Sam and Clyde

Sam walks the streets of downtown San Diego, lightly holding the leash of her pet Clyde, who pretends to care about the sights and smells around him. The sun hasn’t touched the tops of high rises rimming the parking lot that isolates Petco Park from the teeming homeless population starting to stir in the shadows along cyclone fences and the recessed doorways of closed businesses near Imperial Avenue.
Sam lights her second cigarette in ten minutes as a voice from behind a tarp asks if anyone has toilet paper, and three men pushing carts stop just behind her to share a pipe.

When her father was dying of pancreatic cancer, Sam stepped up to care for him. That was her undoing. Lifting him too many times, her back finally gave out when she couldn’t support him and his full weight fell on her. Her mother caved in to the stress of the situation and threw Sam out of the house. That was in 2002. Sam has been homeless ever since.

Starting out with a motor home, then losing that, sleeping on the beach and one time in the bathroom at Ocean Beach to escape inclement weather and harassment. She knows every patch of grass and bridge in Mission Bay Park. She has stayed in the short term HOT team beds at shelters. And she proudly recounts she has survived living in the San Diego River bed for years without being assaulted or robbed.

At one point she was living in the Old Town area until the police drover her out of there with so many illegal lodging tickets she ended up in jail. Now she’s in a temporary group apartment at St. Vincent de Paul downtown with her service cat Clyde. She walks past the former carnation plant where sh remembers touring as a girl scout and inadvertently dropping her hat on the conveyor belt.

“I’ve stayed everywhere in San Diego. Bushes, river beds, shelters… the only one I haven’t done is Salvation Army,” she said. “I don’t want to join the army.”

Sam studied computer science in college. Just six months shy of a degree, she broke up with her boyfriend at the time, and being depressed, stopped going to class, abandoning a 4.0 gpa. She ended up working as a cashier on North Island selling greeting cards.

Two of Sam’s three children are twins. One of the twins ran away at age 15 from where they were staying at Sam’s parents’ house because he didn’t like authority. Because she was addicted to meth, her children were taken from her by Child Protective Services. She laments losing the ability to be there for her children, but recognizes that addiction is a disease, one that’s difficult to moderate. “Everybody’s situation is different,” she said. “I think 99% of us are from dysfunctional families. You know, drunk on Saturday night, in church on Sunday?”

Walking the street, tugging Clyde behind, Sam runs into old friends she hasn’t seen for nearly ten years, when they were all homeless together downtown. They share stories and point at the windows where they now live temporarily, sharing information about mutual friends ad strategies for maintaining a roof over their heads when their temporary programs end. Much of that strategy revolves around giving in or giving up an addiction. For Sam, her drug of choice is meth. “Finding meth is easier than looking for food,” she said. Breaking free of that easy addiction is fraught with difficulty; but is essentially necessary for survival; a daunting undertaking that can lead to depression, anger, denial.

She has learned that the best way to deal with frustration or depression is to write down what you are feeling or thinking, “then cast it into the ocean…. get the negative energy out,” she said. “It works every time.”

She also laments that people aren’t “old school” any more in how they treat each other. “What happened to do unto others?” she asked rhetorically. Sam has been robbed many times on the street and inside at St. Vincent de Paul. “I’ve lost everything many times,” she said, shaking her head. The she was in prison for having too many illegal lodging tickets, an irony that is not lost on the homeless population, and Clyde was in the pound, her shopping cart was stolen. When she got out she had to take out a Pay Day loan to get Clyde out of the pound.

The fact there are so few public restrooms and showers on the streets is the cause of the Hepatitis A outbreak, Sam feels. “You can prepare yourself for many things on the street, like losing your possessions, being assaulted. There is no preparing yourself for needing a bathroom!” she said. “That’s why the Hep A epidemic is still happening. I blame the city.”

She keeps a cell phone in her pocket, but it is not always charged even though she lives in a dorm room. There are never enough outlets for all the devices she and the five other women want to plug into the two-outlet wall socket.

“I know I’m here (on the street) for a reason,” Sam said. “I’m just not sure what it is yet.”