NIKKI AND ERICK
PHOTO BY RANDY BACON
NIKKI AND ERICK’S STORY
[NIKKI] July of this year will be Eric and my four year anniversary, but we’re not married yet. We’ve been through some horrible things that would typically tear two people apart, and he has stuck by my side since day one. My two daughters were taken away from me on April 1st of 2014. We’ve been homeless on and off for about three years. We had our own apartment for about nine months, rent free, because my uncle owned a complex there and that was nice. He ended up having to board it up ‘cause he couldn’t afford to fix all the work it needed and we had to go.
For the last ten years I’ve been fighting depression, and it’s definitely not getting any better. Ten years ago, I had to bury my first born son. I was sixteen when I got pregnant with him, I was making $700 a week, managing a business. But then I got stabbed in the stomach when I was six and a half months pregnant with my son. It was one of the hardest things I’ve had to go through and I’m still dealing with it. On top of losing him, I’ve got two boys, a set of twin boys that passed away September 25th, 2010 because their sperm donor pushed me down a flight of stairs. But you know, they’re in a hell of a lot better place than we are. My oldest son, he’s not hurting anymore, he would have been in a wheelchair and on a feeding tube the rest of his life, because he had gastro fesus. He would have only lived to be about twenty one. But I do have two beautiful little girls that just turned five and four in July and August. I miss them like crazy every day. I was trying to self-medicate because I wasn’t getting no help from my doctors or anybody.
My dream is for Eric and I to get off the streets and be clean...and to one day be old, sitting on our porch in rocking chairs together, that simple life. I also want to get my culinary arts degree. I want to be a part of my kids lives again too. My advice to people is to never judge a book by it’s cover, ‘cause you never know what that person has been through. For me, I’m just not out to make friends, because I’ve been hurt by so many people throughout my life that were supposed to be there to love and protect me, but instead they hurt me...but still I think that there’s always hope out there.
[ERICK] My mother passed away last year, and now all I have left here is my sister, my nephew, my ex wife and my four kids. Through everything, Nikki has stuck by my side. We’ve stayed together through it all, and I think it’s cause we’re the only two people insane enough to deal with each other.
I don’t really deal with my addiction, I guess. It’s pretty much why we’re on the streets. And I think a lot of people have excuses and saying it’s other people’s faults that they end up on the streets, but I think I take full responsibility for why I’m on the streets because of decisions I made. And after making so many bad decisions, eventually no one wants to be around you.
I wish I would have paid a little more attention to what I needed to be taking care of when we had an apartment together, then I wouldn’t have lost my ID, I could have gotten a job and been making money and making some kind of progress towards supporting ourselves and my ex wife and kids. At the time I was just living day-to-day, addiction always comes before everything. I’m just tired of it.
I’m so proud of Nikki, ‘cause every time she does any kind of art, she thinks it’s crap and then I tell her to show it to people, that it doesn’t suck, and people do love it and buy it. My dream for the future is to have some kind of relationship with my kids. That’s the main thing that’s on my mind all the time. Being alienated from my loved ones ain’t helping my addiction. It’s so much more complicated than to just stop doing drugs, it’s harder than that and I wish people could see that. I want to see my kids again more than anything in the world. I don’t want to be addicted.