Key West Homeless Forum Report From An Ex- Key West Street Person's Perspective

While The Blue Paper was hard at blue news work, the Key West homeless forum happened on August 28 at the Harvey Government Center.

The  four forum panelists’ main thrust was the criminalization of homelessness is the most expensive and least effective way to deal with homelessness. Jailing homeless people costs the criminal justice and the court systems heaps of money and makes it even harder for homeless people to get a job and stop being homeless. Putting homeless people into hospitals, instead of into jails, also is super expensive. Easily the cheapest and most effective way to end homelessness, 95 percent proven success, is to put homeless people into housing where they are managed by case workers until, and if, they are ready to move out on their own.

The panelists were splendid, moderator. Rev. Randy Becker did an excellent job. He announced the 3-hour forum would run straight through without a break, anyone needing to get coffee, stand up and stretch and walk around, use the bathroom was in charge of when that happened.  Randy said each panelist would present, then the other panelists could respond, if they wished. Then, written questions would be taken from the audience. Then, anyone in the audience who wanted to speak, could have 2 minutes.

Just before the forum began, I was told by Monroe County IT personnel that the county was not recording the forum. A fellow with a camera set up on a tripod on the right  front of the meeting room said he worked for Florida Keys Outreach Coalition, was filming the event, with audio, and Father Steve Braddock would have a copy of the video and perhaps a link for people to open and watch, who did not attend the event.

The meeting chamber was maybe 85 percent full, the audience was white. I saw no homeless people in the audience. After the forum was over, when they were free, I gave each of the four panelist my goodmorningkeywest.com “business card”, with “Sloan Bashinsky, JD, LLM” written across the top. I told them I would report the forum the next morning at that website, and that my report would be “different”. At Naja Girard’s request, this article you are reading is that post only slightly modified for submission to the blue paper.

All four panelists said during the forum that nobody who is homeless wants to be homeless; something traumatic happens, then they are homeless.

I will come back to the homeless forum further along in this article, after a pre-Key West testimony on homelessness, which I was directed in dreams the night following the Key West homeless forum to report.

Something that came up from time to time when I lived on the street in Key West, and afterward, was it was said I never really was homeless. I was doing it as a research project for book, or as an under cover agent for a homeless activist organization, or because I wanted to live that way. In fact, I did not like being homeless. It was traumatic. It was due to running out of money and, for reasons I still do not understand, I was spirit-blocked from earning a living wage, and still am.

My initial experience with and getting to know homeless people was in Boulder, Colorado, where I lived from 1987-1995. Even back then, I was spirit-blocked from earning a living wage, but I had inherited money and was able to live comfortably; I did not live extravagantly.

There was a road in Boulder, which had been turned into a pedestrian mall and became called Pearl Street Mall. It was quite popular, and I spent a lot of time hanging out there. During the warmer months, street performers were there in the evenings. Town residents came with their children. The shops along the mall were doing very well. Even as a variety of homeless people hung out there.

One homeless fellow was about 45, I would guess. He was from back east. He’d had a regular life, wife, children, job. Then, he’d left all of that behind and have moved west, became e a Buddhist, there was a large Buddhist community there, the Tibetan strain. He lived there year round.

Tony had  cubbyholes out of the way against buildings where he slept nights. When winter was coming, somehow the warmer clothing and sleeping bag he needed showed up, and he didn’t freeze to death. Boulder winters were about six months. When the snow melted, Tony started shedding his belongings, and by June was down to very little clothing. He was clean, personable and interesting.

There was Jim Freedom, maybe 35, that was not his birth name, who lived in a van and preached freedom, in the spiritual sense, every afternoon and night on Pearl Street Mall to anyone who would listen to him. He was eager to talk with anyone who wanted to talk with him, when he wasn’t preaching. I had many conversations with him.

There was Sam, maybe 50, who wore a sandwich board sign made out of a cardboard box, depicting himself as Jesus with  a crown of thorns. He said God had told him to wear that sign, he was Jesus. Sam sometimes preached. He dumpster-dived and panhandled change for food. I had many conversations with him, as well, and with him and Jim Freedom together. Sometimes in the evenings, we drew a pretty good crowd of passersby, some of whom became regulars, in front of Boulder Bookstore.

When winter was coming on, Jim and Samuel Jesus, as I called him, headed elsewhere. Jim in his van. Samuel Jesus on foot, under his very large backpack. He traveled the US on foot and hitchhiking, going wherever the spirit led him; talking God and Jesus to whomever was in front of him; panhandling and dumpster diving. He did not work for money; nor did Jim, who had a small income from securities he’d acquired in his prior mainstream life , with which he’d become disenchanted. His history I never learned, nor Samuel Jesus’.

