What happened to Gypsy?
Gypsy explains her black eye and how she defended herself against an attempted sexual assault in downtown San Diego. The assailant had been taunting her for days, and one night he grabbed her and slammed her head against a wall and then the ground thinking that would subdue her enough to rape her. But she grew up tough, learned to defend herself. She is often running into young women who have just arrived on the streets, and offers them advise about who to trust and how to keep your belongings from being stolen. She has her own theories about why men feel it’s okay to assault women.
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Mike
Mike has been reliving a trauma every day for the last three years. His notebook is an angry testimonial to his near death experience, and a memorial to the friends who died that day on the Ides of March 2021. “I was talking with Randy,” Mike said, “and then he was gone.” He wipes away tears with his shirt sleeve as he recounts the memory.
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"I'm your Destiny"
Destiny Jones, 62, feels she is finally emerging from the broken and torn pieces that constituted her childhood and early adult years. Overcoming the depression, anxiety and bipolar diagnoses that generated from multiple childhood abuses, and the addictions she used to deny everything, she has found her voice and her soul in music. Now she wants to help others find their self-worth.
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DaVida
At age 65, she has been living on the streets for 52 years; most recently six years in San Diego, three years in Oceanside. Her father threw her out when she was 13. “He told me to ‘get the fuck out. You’re old enough to find a place, get a job.’ So I moved in with friends but I still went to school.” She got her GED eventually in prison, on her birthday. “They see you but they don’t see you,” DaVida told me about that people passing by on the sidewalk bordering Balboa Park.
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Rachel Hayes
Rachel Hayes knows she’s a strong woman. After spending eleven years homeless, establishing safe camping sites and building trusting communities of friends in and around East Village, Petco Park and a canyon in Lemon Grove, Rachel has navigated her way into permanent housing. Free from the daily struggle to survive on the streets, she is leveraging her new situation into time spent advocating for others - helping them secure resources or manage paperwork. She is considering a run for city council.
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Isaac Rim
Izean “Isaac” Rim, 71, was in the room where it happened when the late homeless advocate Waterman Dave won his lawsuit against the city for unlawfully disposing of people’s personal belongings. The resulting funds went to creating the initial Transitional Storage Center, which used clean, empty waste bins in a secure, central location (at that time on 10th Avenue across from the downtown library) to provide individual storage spaces for unhoused individuals. Isaac has taken on Waterman Dave’s watchdog role on the city’s streets.
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Julie Hockman
It takes less than a minute of talking with Julie and looking into her eyes to know she is profoundly intelligent. Like many of the thousands of people living unsheltered on San Diego’s streets, the circumstances that caused her to become homeless are complex, personal, and often misunderstood. Her difficulties navigating the layered bureaucracy in place to get vulnerable individuals into housing and health care services are not unique, but in Julie’s case they are compounded by the myriad stereotypes heaped onto people with physical limitations.
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Phyllis and Taz
Leaning against the bed that takes up most of her 400 square foot apartment, Phyllis can’t resist handing over another rawhide chew to her emotional support dog Taz. As the four year anniversary of being “inside” approaches, Blanck confesses that she still feels suspended in limbo. “I’m having a rough time, to tell you the truth,” she said. “There’s no sense of community. I am not part of the homeless community, and I don’t feel part of the housed community either.”
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Art and Soul
Art gives our spirits a chance to soar, to reflect on and reframe the situations we are dealing with. Everywhere I meet up with individuals experiencing homelessness, I discover artists - painters, musicians, crafters of jewelry or pottery or textile arts, singers, poets, and sketch artists. It speaks to the perseverance of the soul and lifts up the creative voice. Here are some of the artists I photographed that ended up featured in San Diego Magazine.
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Ghost Rider
Ghost Rider, aka David Lloyd, 65, was born in Iceland. His mother died in childbirth. He quit high school a month before graduation, but got his GED in jail at age 18. His father and brothers joined the military but recruiters wouldn’t take him because he was the “last son”. His father died in 1985 from complications due to exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. He got married young, but his wife was killed by a drunk driver when their daughter was two. After raising his daughter he took off hitchhiking across the U.S. and Canada.
