Ian and Oreo

Ian, 41, was born in Parma, Ohio. His dad was in the navy, so they moved around, landing in San Diego when Ian was 4. His mother was a registered nurse. He went to Spring Valley High School - a stand out water polo player. His grandmother was a swim teacher and taught him to swim at an early age.

His grandmother and grandfather on his mother’s side lived in Phoenix. Each year they would alternate having Thanksgiving in San Diego and Christmas in Phoenix, then switching cities and holidays the following year. All his grandparents are gone now, but Ian loved being the only grandchild for many years.

When his father retired from the navy he worked on computers, a job that likewise required him to travel. His parents divorced and his mother remarried to a man who had two sons. Ian wanted me to know that his stepfather molested him repeatedly when he was young. He threatened to beat Ian if he said anything, and he knew his two stepbrothers were always ready to beat the crap out of him if their father asked them to. “They were headed for bad things,” Ian said. At the age of 10 he “found the ability to tell him (the stepfather) to fuck off.” His stepfather didn’t touch him any more after that. When he graduated high school he moved to Phoenix to help his arthritic grandmother get around.

In Phoenix a college recruiter convinced him to enroll at a DeVry University specifically for its IT training. He lasted two semesters. “My head wasn’t into it,” he said. “My parents shoved me through all these honors classes in high school. I was always studying, so I just wan’t ready to jump back into that again yet.”

His parents asked him what he was going to do with his life if not pursue an education or a skill tailored to today’s workforce. Ian remembers it was May 11, 1999 when he joined the Air Force. He went through boot camp at Lackland, Texas from May to June, then technical school in Wichita Falls, Texas from July to September. He reported to duty in New Jersey that October, which is quite different weather-wise than summer in Texas. Working on planes required him to be outside all day, and despite the cold winter months he loved it. Ian mostly worked on KC-10 Extenders. “They’re flying gas stations essentially,” he said, “cargo planes that refuel pretty much everything in the air - bombers, fighters, you name it.”

He said he had wanted to join the Air Force ever since he was four and a half years old and travelled alone on a commercial flight. Flight attendants and pilots doted on him, showed him the cockpit and fed him all kinds of goodies. He has loved airplanes ever since.

He lasted two years in the Air Force, because he was constantly getting in trouble for what he called little stuff like failing room inspection or not passing a test. He left the Air Force at age 20 with a “general under honorable” discharge - a designation meaning he wasn’t eligible for any kind of benefits from the military.

From there Ian went to live with his father in San Diego. He admits that he got himself into trouble again by inviting too many friends over all the time. Finally, Ian’s father put his belongings on the front porch and told him to find another place to live. Not long thereafter he ended up in county jail for two and a half months, with three years probation and having paid financial restitution after he “got caught messing with a 16-year-old.” Everyone he has dated since then has been older than he is, Ian said, just to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Ian found a new girlfriend, moved in with her and started driving a pedicab downtown. He was loving life for three years until the relationship broke up and he ended up homeless because he “didn’t know how to budget money.” He couch-surfed and slept outside bouncing between San Diego, LA, and Hollywood until he met up with an outreach team from the Set Free Ministries. He went through their sober living program at a ranch in Cabazon, CA. Once the leaders deem participants ready to stay clean on their own, there is a “blessing out” ceremony and the person is placed in a communal setting with other graduates in Riverside. He got a job detailing cars that were being prepared for auction. “I must have washed over 10,000 cars in my lifetime!” he said. As the months went by and he was making real money, the leaders in his program wanted more and more of his income, so he left.

He ended up marrying a woman who had also been in the program. They had a nice two-bedroom apartment and he found work operating an insert machine at the Riverside Press-Enterprise. Once again, everything was going well until it wasn’t. He was a passenger in a car with a friend who had been drinking too much at a party. As a result of their car wreck, he cracked a bone in his chest from stress against the seat belt and suffered a concussion. He still suffers bouts of anxiety when he is in a car. His anxiety triggers his temper, which he has trouble controlling. “I get PTSD and freak out all the time, like mad freak outs, throwing things,” he explained.

