you think about it, we are the invisible people.”