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Kathy Shely
Kathy Shely has a naturally positive demeanor and upbeat outlook on life. After working as a social worker for the county for 22 years, then caring for her terminally ill mother for more than three years, being out on the streets doesn’t deter her from gravitating towards connecting people to what would improve their quality of life. Once her mother passed away and the state swooped in to take possession of her mother’s house, Kathy found herself on the street, having to fight to keep her sanity and dignity, even physically having to fight when she refused to have sex with someone in exchange for a cigarette or bottle of water.
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Moses
Moses’ mayoral campaign slogan is simple. “You cannot fix a city if you do not love the city.”
That’s why, Moses said, he’s going to one day run for mayor himself. He loves San Diego and wants to see it prosper, and believes a first step would be renovating historical landmarks that made it a tourist hub to begin with. But he also believes that in order to really start improving the city you need to start with the “weakest link,” which he thinks is people like himself — San Diego’s homeless. “How are we going to move up another step if they stay at the bottom?” he said. “We can’t move up because they're going to be like that ball and chain.”
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Voices of Our City Choir
Beginning with the early days when San Diego’s Voices of Our City Choir co-creator singer-songwriter Steph Johnson walked the streets offering oranges and a song to unsheltered members of the community, this unique coming together of souls has changed the lives of those who participate as well as those who hear them sing.
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Randy and Bullet
Randy, 63, was born and raised in San Diego, graduating from Sweetwater High with a love for anything to do with mathematics. He father, a veteran, convinced him to join the military after graduation. A long-haired surfer, Randy opted for the Merchant Marines, since they promised he would be sent to Hawaii. He was in Hawaii for two days before his unit was shipped to Saigon. As long as he has his dog Bullet with him, he is just fine, he said. Currently his is living in a downtown SRO, hoping to get into housing through the VASH program.
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Raven Jones
Raven Jones, 62, moved to San Diego from New York when she was six years old. She was homeless for a while, ostracized for being trans and Black. You can spot Raven several blocks away because her outfits are always flowing and colorful. Though she is discriminating about who she associates with, Raven is generous, often giving away her jewelry when someone shows an interest in a particular piece.
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Benito
Born in Denver, Colorado, Benito, 59, was one of 11 kids. The oldest brother, a Marine, died in Vietnam. He also has a brother in the Navy. Benito joined the Army. When on patrol in Iraq, a bullet sent a chip of concrete flying that broke his collarbone. That injury brought him home. His second wife died of a heroin overdose when their baby was six months old. That drove him into a depression that was hard to crawl out of, but he did. That lasted until light from a welding arc affected his vision, and he ended up an alcoholic and on the street again.
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Memorial for murdered homeless
An interfaith memorial service was held for Randy Ferris, 65, Walter Jones, 61, and Rodney Diffendal, the three homeless men who were killed by a drunk driver on the morning of March 15, 2020 as they were resting in their tents on B Street near San Diego City College. Two men in wheelchairs who were injured during the same incident, Duane and Jesse, sat solemnly together during the service. The tunnel where it happened is still covered in chalk dedications to the fallen.
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Richard
Richard has a quiet personality that works as a calm in the storm that can be daily survival for many homeless folks. Flush with cash and expensive toys in his early 20s in Minnesota, he sold it all and moved to San Diego when he found his lover in bed with another man. The cost of living in San Diego combined with an economic downturn forced him to live in his taxi, then to couch surf for nearly ten years with a friend down in Tijuana while crossing the border every day to do day labor work. He eventually moved back to San Diego where he spent 20 years living under the same tree in Balboa Park.
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Red
Michael Connelly, 62, grew up in Tucson, AZ. and joined the army right out of high school. He was a field medic but realized pretty quickly he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. His original goal had been to work as an operating room technician. At the age of 18, however, the idea of knowing and organizing all those tools when someone’s life was at stake, was a bit daunting. Red came out to San Diego in 1980, worked off and on at odd jobs, got married in 1988, has four kids, then got divorced in 1998. “After the divorce I ended up out on the streets, and got into the drugs and things. I spent the next 20 years out here doing drugs and ruining my life.”
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Monster
Monster thought COVID-19 was a lie. Then three people in his family died from cancer and his nephew in Tecate died from respiratory failure due to complications from COVID-19 just two days after being admitted to a hospital. Other people living in the park see him as a father figure. He has a calming effect on some of the younger, more energetic locals, especially when they are high. He has trouble with joint pain as he gets older. Some days it’s hard getting up and out of the bed he fashioned in the back of his vehicle. His dream is to own a furniture shop or sell cars so he can help support this daughter and shower his grandchildren with gifts.
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