Thoughts on the death of Trent James Hayward aka Harpo Corleone

Original Author
Tiny
Original Body

June 10, 2000

When I heard Trent died it seemed both unreal and inevitable. I look at his picture and he looks so alive, so energetic so vital. So young.

Yet his death also feels like peace, rest at last. I remember my years and years of endless homelessness, homelessness with its wall-to-wall nonstop brutal reality with no time out. I just wanted off, to rest, for it to be over, to die. Heroin was not in my toolbox, but I have met many people who told me they were going to get some and OD because they just couldn't take it any more. It's a pretty easy way to die. Maybe that's what Trent was doing. Or maybe it was just a mistake.

He was having a hard time with his success, of getting the gig writing a column for the online Bay Guardian. Many street people can't handle "success", Food not Bombs has had a lot of people who can't. Perhaps because it is associated with such ugly behavior by those who have our society's definition of success. The flip side of failure and punishment, success and the right to fuck people over. The fear of losing it. Trent's drinking seemed to escalate after he got the job. I had rarely seen him drunk much before, once at a housing meeting he came really out of it. Periodic scabs on his face from some long night. He mostly seemed ok when he came to the ROV writing group this past year. He worked hard and he was a bit crazy, like the rest of us.

He was supposed to start writing a column about the world from his view as a homeless person. I think about that: having a job, writing: but did he have to stay homeless to keep it? What if he got housing with his salary, would the SFBG still find his edgy, sharp writing exciting? Then, what I remember that was so painful for me in my years of homelessness, was how could people with housing work with me politically, claim to believe that homelessness was politically wrong, claim to be my friends, and yet neither offer a time indoors nor help me find housing. Only those with the least shared it. It made me very crazy, and cynical.

And the double life of having to look meek and scruffley to get what I needed to survive, and to look neat and confident and together to get what I needed to get out of the trap. The situational insanity of poverty. Perhaps some of these things were going on with Trent.

At the same time other things happened. His good friend Tom Gomez left town a week before, apparently ran off with some people who wash feet; and his friend Max lost his housing which was a place Trent had been able sometimes stay indoors. Losses in a fragile support system can be the tipping point.

We may never know what was really going on for Trent, but we do know it's not all right for people to live like this in the midst of the great, obscene wealth of San Francisco, of the USA. So maybe it was murder.

Trent was always a pleasure to be around, his vitality gave me a lift, perhaps some hope. I am sad he is gone, but I still suspect he may be relieved to not have to work so hard and endure so much pain anymore.

I am touched by the outpouring of responses to his passing. I am charmed and saddened by the range of people's reactions, functional and dysfunctional. Death, our great companion and taboo.

I thank you great spirit that we had Trent in our lives while he was here. His family told people he died because he had a bad heart, but we know he had a good heart. Goodbye, Trent.

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