There was Loki, who actually was David, but it was some time before he told me his birth name. He was from California, raised be a Mormon high priest. But in his early teens, he became disenchanted with his destiny being mapped out for him by his Mormon parents. There also was friction with his father, and with his mother. So, when he was about sixteen, as I recall his story, Loki took off.

He had a long, full beard, and was blond, and, dang, if he didn’t look like the Jesus in lots of Christian paintings of Jesus. Loki knew the Bible cold. He was psychic. Had spirit powers, but didn’t use them, by choice. He told me he chose Loki as a name, in honor the Norse god by that name. A mischievous god. A trickster.

Loki liked to simply lie on his backpack and meditate and sleep in the middle of of the park between several popular establishments. He had several companions about his age, who did the same. They were sort of like modern day Hippies. But they were not Rainbows. They were something else entirely. Loki deserves more time here.

On one side of the mall median was a pizza restaurant. Loki loved pizza, and he and other street kids, and Samuel Jesus found a lot of thrown away uneaten pizza in the dumpster in front of the pizza restaurant. They also panhandled people going into and coming out of the pizza restaurant for a slice of pizza. Or for money to buy a slice.

One day, a bunch of Christians on some kind of mission or tour came by, and Loki asked them for spare change, so he could get a slice of pizza. The leader of the Christians braced, told his followers to walk around, don’t give the beggar anything. Loki asked the leader if he knew of such and such passage in the Gospels? Loki said the book and page and paragraph numbers, not the passage itself. The leader was stopped in his tracks. He told someone to go inside and get Loki a slice of pizza, but don’t give him any money. The passage was where Jesus told his disciples he was hungry and they had fed him not. But Loki never said the words, only the book and page and paragraph numbers.

Loki and I had deep conversations about many things. My wife and I tried to let him living in the basement of our home for a while, but he was too restless, had to get up several times in the night and go outside and smoke a cigarette. He liked beer, and drank it when he could beg it. He had done LSD. Peyote. As far as I know, he didn’t use them when I knew him.

I was having ongoing spirit experiences, and that’s part of what interested me about Loki. I told him I never did drugs. My experiences just came. By the time I met him in the summer of 1994, I was living in two different worlds at the same time, all the time. Loki recognized that, and he respected it. As did his young friends.

However, Jim Freedom did not relate to my experiences, because he was not having spirit experiences; and Samuel Jesus did not relate, because my experiences did not seem to him to have anything to do with the Bible, which he was always opening and reading and studying. My experiences had everything to do with Jesus, but not in the way any Christian I met in Boulder could take in.

The way I came to meet Loki in the summer of 1994, came about in this way.

My wife and her son went to Europe and England for five weeks. Most of the trip was so she could study under Angels “Nessie” Bayley, an English child therapist of some renown, whom I had met when she came to the states, and we had become good friends. Nessie knew I was having spirit experiences. My wife knew. Her son knew. Some of her friends knew. Some of them were therapists. They didn’t know exactly what to make of me. Nor did my wife. But they never told me I needed psychiatric help.

While my wife and her son were overseas, the notion came to me to buy a white plastic paint bucket, and write with magic marker on it: “Take what you need, give what you can.” That was borrowed from Robert Heinlein’s iconic novel, Stranger in a Strange Land.

The “hero” in that book, born to human settlers on Mars, returned to Earth when the Martians had enough of humans and made them all leave. The Martians had trained and done things to the hero, which enabled them to use him like a TV camera, to watch him and Earthlings after he came back to this planet. The Martians were wondering if they would have to do Earth, what they’d once done to the planet between them and Jupiter, after that planet’s inhabitants had become a threat to the Martians. The Martians collectively beamed thought waves to that planet and blew it up. The Asteroid Belt was the result.

Anyway, the hero started a church when he got back to Earth, and it was a very different kind of church, because his followers believed he was Jesus returned, or the next best thing to it. When he passed the collection plate, a bucket, as I recall, it was full of money, and he told the congregation, “Take what you need, give what you can.” Eventually, he caused so much trouble, simply by being who he was, that he was assassinated, which he had predicted.

Not long before, he had told his closest friends that maybe humans would develop fast enough to outwit, or defeat the Martians, before they finally got around to blowing up Earth. He said the Martians would take their time making that decision. Perhaps they would wait too long. Perhaps not.

