Victor

“I’m living proof you can eat well, live well, and dress well” when you are on the street, Victor said. He should know - He’s been on the street more than five years.

Victor, 57, has little sympathy for homeless individuals who say they can’t get the help they need. “That one paycheck away stuff is bullshit,” he said. “People out here who aren’t even trying to get into housing or a program or whatever, are just lazy.” He pointed out that there is plenty of food, clothing, services, showers, case workers - anything anyone needs is out here for them, free. “They just have to use it; 99% of the people out here don’t want to show up and stand in line, or obey the rules” he said. “Just do your part, it’s all here for free. You can’t be stable on the street.”

He feels that most people eventually do want to find a way back into being a contributing member of society. “I don’t care how tough you are, it wears on you to sleep on the street,” he said. “I could get a job if I wanted to, but you have to be in a shelter.”

At first, Victor did try to getting into housing. First he went to Father Joe’s, and he got scabies from the bedsheets there. During the COVID lockdown he went to the Convention Center, which eventually closed. He was shipped to Golden Hall, but that also closed down. From there, he was lucky enough to get into the Veterans Village of San Diego because they weren’t requiring that residents be veterans at that time. It felt like heaven, Victor said. He had three excellent meals a day, good roommates, counselors, and he could leave and come back at his leisure. The only restriction was no drugs on campus. Even though he knew the rules, Victor admits that he kept pushing his luck: smoking weed and getting warnings, until finally he committing one last egregious offense. “I had several warnings, but I self-sabotaged myself.”

Since it was summer, he took himself to the beach areas, swimming, sleeping in the sun, partying with locals, showering in the public beach showers. Even in winter months he travels light. “I can get new clothes five times a day,” he said. “So why do people lug around 200 pounds of stuff?” referring to those who push and pull carts overflowing with clothes, bike parts, plastic bags, food, etc. “The problem is there’s so much generosity in San Diego, that’s why there’s so much trash. The young ones, they have no desire to stop the way they’re living. At age 20 they should be golden, in the prime of their lives, but they’re out here like zombies. You can sell your EBT for $500 a month, living large. $10-20 buys enough fentanyl for all day for you and your friends. They’re just tuned out indefinitely. And by the time they’re 30, their brains are cooked.”

Victor doesn’t blame the general public for not wanting to see homelessness everywhere. “I grew up here in the 70s and 80s - there were no homeless on the city streets back then” he said. “I wish I were oblivious to all this bullshit around here, like someone screaming for no reason. I’ve been educated, I’ve been to college. There are so many 5150s. I’d ask them, are you sane or insane? People are so paranoid it overwhelms them.”

Before he was homeless, Victor said, he had a long career working at US Bank as a loan officer. He has two grown daughters. Victor’s wife was a registered nurse. “But I was a hound,” he admitted. He chased other women, then when his wife called him out, he got mad and lashed out. Seeing a therapist didn’t repair things. When she served him divorce papers he got more violent, so she got a restraining order. He said it was stressful for him to go from seeing his daughters every day, to only seeing them every other week. He realizes now that without his daughters to care for, missing hearing them call him daddy, he had lost his real purpose in life. So he started going to bars. Then he started going to work hung over, and falling asleep in the break room at the bank. “I hid from everyone, but that was not sustainable.” He said the stress caused him to let it all slip away. He lost his job and his home. He ended up in a shelter. Even though he is the youngest of seven kids, Victor said, and they all live in the area, he doesn’t talk to any of his siblings. No one has offered to help him with housing or help him get a job. He recently heard from a nephew that his youngest daughter got married.

“I’m stubborn. I don’t want to ask anyone for help. Too much pride. God’s got to break you down to the point you realize it’s okay to ask for help,” he said, adding that he grew up in a protestant, Assembly of God household. “People do drugs out here because they’re bored. A little crystal, just to get high, not passed out on the street.” The trend towards fentanyl misuse is the direct result of “Purdue Pharma selling us painkillers just for the sake of profiting off (of) getting us hooked on their drugs.”

Aside from crime associate with drug use, Victor feels relatively safe. “You almost never hear about violence in San Diego. People steal your phone, yes, but you don’t hear about someone slamming someone on the head while they’re sleeping,” he said. The San Diego River and canyons are the perfect space for the type of homeless people who want to be left alone, he added. “There are people 20 feet from the freeway and no one knows.” He doesn’t understand personally why anyone would want to be under a freeway overpass, because of the noise, or in the riverbed. “I don’t want spiders and rats crawling on me,” Victor said.

The worst thing about being outside is always having to move,” he said. Recently, the Clean and Safe officers and the SDPD have been telling him to move nearly every day. Victor said he’d ask the officers “where do you want me to go?” They would tell him to go around the corner… “what’s the point in that?!,” Victor said he responded.

Bathrooms are hard to come by, but there is hot water in the ones at Waterfront Park and Seaport Village. He doesn’t want to go anywhere near East Village, the “poop zone.” And even with his few belongings, even he can be robbed once in a while when he’s careless. “One day I’ll have $300 in my pocket, new clothes and a new backpack. Then I’ll fall asleep and wake up to find it’s all gone,” he said. “What was I thinking? I fall prey too.”

While we were talking, he saw a woman friend who was back in the neighborhood after having been taken into custody by police, and therefore lost all her belongings when the police failed to return them. She literally had nothing but the clothes on her back. He gave away one of his blankets and a pillow, knowing he can find another one from one of the churches or outreach groups that frequent the downtown corridor. Victor can recite where to get food, a shower, and fresh clothes on any day of the week. He took advantage of free medical services for his cold, and got himself a stylish new haircut at the Ladle Fellowship on a recent Sunday afternoon. “I’ll eventually go inside. I know how to do it,” he said. “I’m good out here for now.”