A Homeless Man I Know

by Bobbette Robinson                             

I know a man who lives with a woman, who likes to beat him all the time. He doesn’t fight back because she has sons who also used to beat him up! She beats him in front of his friends, who tell him that because she’s a woman, he shouldn’t hit her. Her sons stopped beating him up, but she didn’t! She keeps beating him with that cane, but he can’t fight back because her sons might beat him up to defend their mother. She has beat him so much that he has seizures.

This lady he is living with keeps saying that she will call the police on him, but she hasn’t done that just yet. She buys him clothes and shoes and gives him money every month, but then she beats him and says she wants him out of her house! He goes to his daughter’s house when the lady puts him out, but the family is tired of him doing that.

He’s very sick! He’s so sick that his eyes are yellow from drinking so much. He drinks every day, and he has “the shakes.”

He won’t go to a shelter and let them help him find housing. I think he is afraid, not of living in a shelter, but because he has a warrant for his arrest and doesn’t want to go to jail. He cashed someone’s check illegally and because he doesn’t want to do the time, he has been dodging the police.

He works at a friend’s barber shop. The friend, who he tells everyone he is his brother, is really his brother-in-law. He doesn’t want to give the lady any of the money he makes at the shop to help pay the bills or buy food, but sometimes, he buys her a beer or two.

There are many reasons why people become homeless, and this man is dealing with two of them – domestic violence and alcohol abuse. Rather than go to jail, he’d rather deal with her. There is nothing that I can do for him, except to listen when he feels like talking.