Well, what happened was the notion and the white paint bucket. I went to my bank and got $ 50 in one dollar bills and put them into the bucket, and hung the handle of the bucket over the handle bars of my bicycle, and pedaled into town, to Pearl Street Mall, and parked my bike, we didn’t need bicycle locks in those days, and set the bucket on the brick retaining wall around a raised garden on the mall, and sat down by the bucket and waited to see what was going to happen.

Oh, I also pulled the red satin devil horns out of the bucket, which my wife had made for me the year before, as I recall, and installed them on top of my head, and sat there and waited.

Lots of people walking by did double takes, smiled, or frowned, and kept on walking. Others pretended not to see me and kept on walking. One fellow did not pretend. He stopped, glared at me. I just stat there, maybe like Br’er Fox’s tar baby, although that analogy only just now comes tome.

The glaring fellow slowly walked by me, around the raised garden. I sensed he was behind me on the other side. Then, I sensed he had stepped up onto the garden and was coming up on me from behind. I was very still.

K-bam!!! He kicked the bucket off the brick wall, up into the air above the brick pavement. The bucket inverted, all the dollar bills fell out onto the pavement. I heard from from the spirit world: “Don’t move.” So, I didn’t move.

The fellow uttered something derogatory about me and what I was doing, stepped down off the raised garden and righteously stomped off, having done God’s good work against the devil. “Don’t move,” I heard again.

It was hard not to move, all that money lying on the bricks. But I did not move. And, lo, suddenly several people flocked to the bucket and righted it and put all the money in it and walked over and smiled and handed me the bucket and gave me thumbs ups.

Before long, the street people were there, taking a few bucks each, for a slice of pizza. Dropping a cigarette in the bucket, cigarette rolling papers, a bobby pin, a ribbon, some of them were young women. One dropped a condom in the bucket. It was all they had to give.

Then, the foot cop whose beat was the mall came by, smiled wanly, asked what I was up to? I said, well, the churches won’t help the street people, so the devil had to do it. He smiled again, said, well, that probably wasn’t illegal, and turned and walked back to where he’d come from.

The bucket emptied quickly, and that was how I met Loki and his young street friends.

I was back there every day with the bucket and horns and another $ 50. A local radio station interviewed me on site.

I suddenly had a passel of new, interesting friends.

These young street kids were having their own spirit experiences by using psychotropics. They were astounded to hear my spirit stories, without drug assistance. No way, Not possible! Yes, possible. I take nothing. Never took anything. Au natuarle. Wow! Far out, man!

Rainbows were in Boulder by then. They were a different tribe, though. Not so easy to relate to. But far different from the rainbows who call on Key West today. The rainbows in Boulder were polite. Respectful. They gathered crowds with their drumming. It was very different back then. Almost paradisical. Almost.

The beat cop hated street people. He was causing a lot of problems. I finally started a correspondence with the Boulder Chief Of Police, and told him that officer was on the wrong assignment, for him. Put him on an assignment where he could be a good cop. Before something terrible happened.

The Chief had a sergeant write back to me. I wrote back to the Chief, saying I had written to him, not to his sergeant. That officer needed a different beat to work. Don’t dally. Meanwhile, keep your eyes on the University of Colorado’s head football coach, he’s about to have a life-changing experience.

My oldest daughter”s husband, the son of one of my favorite law professors at the University of Alabama, was the assistant head baseball coach at the University of Missouri. He had told me that it was all over the NCAA that the Colorado head football coach’s daughter was sleeping with most of his football players. I said, that was the rumor in Boulder, too.

The Colorado coach was a founder and national leader of “Promise Keepers”. Christian men who re-vowed to be good husbands and fathers. They’d had a huge revival in the Colorado Buffaloes football stadium. Promise Keepers members came from all over America. It was a very big deal, made national TV news. Promise Keepers were all over Pearl Street Mall. Jim Freedom, Samuel Jesus, Loki and I had some fun with them.

The daily newspaper in Boulder, name now escapes me, had a new journalist, who had come there from Sports Illustrated. He was covering sports for the Boulder newspaper. I’d had letters to the editor published in that newspaper from time to time. I wrote to the sports journalist and told him what my son-in-law had told me about the head coach’s daughter sleeping with his football players. I encouraged the journalist to look into it.

About two weeks later, Sports Illustrated broke the story – front page. The Boulder newspaper sports journalist had sent it to his friends at Sports Illustrated. I had not expected that. I submitted a letter to the editor saying I felt responsible for the national exposure; I had told the local journalist what I had heard and never expected him to send it to Sports Illustrated. The letter was published.

Not long after, the journalist went to work for a Denver newspaper.

The head football coach resigned, to spend more time with his family. He’d won two national championships and had a lifetime coaching contract with the University of Colorado.

