It was Christmas Eve
when he first heard the news: Someone was offering him a way out. After
reading an article about Johnny in The New York Times, Peter D. Beitchman,
the executive director of the Bridge Inc., a nonprofit group that provides
housing and services to mentally ill homeless people and others, immediately
arranged for him to move into an apartment.
Days later, Johnny
celebrated with the one person who had looked after him, Sister Lauria
Fitzgerald, a Roman Catholic nun who helps the homeless in the Bronx. They
ate dinner with another nun at an Italian restaurant in the Arthur Avenue
section, three miles from the cave and around the corner from Johnny’s new
home. He feasted on a plate of eggplant parmigiana and enjoyed his first
taste of tiramisù.
But he didn’t want to
touch the white linen napkin on the table. It was too clean.
“I thought I wasn’t
worthy to use it,” said Johnny, 45, who said he suffers from schizophrenia
and whose real name is John Carbonell. “I used the one that was in the
basket where the bread was.”
For the next several
months, Johnny would drift between his old life underground and his new one
above it, struggling the way a man freed from prison must readjust to
society. It is easy in a sense to take the city’s homeless people off the
streets, but it is harder, as Johnny’s odyssey illustrates, to take
homelessness out of them.
Even after Johnny moved
into the apartment the first week of January, he returned to the wooded area
around the cave to feed Meow Meow and the other stray cats he had named. His
first several days in the apartment — a light-drenched one-bedroom unit with
hardwood floors and a large kitchen in a five-story building — he did not
bother locking the door. “There’s no doors in the cave,” he explained.
He had bold ambitions of
starting over: He talked about getting a sewing machine, so he could design
clothes, and he refused to move his belongings from the cave to the
apartment because he worried about bringing in bugs. He wanted to put up “No
Smoking” signs, vowing not to indulge his old addictions in his new
environment. Johnny, an ex-convict who served time in the early 1990s for a
drug-related offense, has been smoking cocaine since he was a teenager.
One Sunday in January,
Johnny slept on the bed, on top of the covers, wearing a leather jacket and
muddy boots. He resembled not the sole occupant of Apartment 3B, but a
visitor. He said he spent the night in the apartment, then went back to the
cave at 6 a.m., then returned later that morning to the apartment. The
flashlight he used in the cave still shone inside his jacket pocket.
He woke up and sat
outside on the back fire escape, smoking a cigarette. Behind him, he could
hear the water running in the bathtub, his bathtub. On the streets, he used
to wash up at an open fire hydrant.
Johnny survives on a
monthly check from the federal Supplemental Security Income program. As part
of his arrangement with the Bridge, the nonprofit group that provided the
apartment, his rent would be $168 a month, about 30 percent of his
government check. Sister Lauria and two case managers, one from the Bridge
and one from the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, planned to help him
make the transition.
The bed and the
furniture had been supplied by the Bridge. Yet furnishings were not new to
Johnny. In the cave, he had created a makeshift home: Sleeping on a
quilt-covered mattress atop milk crates, keeping a bottle of cologne near
the bed, cooking with cans of Sterno, using a car battery to power a DVD
player. He was not awed by 3B, but somewhat suspicious of it.
“Sometimes the one
living in that cardboard box is happier than the one living at the
penthouse,” he said.
Johnny had been living
in the cave off and on since 1986, and for the last nine years or so he had
settled in permanently. The abandoned train station sits in a fenced-off
area thick with weeds and trash not far from Yankee Stadium.
Sister Lauria tried for
years to persuade Johnny to get out of the cave, but it was not until last
year that he told her he wanted to leave. “I realized I would have been
better off doing 10 years in prison than nine years in that cave, crawling
in and out, getting scabs, bugs,” he said.
Johnny’s homelessness
was not about a lack of housing. It was more complicated, a result of a
variety of spiritual, psychological and emotional causes. “Everything just
bothering my conscience,” he said of the reasons he was homeless. “How can I
ask God for forgiveness when I don’t forgive myself? So I’ll torture myself
and go to the cave.”
