Joey Pollit moved to Seattle more than 20 years ago. “I had to get away from my family. I love them, but I have to love them from afar. Once you grow up, you have to be on your own, whether that means you’re homeless or you got your own place. My sister packed a bunch of chicken in a bag and said, ‘You might need to eat when you get on that bus, because it’s going to take a while to get to Seattle.’ ”
Joey spent his early years as a foster child of heavyweight boxing champ Jersey Joe Walcott. “He had superstars coming there. And Bill Cosby. Bill Cosby said, ‘Here, son, you want more to eat? I know you’re hungry!’ ”
“Then my aunt moved me out. She took a stitching cord to me. She said, ‘If I could get away with it, I would murder you.’ I told her daughter. [She said,] ‘Mom, did you say that to him? Talking about you’re going to put him in a staircase and bury him?’ ”
Joey said: “I went to live with my sister. She was really sickly. She’d go pounding on the walls. I was so hungry I would go to the store and take a pack of Oreos. When she got well, everything was OK.”
“My big brother came to live with us. Big hulking son of a gun. When he caught me smoking, he said, ‘If I catch you smoking again, I’m going to make you eat a pack of cigarettes.’ And he did!”
Once in Seattle, Joey stayed in the Morrison shelter. “That’s when I met my girlfriend.”
She found an apartment, and he got a job washing dishes. “We bought groceries. We got furniture. When she went to the hospital, I bought a TV, figured that would charm her up. We put cable on it. We bought a stereo. She had her friends, and I had my friends.”
An agency placed him at the Rabanco recycling plant in SODO. He worked as a temp for seven years “sorting paper, cardboard, glass, newspapers, wastepaper. I was throwing papers up in the tubes all day long: ‘Come on man, pick up the speed!’ It was fun. I had a good life.”
His girlfriend moved out when they started arguing a lot. “I had my ups and downs. Then I had to move out; things went downhill, lost the job, ended up in a shelter.”
Joey likes working for Real Change, but it bothers him when people on the street ignore him. “Some of them won’t even look at me. There is a lot of racism out there. I ain’t got no hate for them. Whatever comes my way I have to treat it accordingly.” But he reserves his “million-dollar smile” for his customers. “I wish you well, wish you good on your job and wish you good in your place where you live and hope you guys are having a good life.”