The Barn House by Ed Zotti

Author:Ed Zotti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-29T04:00:00+00:00

14

I mean no disrespect to anyone involved, but it tells you something about our situation, and what it was like renovating city houses in those days, that a trumpet-playing homeless guy with two big dogs moved into the basement of the Barn House and that we were grateful he was there. His name was Tom S—; he’d been living on the streets for years. One day he’d shown up at one of Tony and Jerry’s job sites and offered to keep an eye on things if they’d allow him to live in the house while work was under way. The project was one of a series of jobs Jerry had lined up under a city-funded neighborhood improvement program; the buildings were mostly in tough neighborhoods and had been plagued by thefts and vandalism. Tony and Jerry readily agreed to Tom’s proposition. He’d watched a couple of houses for them; work was nearing completion on the second when the Barn House was burglarized.

How many homeless people live in Chicago or any big U.S. city has long been a matter of debate. During the 1980s homeless advocates had claimed enormous numbers, and in the early 1990s the newspapers still sometimes reported that Chicago was home to as many as sixty thousand. The figures arrived at by actual count were much lower—the 1990 census had turned up sixty-eight hundred, of whom around sixteen hundred lived on the street, with the balance in shelters. Whatever the number, they were a conspicuous feature of the urban landscape, most visible at the time on Lower Wacker Drive, a below-grade service road girdling the Loop, where many camped out on the loading docks of office buildings. Most subsisted on handouts, but a few earned a marginal living—I’ve already mentioned the metal scavengers who pushed old grocery carts through the alleys collecting discarded aluminum cans.

Tom had contrived his own method of getting by. I went out one cold January morning to meet him at a job site on the west side, only a few blocks from the neighborhood where I’d grown up. The project was a small single-family house. Expecting a shuffling derelict, I was surprised to find an alert-looking fellow with glasses and a salt-and-pepper beard wearing a sporty muffler and a plaid bucket cap. He was quite thin. He supported himself by playing the trumpet on street corners. For company he had two enormous dogs named Layla and Oscar. I wondered: What is this guy doing living in basements? We agreed that he would watch our house for the duration of the project.

Tony’s guys moved him in a few days later, building him a bed in the front of the basement and hauling down the gas space heater previously installed in the dining room. He had a hot plate, a coffeepot, some utensils, and a few other odds and ends. I wouldn’t describe the room as cozy—it was the sort of rough-hewn place where you expected to meet people named Igor and Trogg—but it assuredly beat the streets.

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