Sister Lauria often
coaxed him out of the cave with the promise of odd jobs and a good laugh. He
became one of her regular assistants, accompanying her on holidays to feed
the homeless. Last year, a deliveryman who works in the neighborhood needed
a place to stay, so Johnny gave him his room in the cave and moved to the
opposite wall.
“I try to imitate her,”
Johnny said of Sister Lauria, a member of the Sisters of St. Dominic of
Blauvelt, N.Y. “She imitates Christ. I try to imitate her.”
She was thrilled for
Johnny when he moved into the apartment. “I felt like I was a mother sending
my son away to college,” said Sister Lauria, who helps the homeless as an
outreach worker for the Highbridge Community Life Center and as a manager of
a thrift shop run by Siena House, a women’s shelter.
But she was worried
about how he would cope. She had seen other homeless people struggle to
adapt to life indoors.
Johnny struggled, too.
Weeks after moving in, he kept returning to the cave. He missed his cats,
whom he called his soldiers. He missed his old neighborhood around Ogden
Avenue. He went back out of concern for his former roommate, the
deliveryman, and he went back to feed his addictions. He hates and loves his
crack cocaine habit, just as he hates and loves his cave. “When you pick up
drugs,” he said, “you’re saying goodbye to all your dreams, all your goals
and all you can be.”
He figured he stayed in
the cave the first three weeks he had the apartment. By March, he had taken
the doors off a closet and used them as partitions to create a small
darkened hideout, like a room in the cave. By April, Sister Lauria had not
seen him for about two weeks, so she paid him a visit. She found he had put
up plastic tablecloths and plastic bags all over the apartment, on the walls
and on the ceiling. He told her he thought his neighbors were spying on him.
He took down the
plastic, but moved out soon after. He lived there for four months, from
early January to late April.
He said he had become
uncomfortable there. “Even though I had paid the rent, I never really slept
there,” he said. “There was no life in the apartment. I will compare it to a
spring break, with all the utilities and this and that and whatever. But no,
it’s not for me.”
The Bridge had offered
him another apartment and tried to have him undergo a psychiatric
evaluation, but Johnny missed those appointments. “We hope that Johnny will
come back,” said Mr. Beitchman, the executive director of the Bridge. “We do
hope. Our experience in all these years is that folks are at different
points of readiness at different times.”
Johnny returned to Ogden
Avenue and began running errands again for Sister Lauria. She helped get him
a job at a substance abuse treatment program. Johnny did janitorial work for
several days. Then he quit. He was overpaid by mistake, and he returned the
money because he felt it was the right thing to do.
In the end, he left the
apartment for reasons that made sense only to him. Because of his paranoia
and schizophrenia, because of crack, because he felt isolated from those who
knew him best, because of the cats, because the bathroom was too small,
because he didn’t want to live there without a spouse.
Some in his old
neighborhood were upset with Johnny, but Sister Lauria told them not to
judge him. Whenever Johnny became fed up once again with life on the
streets, she was ready to help him find another apartment.
“Even though housing
seemed like a baby step in light of everything else going on in his life, it
was too much of a big step,” she said.
Johnny said he was now
sleeping in a plywood hut he had built near the cave. He was a jumble of
emotions, a paradox of hope and despair. He said he worried that he might be
infected with
H.I.V. He said that he had never been happier and that the best thing
God ever made was tomorrow.
One recent afternoon,
Johnny was back in the cave. Candles lighted a back room in a far corner, at
the end of a maze of garbage bags and concrete walls. He talked about fixing
it up again. He smoked some crack through a thin glass tube the size of a
cigarette. Then he crawled out, worried about Sister Lauria.
His life swayed in this
way, between the world above and the one below. On Friday, he said he was
ready to work with the Bridge again and to give an apartment another try. He
had thrown the tube that he uses as a crack pipe against a wall in the cave.
It had been nearly two days since he last got high. “I had to tell Satan,
‘You don’t own me,’ ” he said.
He went to a store
across the street from the thrift shop. He bought a bottle of nonalcoholic
sparkling apple cider, to celebrate.
Brent McDonald
contributed reporting.
Staff Members
New York Times Article
(June 11, 2007)
