VP
Some people have to go all the way to the Bahamas and spend $250,000 to feel good. I can go to my room and feel that way. That little apartment, I call it my penthouse.

As VP describes his new apartment, which he has just acquired through Section 8, the enthusiasm and contentment of these words are evident on his face. He knows he is starting a fresh chapter in his life, and that it is going to be very different from the decades that he has spent scouring the streets for sleeping space and drugs.

Being homeless for most of his adult life was a choice that VP, who turns 50 this month, made. He liked the lifestyle; it gave him the degree of freedom that he wanted. It also allowed him to indulge unhindered in his cocaine habit. “There are times when you regret it, but the independence and the rush get to you. It was not completely the drug habit. It was my life, and not wanting to go to school or stay at work,” he explains.

There was already a fair share of drugs and alcohol – and the tendency to be out on his own because he was a “man” – in VP’s life when he was around 19 years old and his mother refused to let him into her house. “My mother didn’t want me anywhere near my sisters. My stepfather was respectable; I think he owned a factory. So my mother knew the difference between that man and me,” he admits with a surprising level of acceptance, even as he says that this took him to the streets and the “wrong crowd.”

He became involved in gang activities in the Bronx and started stealing to provide for himself. When VP ran into a man who agreed to let him stay in his basement and then found a cache of guns in that basement, the two started “robbing everything that moved.” Within a year, he was arrested for armed robbery, and spent the next four years in prison.

Not knowing where to go after finishing his term, VP turned to his brother. He also started working as a janitor and supermarket help. With their combined earnings and welfare payments, he felt assured that they were in a comfortable situation. So VP found it especially difficult to leave their Brooklyn apartment when they were evicted for non-payment of rent. Alcoholism and gambling in the family had consumed most of their earnings and savings. “I was so mad. I didn’t want to see them ever again. So I became homeless, really homeless,” he says.

VP found shelter at Grand Central station, on cardboard pieces next to the token booth or on the tracks under Amtrak trains. From there, he went wherever he could park his shopping cart and stayed for as long as he could escape the police. And as his addiction to cocaine got stronger, he literally began following the drug trail. According to him, “It’s like a basic instinct. When the cocaine doesn’t start coming in good on one side, you follow the crowd when they go on to the other side.” He held temporary jobs as a flyer distributor and even enrolled in computer classes, but left as soon as he had enough money in his pockets to buy more cocaine.

VP knew that there were services available to help homeless people off the streets, but he wasn’t interested. He had become so dependent on street-life that he felt he was going to “miss” it if he left. “I don’t know why,” he says, and then adds: “It’s just the cocaine. I wasn’t ready to give it up.” His two brief stays at shelters – once through an outreach program and the second time under police instructions – did nothing to convince him about the value of these services. “I have been to prison and it is worse than prison,” he declares.

Late last year, VP finally came to a turning point. “It was getting to a stage where I was completely tired. I didn’t want to end up in the street with a bullet in my back or a knife in my neck,” he says. Most important, however, was the realization that cocaine just didn’t “excite” him anymore.

It hasn’t been easy for him since then, especially given that the transitional house he moved into in January this year had plenty of drugs to be found. But the positive signs are apparent when VP says that he locked himself up in his room for two days under the weight of guilt after he relapsed for a brief period. Or the fact that he bought himself multiple TVs and VCRs just so he wouldn’t have any spare money left to buy cocaine.

Having made his decision to change his ways, VP also approached the social services that he had refused to take advantage of earlier. He is now receiving public assistance and food stamps. All through the week, he volunteers at two churches and gets some extra supplies from them. And he has Medicaid to get the attention he requires for his Hepatitis C and HIV positive status, though he asserts that he does not need anything more than vitamins to stay in shape. As VP puts it: “All the things that I was taking, I should have been dead. And I am healthy. If you threw me in with a group of people, you couldn’t tell that I was HIV positive.”

As he talks excitedly about setting up his apartment with pots and pans and new towels, VP recalls one incident that highlights the impact that social service providers can make. On the day that he was supposed to sign his lease, he didn’t make the appointment that his case manager from Care for the Homeless, George Wilkins, had made for him. “My body just choked. I was scared of going,” he says. VP expected to get a very negative reaction from Wilkins during his next visit. Instead, minutes after he had made his excuses over the phone, he saw his case manager standing right in front of him. VP describes their meeting: “He was so calm and reassuring. He sat down at my level. I didn’t feel he was standing up over me. He got it rescheduled. I knew that George was going to be there and I felt more confident.”

And now that he has signed the lease and settled into his new home, VP says that he has “never lived and felt so good before.”

See other stories at "Homeless Voices."