“The label absentee father already makes you look at me differently.” Christopher

My name is Christopher. I’ve been housed just about two months now, after ten years or more being either in the shelter or on the street. A lot of my time on the streets is because I don’t want to put up with the restrictions of the shelter. They each had their own quips and quirks and staffs. They lost sight of what their purpose was, they don’t do the common sense things.

If you want to get a night reservation, you have to spend all day outside of the shelter, because of ‘first come first serve.’ So you have to spend the whole day trying to get a bed, which really leaves you unavailable for any other services that are out there. They don’t care if you got a job interview or something. And then there is the bed bugs, and the lice.

It was much more comfortable to sleep out on the streets. It’s a little tougher though. You have to take care of your belongings. And when nature calls, you know, you have to go. Nobody wants to take a crap in the streets, or pee in the streets. It is a shame. Not a human being that I know wants it, we are not animals you know.

“Nobody wants to take a crap in the streets. (…) We are not animals you know.”

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I was in the military, in Vietnam times. I did not see combat, because my time was at the end. It was a war we had no business in, so it put a bad taste in everyone’s mouth from the beginning. Sending young men over there, that had to fight a war that was none of our business. That had to do with political interest. It had nothing to do with the safety of the United States of America.

So the majority, up to commanding officers, were all doing heroin, and opiates. It was there, for free. So now the next stigma for the Vietnam veterans is that we all are drug addicts, or crazy. Those are the labels for men that were forced to fight a war, because of the drug use that was promoted by the military.

I didn’t go through the same things because I didn’t see action, but I do feel that as a Vietnam veteran it’s hard. They treat you like a drug addict, while they were supplying everyone that was fighting the war with drugs, to make sure you would stay there and fight and do what you were told. They leave that all out.

When I first came out the military, I worked a bit with my biological father. He was only biologically my father, not a real father, that’s why I say it that way. He owns a business here in the city. That is how I got here.

You know it was good at times and tough at times. I was a carpenter, I can do just about just any of the trades. For a while I operated a business as a general contractor. The construction business collapsed for a number of years, I worked as a bartender. But then I got…, well I got here. Here is the reason why I’m homeless. It’s attributed to mental health problems.

“Here is the reason why I’m homeless. It’s attributed to mental health problems.”

The most indicative of my mental illnesses is called PTSD, but it’s called PTSD complex. It’s related to trauma that occurred during your childhood, when you had no control over it.

When you don’t have one of your parents, the parent that is there always has some stories why the missing parent is missing. And you don’t know if there is anger between them. You don’t even know if the story is true, but when you started hearing it at a very young age, it is very damaging. Any child that doesn’t have both parents subconsciously wonders if they are the reason the parent is gone. So I said biological father earlier, but what I really call him is biological sperm donor. Because he wasn’t a father for me, he was a sperm donor, that is all he was.

“Because he wasn’t a father for me, he was a sperm donor, that is all he was.”

And then when I worked for him he said ‘you know son I love you’, but he did not treat me as a family member. When I first got out of the service he tried to. He wanted to buy me this and that. But you know, I had a wife then. I don’t need him, I know how to pick out my own clothes. And if I don’t, then I have a wife that does.

As a matter of fact, I had four wives. But to be quite honest with you, knowing who I was then, I would have never married any of them. But I had to, it was my responsibility. See, she was a couple of months pregnant, and number two was a couple of months pregnant, and number three was a couple of months pregnant, and number four. The right thing was to marry them, but it never worked out. Because, first of all, there wasn’t enough time between the initial point of meeting and the pregnancy. When the relationship starts out sexually that is all it is, nine out of ten times, that’s all it’s going to be. The thing that was holding us together was the child, but that is not good for the child either.

How many children do I have? Let’s see. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and there is another kid, but we didn’t get married because her family was Pacific Islander or Asian, and they would dishonour her if she married a caucasian.

So maybe I was an absentee father. But let’s put it this way, and I don’t wanna say it just to save my own self, but it comes to a point where I don’t give up, I’m a perfectionist. I always want to fix it. That’s just the way I am, I don’t understand failure.

So the word ‘absentee’ is true, but to tell you the truth, that’s another problem that I have with the society. We put too many labels on people. When people hear the word absentee, that label already makes you look at me in a different way. Automatically, because of the word. You know nothing about me, but you think you do, because of that word absentee father.

For my latest family out there in the Pacific I wasn’t an absentee. There were periods, not separation by choice, but I still saw the children here and there. I miss the grandchildren, because I am sure that all the other ones in between had grandchildren.

You know of course the story goes deeper, but I am not going to share that. There was another diagnostic, and I have other diagnostics.

I want to make my closing argument here. Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case. We have to have some great idea to get the drug addicts off the street. People do drugs for a reason. Drugs have been there since the beginning of the human species. Governments make drugs illegal to gain a profit. But all governments are actively involved in the distribution and selling of drugs. Period.

The homelessness situation is what it is because the people come here. San Francisco is well-known for the services they provide and they should be proud of it. However, it is not enough. There is plenty of ways to make it enough but they don’t do that. There’s plenty of empty buildings that the city owns, to take over, redo and rent them out. Rather than paying a hotel owner, they should subside themselves, so at least the money is being returned. It is simple mathematics.