Two figures darted through rush-hour traffic in the drizzle of a rainy April evening in Longview. With unwashed T-shirts clinging to their backs, they flagged down wary drivers who were attempting to exit a grocery store parking lot, not far from downtown.
“Hey, can you spare a couple bucks?” they asked. “We’re trying to get a bite to eat.”
A few people rolled down their windows and handed over change. Others did not. “All they can say is yes or no,” said Shane Wendell, one of the panhandlers. “If they say no, I don’t hold it against them. But we don’t usually do this because we usually work.”
They had not worked on that day, a Monday. During the weekend, Wendell and his friend, Terry Pate, had lived off their earnings from a roofing job. The money had run out by that afternoon, washed away by pitchers of beer at a local tavern.
So they walked across the street to the grocery store, and they begged.
THE SCORE
After scrounging together some cash, Pate and Wendell bought a pouch of rolling tobacco and enough malt liquor to keep the buzz going. They made an unlikely pair.
Wendell was 35 years old. He was tall and easy-going, from the Pacific Northwest by way of Houston, and he wore a baseball cap pulled low over his curly blond hair. He had been homeless for five months.
Pate had been on the streets much longer, and it showed. With a quick temper, intense blue eyes and a face etched by hard living, Pate said he was a former surgeon’s assistant who had divorced a good woman in Malakoff. He had been homeless in Longview for more years than he cared to remember.
“We’re not all bums,” Pate said. “If somebody could just give us a job, we’d be back on our feet like that.” He snapped his fingers: “That quick.”
Pate ordered Wendell to carry the malt liquor from the grocery store, and he tried to return to the bar where his girlfriend was still drinking. Wendell wouldn’t allow his friend to wander off. The rain had stopped, night was approaching, and it was time to go to the place they called home. The men crossed East Marshall Avenue and turned down a side street. They walked past large homes and a business or two, then ducked into the woods and were gone.
ARRIVING IN CAMP
A footpath parts the weeds where Pate and Wendell stepped into the forest. It is all but invisible to the drivers who pass by it every day, but it is well-known among the street people in Longview.
The trail meanders about 150 paces through stands of sapling and brush, over a fallen log and past tall pine trees. It wends toward a campsite in the middle of a bamboo grove.
Wendell and Pate were not the first homeless people to make camp there. They had been sleeping at the spot off and on for a couple of months, adding to the mounds of refuse around the dome tents and campfire as they tossed off old clothes and shoes, food wrappers, empty cans and 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor.
For warmth, they burned canes of bamboo that sizzled and popped in the flames.
Wendell said the camp had been tidier when they stayed there more frequently. Lately, as the weather warmed and the mosquitoes returned, they had been spending more nights at motels and in the Salvation Army.
“It’s not always like this, but it can get that way,” Wendell said.
Pate’s girlfriend showed up. Jill Doss, 42, wore thick glasses and a V-neck blouse. She said she grew up in Longview, married at 16, then divorced and joined a carnival that was passing through East Texas when she was 20. She lived in six states before returning to Longview in 1998.
“I met a lot of awesome people between here and there,” she said.
Doss is the mother of a 9-year-old boy and a 7-year-old girl, both of whom live with their dad. She had spent the previous night in a motel room with Pate, and Pate was jealous of her interactions with other men.
“Jill!” Pate barked at her. “Give the writer a break!”
Doss’ story was over.
WITH FRIENDS
“Company!”
The friendly shout rang from the trail. The camp’s previous occupants, a couple of guys named Tommy and John, had come calling.
The men were staying in a motel after finding steady work on a trash truck, and they cracked jokes and sprinkled lemon-lime salt into their drinks to kill the bitter taste of the malt liquor.
Pate sidled over to the man named John.
“Did you bring us a little somethin’ somethin’?” Pate asked him.
“Not yet,” he replied. “They’re not giving it to us till the morning, but we don’t feel like waiting so we’re about to go find it.”
Pate told Doss to fetch her Bible. He ordered the reporter to read a passage from 1st Corinthians 13, a chapter that defines love for the Christian religion.
Pate snarled at the chapter’s conclusion. “You can say it, or you can mean it,” he said.
The sun set over the bamboo grove, and Tommy and John left camp. When Doss stood up to follow them, Pate tried to stop her.
“Honor, Terry!” she shouted. “Where’s your honor?”
He watched her walk away in the firelight, then bolted after her. Wendell shouted as he ran past. “Terry!” It was no use. Pate reached his girlfriend on the trail outside of camp.
“You want to use me like this?” he said.
“Get away from me!” she screamed. “Get your hands off of me!”
A BEATING
Tree branches snapped and leaves rustled in the confusion. A rapid fire of fists on flesh pounded in the darkness. Pow! Pow! Pow! Wendell ran to break up the fight.
When he walked back into camp, Wendell said Tommy had ambushed Pate and beaten him for confronting Doss.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I just know they were fighting in the brush, and I broke it up. All I know is they’re both my friends, and I stand behind my friends.”
Beaten in the fight and fuming about it, Pate stumbled toward the street. Tommy returned to the camp to ask whether anyone had noticed a cell phone that had fallen from his pocket during the scuffle.
