ERIC

PHOTO BY RANDY BACON

ERIC’S STORY

I’ve been a loner and homeless on and off most of my life. The hardest thing was that I just wanted to be loved, have a family. You know? I got God in my life. I think he’s awesome. Ever since my mom passed away of cancer, when I was eight, it was just really hard. I was scared, you know? I was alone. I never had no one come visit me. A lot of the other kids’ parents would come visit and they would take me in, and you know, it made me really strong. I’m fifty-four years old now and I haven’t had, you know, a lot. I haven’t been places. I’ve been here most of my life.

I know I have a purpose here though. My purpose is to show love and care and concern. I’m just into helping people. I like helping people. You know, money and power is the root of all evil. That’s the belief I have. And if we all just rather than isolatin’ everyone off and judging people, loved each other, you know? You can’t judge no one by the outside. It’s what is in the inside that counts. No matter what badness someone has in them, you got to try to bring out the goodness and the love in them. And that’s just what I want to do.

If I’m walking down the street and someone is driving by or walking by, I would want them to look at me like I’m not a homeless person. Love, peace, and serenity, that’s everything. And God. I go around and pick trash up. I put it in a trashcan. It’s like no one cares about our children or anything like that. I mean, they care about themselves, but they don’t care about our future, you know? We want a beautiful world and happiness. No sorrow, no sickness. It’s real sad to go up and know the children, they’ll never have a chance. I’ll give my life a thousand times over just to let them have an opportunity to live. And, you know, it’s the greediness. We don’t have to have money to be happy. We just have to have love. Love is everything. You know, just love thy neighbor, don’t hate thy neighbor, love everyone. It’s the object of all of us being family. You know? And that’s what it is.

I grew up in many different foster homes, and ended up being homeless as a teen. At one point as a kid, I lived on the third floor of a house with a bad person. I had bad dreams a lot. I had a canopy bed, and a nice room, nice antique furniture. But I got up out of there after a year because I thought it was haunted. I thought it was the boogeyman. About two years later, my girlfriend called me up and told me that he was on T.V. and someone we knew had jumped out the window. He got ahold of me, and I think I was like seventeen or eighteen years old and he had done bad things. They had me come down to the station and there was thousands of Polaroid pictures of me and other teenagers. We were unconscious and he was doing very bad things to us. That year that I was having those dreams, come to find out, I guess he was injecting us with Thorazine, something like that. I mean, you forgive everyone, but you know, I can never forget.

But now, since things are starting to open up for me, good things. It took a long time. I’m fifty-four now. I didn’t think I’d live this long, but God has a purpose for me, you know? I just talked to my daughter yesterday and she is just wonderful and I also have a wonderful son out there. Don’t ever lose faith. Always keep faith. Don’t give up. And forgive. I forgive my father. I forgive everyone. It’s hard for me to admit this, but I’ll say it. I forgive that man that hurt me too.