Santana from Havana

by Gordon Hilgers/PNN Texas Correspondent (Endless Choices)

It wasn't all that difficult to see that sooner or later Santana from Havana, as he called himself, was going to get into trouble with the people who ran the homeless shelter where he lived. It couldn't have been more than a week from the time that I met this wide-smiled, homeless man that I first noticed the problems he was causing. I really hadn't noticed that there was all that much wrong with the guy.

Of course, I treasure my eccentric acquaintances. It doesn't bother me if one of my friends seems a little off the rim, or seems to be operating a couple of French fries short of a Happy Meal; mainly because some of the most accomplished people I know—artists and poets in Dallas' burgeoning creative community—could, with a push and a shove, look quite a bit like Santana from Havana at his very best. Or worst. Judgments like these depend upon how you look at these human aspects of God's own best judgment.

Like many who suffer from depression, I have trouble sleeping soundly. Sometimes I'll wake up in darkness, fully awake. But if I'm patient with my own behavior, I know I can relax and let the once-disorderly aberration of the norm slip by as I slide back into oblivion. This particular night, however, the night Santana's disease revealed itself to me, I rose up off my cot, wended my way through a literal sea of sleeping men and pulled up a chair in the shelter's smoking area. It was there that I found Santana from Havana, holding court, if you will.

Since it was late, and dark, most others at the huge round table sat quietly, half-asleep, the majority sucking on roll-up cigarettes, each one alone with his own aching thoughts. But Santana was neither smoking nor keeping to himself. Instead, as he fractiously sorted through hundreds of wrinkled and dog-eared papers, he seemed to be acting. Indeed, Santana was conducting a private theatre of the absurd and talking louder than necessary, doing his stand-up routine from a sitting position. If he caught you listening, he'd start gesticulating more eloquently than the conductor of the New York Philharmonic would.

"What's up, Santana? Besides you?" I asked.

"Man! I was thinking of that monster movie on TV tonight. I used to just love them monster movies. I used to watch monster movies all the time when I was a kid in Los Angeles. I'd get so scared I left the room. But I always came back," he answered.

"Me, too," I replied. "I used to sit in the front row at the Casa Linda Theater, and when the monsters came on the screen, I'd get so scared I'd scrunch way down in the seat. Sometimes I was so scrunched up I could barely see the movie. But at least those monsters couldn't get me."

All of this seemed pretty normal as far as conversations go. Aside from Santana's loud voice, I neither saw nor heard anything out of the ordinary about it. At least until Santana got up out of his seat and began acting out Frankenstein. Not just one movie scene. The entire movie.

But out of his seat Santana was, walking stiff-legged across the floor, his sticklike arms flailing left and right, his face contorted, and his mouth yammering a mile a minute, a sort of play-by-play summary of the film's classic climactic scenes. As something like 250 men slept like corpses around us—tired men, frustrated men, simple men who rarely seem to understand episodes of stark individuality or abnormal behavior other than as an affront—Santana began bellowing as if he'd been set on fire. It was an apt scene. Some of the men at the table seemed to me to be just the kind of man eager to persecute those different from themselves. In fact, I had almost no problem at all imagining these men marching up a mountain to torch an outcast's home. And Santana was the outcast du jour. A pariah. An idiot.

If it wasn't the monster noises that were grabbing the attention and ire of the others at the table, it was Santana's exaggerated and abnormal movements and expressions that, for whatever reason, seemed to be literally rocking the worlds of men who seem to like to cultivate reputations of callousness, hardness, imperviousness to the circumstances they don't like. Several at the table, however, were amused. They rolled their eyes. Others laughed silently to themselves. The unspoken verdict at the table that night was that Santana was crazy as a loon. There were no accusations of narrow-mindedness or intolerance among the members of this self-appointed judge and jury, either. But what's important were the reactions among the ignorant and uneducated to aberrant behavior. Everyone knew Santana was due any day to be accused of being disorderly. Everyone knew what happens in emergency shelters when people are so branded.

One of the shelter's longtime characters—a really together guy who'd been living on the shelter's dole for three years going on four—spoke up, "Why don't you shut up, you—." And, no, the man's language was not nice. But it didn't deter Santana at all. For the next several evenings, or so it seemed to me, Santana went out of his way to annoy and undermine the man who'd collared him that night. Aside from his bizarre behavior, Santana was angry. And hurt. Anyone could see that.

Santana is like many homeless people who suffer from mental illness. He simply appeared at the shelter's door one day. Soon, once Santana learned that his exploits weren't considered acceptable—especially to the emergency shelter's longtime victims of long-term and extended stay emergency—he began a campaign of instigation. The more he was called on his behavior, the more he caused trouble for the shelter's rulemakers and enforcers.

Of course, Santana wasn't really a troublemaker. He was, and is, mentally ill. Sure. It seemed at times that he was intentionally making himself unwelcome. But could it have been that he was drawing attention to himself to get someone to notice that he was asking for help? What really bugged me came in the form of other questions. How many situations like this had Santana already endured? How many towns had he gone through? How many shelters kicked him out?

More worrisome to me, however, was how casually the shelter's supervisors handled Santana's disorderly conduct. When he was kicked out, he was kicked out as if he was any other personally responsible and supposedly adult troublemaker: drunk, stoned, violent, whatever. Despite admonitions that Santana see a doctor and adhere to treatment plans and regimens of medicine, when the time came to give Santana the boot, the shelter's supervisors treated him as if he were suddenly normal. No other steps were taken to help him. He wasn't referred to a clinic. He wasn't taken to Dallas' Parkland Hospital for observation or treatment. He wasn't interviewed by mental health caseworkers who might have been able to agree that the streets are no place for mentally ill men like

When I asked one of the shelter's security staffers why such a thing had been allowed to happen in a supposedly Christian institution—and many area shelters are quite vocal about their faith-based mission and moral diligence—I was told the directors simply don't believe it's their responsibility to go any further than offering residents a bed, a bath, and a meal for the night. Everything else is considered the responsibility of the inmate—I mean, resident. While most of the shelter's residents agree that the streets are no place for mentally ill men like Santana, many simply don't see the glaring misconnection between punishing normal people for rule violations and punishing the mentally ill for behavior they just can't control.

Worse, shelter directors—and, as personal experience shows, every shelter in Dallas misbehaves like this—rationalizing their often misbegotten decisions in order to protect the bottom line, tend to wash their hands of the matter in unconscious imitations of Pontius Pilate.

Santana, of course, isn't alone on the streets of downtown. There are plenty of pariahs just like him—men and women who were not rational enough to obey rules they probably couldn't comprehend anyway. Many, like Santana, live on the streets. They've been kicked out of all the shelters. They've been oppressed by tough policies that were never designed to accommodate them.

But this is how the homeless/industrial complex actually operates. While there's plenty of talk about creating a continuum of care that links troubled shelter residents with effective treatments and appropriate care—plenty of compassionate prattle about the victimhood of the homeless—the proof is in the pudding. Nearly every homeless man and woman with an obvious behavioral problem—these are the people we see living on the streets every day—more than likely has been thrown out of shelters simply because they are mentally ill. No one can deny this. Where does the responsibility for this actually lie?