James Wade lost his Seattle apartment to an electrical fire. “I came home one day and it was smoking bad. I lost my van, I lost my apartment, and I lost my job.”
James, 55, grew up in New York City and left to work as a truck driver for a carnival company. He ended up in Florida, but got a citation and then a conviction for DUI. He was riding a bicycle after that, but got hit four times by cars making right turns, which messed up his knee and his hip. He wanted to go back home to New York, but when he phoned his mother, she said, “There’s nothing here for you; you’ve been gone too long.”
Instead, he moved to Seattle. He was doing demolition work when his boss found out he understood blueprints. “They were trying to figure out how to get the water to go into the drain from the top of the garage. I said, ‘If you put 3 percent in the front, 2½ percent on both sides, water will go right into the drain.’” Soon he was doing concrete finishing work all over the region.
After the apartment fire, he lived in hotels and then stayed with friends. “You never know your friends until you’ve got to live with them.” After a while, he started sleeping outside.
One day James was with a friend who was selling Real Change in the North End. “She’s just standing there and I said, ‘I could have sold all those papers by now!’” He decided to try it out.
“It took me a long time to get my respect in that neighborhood [in the North End] because a lot of people didn’t know if I was black or Puerto Rican or what. I’m just a mutt, [including] Blackfoot, Cherokee and French Canadian. I still don’t know what a French Canadian is.”
“I met a lady one day, and she was like, ‘Why don’t you get a life, get a job.’”
He said to her, “Okay, ma’am, calm down. If I buy my papers and sell my papers, what does that make me?”
“That’s makes you a bum.”
“No,” he said, “that makes me my own boss.”
The next time she came by, she bought a paper and apologized. When he looked down, she’d put a $50 bill in his hand.
James has some goals for the future. “I am trying to find work, something small like dishwashing.” He’d also like to get back in touch with his family and get better housing, and would like to see if he can get a program started to help reintegrate homeless people into society through transitional housing and work. “I know they did something before they got like this,” James said. He sees constant rejection as a big problem for many homeless people, but not him. “I just bounce it off my shoulder. I might mutter under my breath, but after a while it’s gone.”
RECENT VENDOR PROFILE UPDATES
Real Change’s 2015 Vendor of the Year, Lisa Sawyer, recently received a housing voucher from the Rapid Re-housing program, which will finally allow her to get off the street and into an apartment of her very own. Sawyer recently enrolled with the People’s Academy for Community Engagement, a civic leadership development program that teaches skills to emerging leaders in a multicultural environment.
Vendor Gabriella Duncan had her car stolen last week, but it has since been found, albeit with a few dings and bruises, and a left-behind Seahawks keychain. Although Duncan lives in her van, her car is a more affordable option for transportation. Many of her prized possessions were in the car including photographs, journals, awards and degrees, and at press time, she was unable to find them.
Vendor Willie Jones painstakingly put together a 2016 calendar of his famous handmade jackets. It is now available for $15 and Jones is taking orders. To date, his stolen jackets still have not been recovered.