A lot of people have misconceptions about the homeless. We get lonely, we have feelings, said Lynette Gresham, 51, as she searched her purse for a nebulizer.
“Do you think people like to ask ‘Do you have a dollar?’ all day?”

She was born in Salinas. In the summer she worked picking strawberries for pocket change. Her stepfather drugged her and molested her from age 9-11, and she was put out at age 12. She lived in different foster care homes, then ran away and slept behind a laundromat for a while.
Despite the separation, her mother did all she could by supplying her with food and bedding and money when she had it. Lynette moved to San Diego to get away from it all, living on the streets and getting into as little trouble as possible. But she got pregnant and had a daughter at age 15. One day she got drunk enough to get arrested, and CPS took her daughter, sending the child to live with her Lynette’s mother and stepfather.

Unfortunately that was another opportunity for the stepfather to abuse a young girl in his proximity. He fathered three children by Lynette’s daughter.
“I wish I could give her a hug and tell her I’m sorry,” Lynette said.

Lynette turned to drugs to deal with her depression, and to prostitution to pay for the drugs.
She lived on the streets from age 15 to 41, she said, and all that time her money mostly went to drugs. “At first I was good with $200-300 a week,” she said. Then later, as her taste changed, “I used to smoke $400 worth of crack a day just to be with the in crowd.”

All that changed when she started having heart issues. In fact now she has COPD and has a bag of prescription pills and a nebulizer to deal with her health issues. It has brought mortality into sharp focus for Lynette. On a bed at the winter shelter run by the Alpha Project for the Homeless, she said she knows where she went wrong and wants to change things.

“I had an apartment. But I let everyone come and stay with me. They ate my food, stole my clothes and got me thrown out.” Now she wants a place all her own where she can relax and not have to worry about day to day survival. “I want to go to the movies, I want to go to school again. I wan t to accomplish something meaningful before I leave this life.”

And she wants to find a way to get her daughter back in her life.