“He went down like some kind of kung fu move, and I caught him at least seven or eight good times,” Tommy said, demonstrating with a series of sharp uppercut jabs.
Wendell sighed. “I need to get out of this town,” he said.
Wendell had been breaking up a couple of fights a week in the camp. He said he drifted into Longview from Houston after he was laid off from his job and his wife left him with a mortgage and other bills. He had found work in Longview through a temporary labor service but lost the job when he misplaced his contact lenses and could not see to work.
He was thinking about hitching to Fort Worth to enroll in a course to become a commercial truck driver. It was hard to make plans when living day to day, though.
“I don’t know how else to explain it,” he said. “I don’t have a set plan for every day. I wish I did. I used to. I get up every morning. I try to get me something to eat. There’s always Newgate,” a homeless ministry in town. “You can get some doughnuts and coffee. I try to work every day. Sometimes I work, sometimes I don’t. If I don’t work, then I wander the streets, try to make something happen. If not, I have to eat at the shelters.”
That morning, Wendell said he had awakened alone in camp shortly after daylight. There were beers left over from the night before, so he started drinking. He said he had been drinking all day. That wasn’t a typical day, though, he said, because he more often tries to find work.
“Do you know how hard it is to get back on your feet when you’re down? It’s not easy,” he said. “It’s not, man, because when you’re dirty, you ain’t got no place to shower, you don’t have clean clothes, who’s gonna hire you?”
As he spoke, Wendell kept glancing into the darkness of the trail beyond the campfire. Finally, he called out to the woods: “I hear somebody out there!”
“I heard some footsteps,” he said.
THE NIGHT
When Pate returned to camp, he was still furious about the tussle.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said. “I’ve got a woman that I have cared about and walked out on me, and I had to wrestle some little punk out there because I’m too (messed) up, but tomorrow we’ll do a rematch.
“We better get a rematch,” he repeated. “You get me a rematch.”
Wendell scolded his friend.
“If you want to fight, fight in the street,” he said. “You do not need to be fighting in camp.”
Pate pleaded for money to buy crack cocaine, and when turned down, he spent the rest of the night muttering about the rematch, speaking in tongues, cursing the people around him, preaching from the Bible or, especially, calling out for his girlfriend.
“Where’s Jill?” he yelled.
“I don’t know!” Wendell replied. “Quit asking me that!”
Even at around 3 a.m., Pate awoke in his tent and called out her name.
“She’s gone, man!” Wendell said. “Let her go! You’re better off without her.”
AT DAYLIGHT
Wendell and Pate arose early the next morning and rustled through their belongings.
“Let me guess, we’re out of cigarettes,” Wendell said.
“Hup!” he exclaimed, finding the pouch of rolling tobacco. “We’re not down and out yet.”
After rolling a couple of smokes, they walked to the Newgate mission for coffee and doughnuts. They left before the preaching started.
It began to rain, and the friends quickened their pace as they made their way to the Labor Ready office a mile or two away.
If the rain would let up, they had scored a job repairing the roof of a restaurant near the grocery store. Then they’d have enough money to get a motel room, take a shower.
Pate’s girlfriend was at the day-labor site, milling around with the men waiting for jobs. Wendell feared a confrontation, but Pate only spoke to her and watched her walk away.
5,381 responses to “One night in a homeless camp”
Buy Drugs
A motivating discussion is definitely worth comment. I do believe that you need to write more on this subject matter, it might not be a taboo subject but usually folks don’t discuss such subjects. To the next! Kind regards!
58141 167341Precisely what I was looking for, thankyou for putting up. 185592
Great article! We will be linking to this great content on our site. Keep up the good writing.
Howdy! This post couldn’t be written much better! Reading through this post reminds me of my previous roommate! He continually kept preaching about this. I am going to send this post to him. Fairly certain he’s going to have a great read. I appreciate you for sharing!
I’ve been browsing online more than three hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours. It is pretty worth enough for me. In my view, if all website owners and bloggers made good content as you did, the net will be much more useful than ever before.
I appreciate, result in I discovered just what I was having a look for. You have ended my four day lengthy hunt! God Bless you man. Have a nice day. Bye
I don?t even know how I finished up right here, but I believed this post used to be good. I don’t understand who you are but certainly you are going to a famous blogger if you are not already 😉 Cheers!
Aw, this was a very good post. Taking the time and actual effort to make a top notch article… but what can I say… I put things off a whole lot and never manage to get anything done.
Qu?ng cáo trên inasuta.com xu?t hi?n quá nhi?u và khó ch?u
Scam
Viagra
Porn site
Buy Drugs
Hello there! This post couldn’t be written any better! Reading this post reminds me of my previous room mate! He always kept talking about this. I will forward this page to him. Fairly certain he will have a good read. Many thanks for sharing!
Also a thing to mention is that an online business administration course is designed for people to be able to smoothly proceed to bachelors degree education. The 90 credit education meets the other bachelor diploma requirements so when you earn your associate of arts in BA online, you may have access to up to date technologies in this particular field. Several reasons why students have to get their associate degree in business is because they can be interested in the field and want to receive the general instruction necessary just before jumping to a bachelor diploma program. Many thanks for the tips you really provide in the blog.