The beat cop who hated homeless people was reassigned to a different beat in the city. A new cop took the Pearl Street beat, who got along great with street people.

Backing up in time, another notion came to me while my wife and stepson were overseas. She was continually fretting about what would happen to her and her son if she and I didn’t stick together. I was fully supporting our family. What she made in her mental health pratice, she was a licensed cliincial social worker, and a Sandplay therapist still in training, she was spending on her practice and Sandplay and related training. Google Sandplay therapy and Dora Kalff to learn about Sandplay therapy.

Dora had trained under the Swiss Psychiatrist C.G. Jung, before she started what she would call Sandplay therapy, which she said the Dalai Lama, who was her good friend, told her was “applied Buddhism”.  Dora and I were friends, and had some very interesting conversations with her at her home in Switzerland, but that’s another story.

The notion was, when my wife and stepson returned, I would tell her, if we did not stick together, then she would decide what she got and what I got out of my assets. That notion came about three weeks into her and her son’s five-weeks overseas. I sat with the notion. I told God to tell me if the notion was for real. It felt right, but was it for real? I would go with it, when she came back, unless I was told not to go with it.

I heard nothing. I took that as ago. I went with it when she came back. We had ourselves a big cry together. She asked if I really meant it? I said, yes, I really meant it. We cried more.

Time passed. From time to time she asked again if I really meant it? I got tired of being asked. I said so. I had given my word. I would stick with it.

In August the next year, 1995, she said she wanted a separation. Although I had seen it coming, I was hammered physically, emotionally mentally and in my soul. I told her to make the property division. She said she didn’t want to do it. I told her make it anyway. She struggled. We talked. She struggled. We cried. She struggled.

We both believed my father would die soon, he was very sick. We knew what I would inherit if he died. I would be taken care of. I told her to make the property division. She struggled. What would be fair? She struggled. I suggested 10 percent was a tithe. She settled close to there. I got $100,000, she got the rest, 90 percent. She took what she felt she needed for her and her son, who was about 11, as I recall.

I moved away from Boulder. The divorce proceeding was in Boulder. My wife was struggling. She started getting worked over by the angels, about how she’d split my estate. She had her own estate, a farm she’d inherited with her brother from their mother. I had paid the estate lawyer. The probate costs. She was getting worked over by the angels.

She didn’t want the divorce agreement to show what she was getting out of my estate, which was at her election. She knew the judge might not go along with that. But she did not tell me that was her reason.

The angels worked her over. She finally argeed to disclose in the divorce agreement how the division of my estate came about. I understood what the angels were doing. I overrode them. I had given my word. I had to stick with that. I told her to have her lawyer send me the agreement the lawyer wanted to use. The agreement came. I signed it and sent it back.

She waited months to file the agreement with the judge, who approve it and signed the divorce decree on April 1, 1996. I undestood that not an April Fool’s joke. It was something else entirely. But that’s another story.

This story is about how I became a street person in mid-2000. A bum. A vagrant. A piece of shit. Because I had kept my word. And because I was spirit-blocked from making a living wage. And because my father made a seemingly miraculous recovery, for which I was grateful. Grateful for him, and grateful because I did not like depending on him to die, for me to have money on which to live.

He passed over in late August 2005. I received the inheritance Valentine’s Day 2006. I knew that was no accident, either. That’s how I stopped being homeless, a vagrant, a bum, a piece of shit by many people in Key West’s standard.

I did not say during my 2 minutes of citizen comments at the homeless forum, that I was a lawyer.

I said, looking around the room, it seemed I was the only local homeless expert, because had lived on the street in Key West, and on Maui, and I had stayed at KOTS, Key West’s overnight homeless shelter, and I had been in FKOC’s residence turn around program, and had stayed in a homeless shelter in Kansas City, and in Birmingham, and had slept nights outside in Key West in just about any place  imaginable. And had couched and living room floor surfed, and had lived in vehicles.

Mayor Cates went first during citizen comments. He said Keys cannot house homeless people ahead of thousands of working people who cannot afford the housing they now have; those people need to be helped first.

I went after Craig, and said he was right. The new homeless people need to be gotten back inside before they become street people, and the people about to become new homeless people need to be helped so they don’t become new homeless people, then street people. I said the only way to help them is to provide affordable rental housing, $600 month, $800, $900. Key West rents are much higher than that, except for public housing, which we need a lot more of.

I said when I lived on the street, 90 percent of street people were addicts. It’s a waste of time and money to give addicts housing, when they are using. Key West needs a drunk tank, to stash its homeless addicts until they sober up and can be let out. The city is killing the sheriff and the hospital, by sending its homeless addicts there.