His marriage crumbled. He moved back to San Diego, rooming with an old friend from high school. He applied for work at the Union-Tribune and when he told them he was an experienced insert machine operator they hired him on the spot. “It was the shortest job interview ever,” he laughed. He and his new girlfriend had a baby, and all was well for another three and a half years before he got lazy and took too many sick days off work. His coworkers advised him he was about to lose a good thing but he didn’t listen. He ended up being fired in September 2010. He started drinking and fighting with his girlfriend, then left. Child support took half of his check, so he lost the apartment he was in because he couldn’t pay rent.

That was the beginning of a ten year stretch living on the streets and in the park. Mostly he stayed low profile except on Sundays when he joined the drumming circle in Balboa Park. It was a great emotional release for him. He’d played drums since he was 14, and the other drummers were a mix of hippies and veterans smoking weed. “I am home!” was his reaction the first time he participated. On advice from several of the drummers, he went to the veterans’ shelter at Christmas time one year when it was extra cold outside. His timing was perfect, he said, because he was given a bottom bunk right in front of the t.v. “There were presents on the bunk already,” he smiled. He stayed in the tent for several months. Ian also went regularly to the veteran’s Stand Down event for homeless veterans seven years in a row as a participant. The COVID year was the year he had planned to final go as a tent coordinator volunteer. He likes to share the fact that he met Kamala Harris there one year, and got to see Green Day perform to just a handful of homeless vets.

In April 2011 he met a girl at the drum circle named Heather, whom he said propositioned him to come home with her. “That doesn’t come around every day,” he said, “and the tent was closing in four days anyway.” Home turned out to be her chosen spot in the park. They spent from July 2011 to August 2016 in the park together, dealing with everyone from cops to tweakers and in between. “We had shit stolen. Everything that happens to people happened to us.” But they had a Rottweiler named Rock who watched over them for the most part.

Ian has many stories of the craziness in the park. One favorite story is what he calls the “guy who robbed himself.” Ian woke up at 2 a.m. to see a guy with a big stick hovering over him. The guy was shaking, his voice was loud. “Take this!” he shouted at Ian and Heather. Then he dropped the stick, started crying, tossed three $20 bills at them and walked away. Another time Ian was walking in the Redwood Circle area when a hawk flew down and attacked a bald-headed man with it’s talons. “The guy looks up and is shit-talking the hawk, and the hawk came back and did it again, attacking the top of his head.”

The couple went to St. Vincent’s for shelter in 2016 when they were fed up with the Homeless Outreach Team (HOT) trying to convince them to go in. Since he was a veteran and had his DD-14 papers he could stay in a room with one other person after 45 days in the communal dorms. He said he heard that Vinny’s receives $2,500 per month for each veteran they house, so he wondered why he couldn’t have a single room. He was given a roommate who was HIV positive, was born male but identified as female and spoke no English. He was in line to get permanent housing, so he waited. Meanwhile Heather went to Rachel’s, a shelter for women, then through People Assisting The Homeless (PATH) was assigned a small studio apartment at Cypress, funded through Section 8, since she had a disability.

Ian spent a lot of time at her place, living there unofficially for three years. He petitioned to become her caregiver to help her deal with her COPD issues. It became official at the beginning of 2020. “I had a key! I was a legit inside person!” he said. And then came the lockdown. They couldn’t leave her studio apartment for four months except to get food and medical supplies. In late April of 2021 Heather went to the hospital for 17 days, “15 of those with a tube down her throat, unconscious,” Ian said. She died May 5, 2021 at the age of 40. Another close friend died of an overdose in June. He adopted her dog Oreo, who seemed to understand the gravity of the situation and refuses to leave Ian’s side.

Ian was a broken man. He called his father. His father invited him to come back and live with him again, in the area where Rancho San Diego and El Cajon intersect. Over the past six months Ian has done some serious soul-searching. He decided to come out to his friends as bi-sexual. He first told a gay friend in the park. Then he carefully worded something to post on Facebook, hit return and went to sleep almost fearful of the responses he would get. In the morning he saw nothing but supportive comments, telling him how brave he was and how much he was loved. “All these emotions came out,” he said. He then looked for support groups, and found a special friend that he talks with nearly every day.

Asked what he would like people to know about individuals experiencing homelessness, Ian told me “most homeless don’t start out that way. They’ve either lost an apartment, gotten a divorce, lost a job, or all three, and have no other way to support themselves. They come out here sober and they quickly need to find a way to cope with being homeless.”