Porn
This will be a excellent site, will you be interested in doing an interview about how you created it? If so e-mail me!
After checking out a few of the blog articles on your web site, I honestly appreciate your technique of writing a blog. I book marked it to my bookmark webpage list and will be checking back soon. Take a look at my website as well and let me know how you feel.
Everything is very open with a precise explanation of the issues. It was definitely informative. Your website is very helpful. Thank you for sharing.
Everything is very open with a very clear explanation of the challenges. It was definitely informative. Your website is very helpful. Thanks for sharing!
An interesting discussion is worth comment. I do believe that you need to publish more on this issue, it might not be a taboo matter but generally folks don’t speak about these issues. To the next! Kind regards!!
When I initially commented I appear to have clicked the -Notify me when new comments are added- checkbox and now each time a comment is added I receive 4 emails with the exact same comment. Perhaps there is an easy method you are able to remove me from that service? Thank you.
Your style is really unique in comparison to other people I’ve read stuff from. I appreciate you for posting when you have the opportunity, Guess I will just book mark this web site.
This design is wicked! You most certainly know how to keep a reader amused. Between your wit and your videos, I was almost moved to start my own blog (well, almost…HaHa!) Fantastic job. I really enjoyed what you had to say, and more than that, how you presented it. Too cool!
Pornstar
Out of my notice, shopping for electronics online may be easily expensive, however there are some tips and tricks that you can use to acquire the best products. There are generally ways to come across discount deals that could help to make one to possess the best electronic products products at the cheapest prices. Interesting blog post.
Aw, this was an incredibly good post. Taking the time and actual effort to create a very good article… but what can I say… I procrastinate a lot and never seem to get anything done.
I really like your blog.. very nice colors & theme. Did you create this website yourself or did you hire someone to do it for you? Plz reply as I’m looking to create my own blog and would like to know where u got this from. cheers
Sex
There’s certainly a lot to know about this topic. I really like all the points you’ve made.
Oh my goodness! Amazing article dude! Thank you so much, However I am encountering difficulties with your RSS. I don’t understand the reason why I can’t subscribe to it. Is there anybody getting similar RSS issues? Anybody who knows the solution can you kindly respond? Thanks!
bim.london cung c?p thông tin rõ ràng v? d?ch v? và d? án
An outstanding share! I have just forwarded this onto a coworker who had been doing a little homework on this. And he actually bought me dinner due to the fact that I found it for him… lol. So allow me to reword this…. Thank YOU for the meal!! But yeah, thanx for spending the time to discuss this topic here on your web page.
giveawayswithgrace.com d? dàng tìm ki?m thông tin c?n thi?t
Scam
Porn site
I additionally believe that mesothelioma is a rare form of cancers that is usually found in these previously exposed to asbestos. Cancerous tissue form inside the mesothelium, which is a defensive lining that covers a lot of the body’s bodily organs. These cells typically form inside the lining on the lungs, abdomen, or the sac which actually encircles the heart. Thanks for expressing your ideas.
We’re a gaggle of volunteers and opening a brand new scheme in our community. Your site provided us with useful information to paintings on. You’ve performed an impressive job and our whole community will probably be thankful to you.
When I originally commented I clicked the -Notify me when new feedback are added- checkbox and now each time a comment is added I get four emails with the identical comment. Is there any means you can remove me from that service? Thanks!
I think other website proprietors should take this web site as an model, very clean and great user friendly style and design, as well as the content. You’re an expert in this topic!
I?m not sure where you’re getting your information, but great topic. I needs to spend some time learning more or understanding more. Thanks for wonderful info I was looking for this information for my mission.
We absolutely love your blog and find the majority of your post’s to be just what I’m looking for. Does one offer guest writers to write content to suit your needs? I wouldn’t mind writing a post or elaborating on many of the subjects you write related to here. Again, awesome weblog!
Buy Drugs
I truly love your blog.. Pleasant colors & theme. Did you develop this website yourself? Please reply back as I’m hoping to create my own personal website and would love to learn where you got this from or what the theme is called. Thanks!
When I initially commented I seem to have clicked on the -Notify me when new comments are added- checkbox and from now on whenever a comment is added I receive 4 emails with the same comment. Is there a means you can remove me from that service? Many thanks.
Thanks for the helpful posting. It is also my belief that mesothelioma has an extremely long latency time, which means that indication of the disease won’t emerge till 30 to 50 years after the preliminary exposure to asbestos fiber. Pleural mesothelioma, that is the most common variety and affects the area throughout the lungs, might cause shortness of breath, upper body pains, and also a persistent coughing, which may cause coughing up body.
I have read several good stuff here. Definitely worth bookmarking for revisiting. I surprise how much effort you put to create such a great informative site.
Can I simply just say what a comfort to discover somebody that actually knows what they are talking about on the internet. You definitely know how to bring an issue to light and make it important. More and more people really need to look at this and understand this side of the story. It’s surprising you are not more popular since you most certainly possess the gift.
Great information. Lucky me I recently found your website by chance (stumbleupon). I’ve saved it for later.