The Street's Got Talent

Josh is a funny dude. Most of our time together is spent doubled over in laughter. He draws these amazing comic strips in this tattered old sketchpad he carts around in his backpack (that's his work in the photo to the left). He talks often and intelligently about growing up black in a black neighborhood in Baltimore in the '60s and '70s, about liking Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan more than the O'Jays or the Isley Brothers, and about how most black people were just as afraid of white people as white people were afraid of them. He wrote a poem about it for the high school newspaper his senior year. The poem got picked up by a group of poets in New York and printed in a collection featuring young writers from America's inner-cities.

He met his wife at a waffle shop when taking a lunch break from constructing the Baltimore harbor. He stuck by her and tried to coach her free when years later she got involved with hard drugs. Finally, no longer able to put up with his me-or-the-drugs dictum, she told him she didn't love him, and overdosed a few years after that. He stopped drawing comic strips and stopped writing poetry. He worked as a custodian for hospitals in the Baltimore area for 30-some-odd years, lifted weights, played basketball. The weights ruined his back pretty good, and every once in a while he would have to take a month off work, crash at an uncle's or a friend's house to recoup, then get another job somewhere when things got better.

His asthma flared up around 2005 and he was in and out of the hospital for a year. He was prescribed a steroid inhalant he says worked but became unaffordable after three months. He moved in with his mom, who was mentally ill and living alone. He took care of her for four years, though his asthma was so bad at times he could barely make it the length of a bedroom. Locked in the bedroom, he started drawing again. A few years ago a friend recommended an herbal supplement which he still swears by.

I was down in the basement of the public library, where the periodicals and microfiches are stored, when Josh was telling me about the police officer that came by and asked him to leave the shaded spot on a local college campus where he sleeps, a spot he affectionately calls his rock. It is basically a concrete block against a lecture hall that serves as a makeshift bench. He sleeps there behind the trees and shrubs, sitting upright. He had moved out of his mom's place when the violence and frustration became too much, and his younger brother moved in.

A lot of people might consider Josh lazy — Josh the first among them. When I first met him I told him I wanted to shadow him for a few days and write about it, the life of a homeless person living on $40 a month and food stamps. "You don't wanna follow me, bruh. I'm the laziest homeless person alive," he said, laughing.

Josh didn't really have the opportunity to go to college, let alone major in art. I still try to convince him almost daily to go to the city college. The idea seems absurd to him. He worked fast food jobs in high school then went straight into full-time work in construction afterwards, keeping the fast food gig on the side. He grew up in a poor family where his dad drove a cab and his schizophrenic mom stayed at home, undiagnosed and untreated. "Poor people don't go to no psychiatrists," he once told me. "They just deal with their problems on their own, drink it up or something."

After 45 years of manual labor and deteriorating health, nearing 60-years-old, I have a hard time blaming him for not wanting to work any more. A minimum wage job might make him sick, but it probably won't get him an apartment. He's got an idea for a magazine he wants to start. He spends most of the day at the library researching the process, looking at potential advertisers, drawing comic strips and cover art for it.

We were researching some things online in the library basement the other day when we started talking about the poem from high school. I was surprised when my library catalog query returned the collection in stock and in the basement, just past the microfiche stacks and down the hall from where we sat.

Josh lit up when he saw me coming back with it. He let out in big-eyed surprise with that ebullient greeting I've come to know. "Fenster!" he said. "Damn, brother. You got it."

He put a hand out asking for the book. "Page 110, I think." He flipped right to it, amazed he remembered the page, and smiled as he read it.

This is a black room
and all the people here are black too.
There are windows on the wall but no one's gonna open them.
All the white people in the world
are waiting outside this room
and most of us don't want to look at them
or hear them saying "shine my shoes, boy"
or "scrub my floor, woman."
I am willing to open the window to see if they've changed
but the black people in this room might kill me.

It probably shouldn't be surprising the amount of talented people who are living out on the streets of America today. There are a lot of talents that just aren't valued like they should be in a market economy. And there are enough theoretical approaches suggesting that great art comes from suffering. Still, sometimes, how little we value some things — art, literature, human beings — can be jarring.

I think I've convinced Josh to start writing again. I suggested he start using WordPress to post his comics and his musings until the magazine gets started. I thought I knew how important Mark Horvath's new project to get the homeless online, WeAreVisible, was the first time I saw it. It took on a greater I realized when I sent Josh a link to WordPress and realized its importance to him.

Photo credit: Danny Fenster