I met Tamika when she lived on a bench on Main Street across from the convention center.
This was when the homelessness was just starting to take off. Tamika lived on the bench and another lady lived on the grate into the driveway to the derelict hotel by the river. Tamika would talk but she would never accept food and the lady on the grate would never talk but if I ran by the Pizza Stop on State Street and got two slices she would eat one.
Now, when I say Tamika lived on the bench, I mean she lived on the bench. It was her home. And what made me stop and say hello to her as I ran by was that she had it set up like a house. A well-kept house. It was remarkable for its orderliness. She had her possessions in a couple of bags at her feet and on the bench and she had a tarp rigged so that when it rained or snowed she could pull it up over her head and be there, secure against the elements, no matter what came.
On Main Street in Rochester.
About three blocks from where, a generation ago, the mayor’s father would stand out front of Midtown Plaza and sell his xeroxed religious tracts for $2 apiece.
The thing I noticed about Tamika’s set up, after its orderliness, was that it – and she – smelled nice. That’s unusual for homeless people. But Tamika not only didn’t smell bad, she smelled good. She and her clothes were clean, she didn’t accumulate litter around her place, and one time I came by and she was wiping her stuff down with sanitizing towelettes.
But that was a year or two or three ago, and I lost track of her, until she turned up this spring on another bench. Still on Main, but at the intersection of Gibbs Street, across from the Eastman Theater. That was fine for a while, but then it got to be time for the jazz festival and, well, when the jazz festival comes to town some of the reality gets suspended, and there’s no way some homeless lady is going to be allowed to be camped out on a bench across the street from the Eastman Theater.
The cops were kind to her. Rousting her wasn’t their idea, but orders are orders and when she asked where she could go the officers suggested she move farther down Main Street to an acre or so of grass that forms a parklike triangle at Main, Union and University as University feeds into the Inner Loop. There is a nice bench there, and a bus shelter, and the cops gave her a ride down there and made sure she was OK.
That was in June, and Tamika has been there since.
I didn’t know it was her living there, but I knew somebody had moved in. There was a tent, and a chair, and a cleanliness and orderliness that made it stand out. Somebody had made a home on this piece of grass between the passing cars and they had, circumstances notwithstanding, made it a nice home.
Lou, the security guard at the Fastrac across Main Street, kept an eye on her, and the crew at the auto shop across Union let her use their facilities to wash up, and the summer passed, uneventfully and quietly. Tamika didn’t beg, she didn’t bother anybody, she didn’t act out like many of the homeless and the wanderers. She was a nice, quiet lady and she kept to herself.
Which brings us to Thursday. It was a little after 2 and I was going on my daily run. I had thought to run out Lyell Avenue, but I always say a quick prayer asking where I’m supposed to go and as I did so the thought came to mind to run up Union and check on the lady who lived in the tent.
I hadn’t gone very far before, two or three blocks ahead, I could see the orange lights on big trucks, parked apparently on Main. Getting closer I saw police officers and an ambulance and men in work clothes raking the grass, and I knew what was going on.
They were rousting her.
They had a garbage truck, another truck hauling a giant roll-off dumpster, police cars, an ambulance, various unmarked vehicles, and they were gathered around an ambulance gurney, strapping Tamika onto it. She was sitting up, she seemed uninjured, she was cooperative and not combative, but she was not happy.
I took a picture of her, and I took a picture of her tent, its contents – her earthly belongings – neatly arranged inside, and I took a picture of the roll-off, where another tent had already been thrown and where, as soon as the ambulance pulled away with Tamika inside, her tent would be thrown.
Her tent and her sleeping bag and her pillow and whatever else she kept near and dear.
I went across the street to watch, not wanting to either speak my mind or run the risk of getting charged with something, so I went across the street to stand with the workers and the customers at the Fastrac. We all watched and swore, half pissed and half heartbroken and completely powerless at what we, without exception, considered an outrage. This lady minded her business and didn’t bother anyone and kept her place nice and these City Hall bastards are ripping up her life and dragging her off and throwing her stuff into some shithole roll-off that looked like it was last used for hauling compost.
I raged.