I told the panelist who was not a lawyer, who worked for a federal prevention and cure for homeless agency, that I would like to know how much, if any, federal funding there is for housing homeless people in Key West. I said she should tell her boss, Mr. Obama, to stop making war and spending so much money on his military; that would free up a lot of money for funding affordable housing, and for health care. Randy Becker told me I was out of time. I stopped, without saying American wars are creating more homeless veterans.

During his 2 minutes, County Commissioner David Rice, a psychologist, who ran guidance clinics in the Keys for many years, and tried to work with and help may homeless people, said there are two people in the Keys he looks to on homeless issues, they are in the room, Sloan Bashinsky and Father Stephen Braddock (who heads up FKOC).

The City of Key West and Mornroe County have yet to seek Steve’s or my advice on homeless issues. The two governments have steadfastly  listened to politicians, charities who had a money stake in it, or an ego stake in it, people outside the Keys, but they never sought Steve’s and my input.

Steve, I imagine, spearheaded the homeless forum. It was exquisite. Four people with real credentials, finally, having nothing do with Key West or the Keys, gave Key West and the Florida Keys an entirely different point of view from criminalizing homeless people.

The four panelists said every city in Florida believes it is a great place to live, and that’s why it has a homeless problem. Every Florida city has homeless problems, the panelists said. Key West is mistaken, if it thinks its homeless problem is special, they said.

They said 24-shelters are not a solution. Homeless people having homes are a solution.

Alas, Key West is all built out; it has no land on which to build such housing; it has not the money to build such housing; and it has thousands of low-earning citizens who are not yet homeless, who cannot afford where they now live.

The panelist who was the lead attorney in the Pottinger case, told the entire history of that case, and how the City of Miami ended up losing all say so in how its homeless problem was managed. A US District Court now manages Miami’s homeless problems. The same US District Court has jurisdiction of Key West.

State Attorney Catherine Vogel said, she was in Miami when the Pottinger case was decided. She said, back in 2004, when she was an Assistant State Attorney down here, she told the city and the county about the Pottinger case, and that henceforth the State Attorney’s Office would not prosecute cases against homeless people such as the Pottinger case prohibited. The Pottinger case prohibited arresting homeless people for cooking food, eating, sleeping, washing, using the bathroom outside, when there were no public toilets nearby – necessary life sustaining activities.

In late 2002 or early 2003, I emailed Catherine Vogel’s boss, State Attorney Mark Kohl, and told him  of the Pottinger decision, and what it prohibited, and that Key West was using prosecution by his Office to threaten and intimidate homeless people, in violation of Pottinger, and he should look into that and protect his office from what the city was doing.

Lastly on the homeless forum, the lady lawyer on the panel, who works for a Florida homeless advocacy organization, who sues Florida cities for criminalizing homeless people, said feeding homeless people does not enable them to be homeless; it enables them to live.

When my good friend Michael Tolbert told me on election day that the soup kitchen should be closed during the summer, that would get rid of homeless people, I said that sounded Nazi. He said when he was homeless, he always had a job, he bought his own food. I said, if there had been no soup kitchen in Key West, he never would have met me, because I would have died. He said, I would have gotten by. I said I would have died and he never would have met me.

As for Loki, from Boulder, he called me in late 1999, from out of the blue. He had gone back to California, made semi-peace with his parents, but had not gone back into their Mormon plan for him. He was living in Arizona, had an IT job, was smoking lots of a marijuana, had a girlfriend and lots of friends, and was happy.

By July 2000, I was living on the street on Maui. After a few months of that, and then living in a tent on someone’s land in exchange for restoring their old vegetable garden and mowing their large yard on a riding mower, I was told when waking one morning,  to go to the Keys. I awoke, said I had no money.

Three days later I was on an airplane headed to Los Angeles, to see and old friend, who knew all too well the angels running me, because they were on his case, too. Even though he was Jewish. There names are Jesus, Michael and Melchizedek. My friend put me a Greyhound bus to Key West.

Passing through Tallahassee (state capitol), I was told in a dream that was going to get into politics. I awoke, terrified. I hated politics.

The rest is history. And I still hate politics.

Oh, twice while I was a Key West bum, Samuel Jesus came through Key West and hit me up for money. I said I was in the same shape he was in. Just before leaving Boulder in September 1995, I saw Samuel Jesus on Pearl Street Mall. I didn’t go over and speak to him. I wondered if I was going to end up homeless, too?

I never panhandled. I did use food stamps. But for them, I would have starved to death, too.

 

 

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