In other administrations, I would have called the mayor, but in this administration the best I could do was send a pissy text to the communications person and copy in the mayor and one of the better City Council members on a tweet. The communications person sent a pissy text back – 18 hours later – and I never heard anything from the mayor or the City Council member. To those of us watching this operation, it was pretty clear City Hall didn’t give a damn.
Of all the problems in Rochester, of all the heartbreaks and failings, of all the people who have need and all the messes that need cleaning up, to send out more than 20 city employees to blow up the life of some lady who’s not bothering anybody, it was low down and dirty, and it was damned City Hall to blame.
One block north of where we onlookers stood, a man lay wrapped in a blanket amidst litter and filth, asleep or unconscious in the corner of an empty lot where his presence has worn away the grass. The day prior I had run down North Clinton and seen a man sitting on the steps of St. Michael’s, in the odd disjointed catatonia of fentanyl overdose, a cigarette filter in his mouth and his eyes open and rolled to the side.
I see things like this every day, out for a run. The people of Rochester’s neighborhoods see these things every day, as part of their lives. And nobody seems to care and nobody seems to do anything.
And those drones at City Hall are rousting some lady who lives in a tent.
Why does she do it? Why doesn’t she go to a shelter? Why doesn’t she get into some program? Why doesn’t she follow some well-intentioned do-gooder’s plan for her life?
I don’t know. I don’t know why she does what she does.
I don’t know why I do what I do. You don’t know why you do what you do.
She just does it, and she doesn’t bother anybody, and that’s all that’s really any of anybody else’s business.
Some people are just square pegs in a round-hole world and no amount of pounding is going to change that. Or maybe she’s got some purpose, some statement she’s making, some Rosa Parks stand she’s taking.
I don’t know and you don’t know and City Hall doesn’t know.
But when they solve all the other problems in Rochester, they can get after this woman for “trespassing” on city property. Until then, I think they should leave her the hell alone.
I don’t know how long the hospital kept Tamika, or why they even took her there. But they’re kind of famous for spitting people out as fast as they get them, leaving them stranded and on foot across town outside the Emergency Department exit.
Whatever happened, when Mike who used to work at a homeless shelter drove by the next morning, Friday morning, to check on her, there she was, on the bench, hunched over, back where her tent had been, with nothing, and with rain in the forecast.
This is when the communications person got back to me with the assurance that “we connect people to countless services.” I mentioned the weather forecast. The response was “she can get her tent.” I observed that this was a homeless lady without a car and getting her tent herself wherever the hell the city had it stashed might not be within the realm of her capabilities, whereupon the response was “we would deliver or help her get to her belongings.”
Then this: “Both our PIC team and the county’s FIT team are very familiar with her and continue to work to encourage her to connect to all the help that is available. I am sure they’ll swing by again today to see her.”
They didn’t.
And she sat there all day.
At some point someone dropped her off a discount tent, unassembled, and a couple of hours after dark on Friday night a former Scoutmaster with a borrowed headlamp put it up for her, and someone drove off to the Hudson Avenue Walmart to buy her a blanket and a pillow.
And there she spent the Labor Day weekend, when the temperature dropped 20 degrees and a half an inch of rain fell and the discount rain fly flapped in the wind.
And who knows when they’ll come back to roust her again.
Who knows if they’ll see it as a pissing match they have to win, or if they’ll realize they have bigger fish to fry.
Homelessness is complex and intractable. It is a driven by insanity and addiction and the worst Rochester economy in generations. You add opioids to deinstitutionalization in the Rust Belt and you get a panhandler at every off ramp and a summer where the fastest growing call to the Rochester Fire Department was for a “man down,” asleep or overdosed in random doorways and empty lots. Whether you see this as an ugly blight of ramshackle camps and people, or a humanitarian crisis of people in need, there is no easy solution, and there may be no solution at all. Mansions on East Avenue are headquarters to non-profits and unions and blankets in alleys are home to children of God. It’s just the way Rochester is. It’s just the way the world is.
And we do what we can do. And the city does what it can do.
We donate where we will and we serve as we can.
And God bless everyone for it.
But this was a miss. This was PR. This was a dog-and-pony show.
Tamika lives on Main Street.
She doesn’t beg money, she doesn’t make a mess, she doesn’t rant and rave and shout at invisible people.
She just lives, visibly, with dignity, and that apparently makes some people uncomfortable.