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Her nose leaks not like a faucet but more a ruptured water main and her right sleeve is stiff and crusty from hardened snot as she savagely rubs it back and forth against her face.

By Corey Hutchins

It’s the Thursday before the college students leave for spring break and Five Points is chilly as packs of them crisscross the busy streets. “We’re going to Jungles!” shrieks a group of girls to a fratted-out SUV with the bass rattling the windows. Forty-one-year old Lisa, a black HIV-positive homeless woman looks on from the shadows of a leafless tree adorned with darkened Christmas lights. She’s dressed in an olive-colored flannel jacket, jeans and boots and wears a black knit Carhartt winter hat pulled down over her eyebrows. And she gets right to the point. “OK, I’m homeless, right? I’m HIV positive,” she says.

”OK, I’m homeless, right? I’m HIV positive”

Lisa is originally from Kansas City, Missouri but it was her boyfriend (“My asshole boyfriend, pardon my French”) who brought her to Columbia. Once in the capital city where friendliness flows, he beat her. And then he left her on the street. That was a year ago and she’s been out here ever since. Even on less-than-warm nights like this one shortly after 11 p.m. closing in on the Ides of March as she watches the bar crowd just start to get rowdy.

Since she’s been in Columbia she met another man and it was the same sad story all over again. “A lot of people ask, ‘Well how did I contract HIV?’” she says. “I contracted it by being careless, OK?” She’s not talking about sharing needles or other drugs, though, she got it the way most people get it: “I slept around with the wrong person.” That was two years ago and it may explain the runny nose. The nutrition of a homeless diet doesn’t exactly boost the immune system.

Living on the streets of Columbia is “not good,” she says. “Especially for a female.” When she starts to cite examples for a statement where really none are needed, her eyes begin to resemble her nose. And there goes that sleeve again. Scraping. Scraping against her face.

“I almost got attacked one time,” she says and her words trail off as she breaks eye contact to wipe them. “At the place I sleep at sometimes.”

She won’t say exactly where the place she sleeps is but it’s not a shelter. She knows she could use them but, like most of the homeless people who’ve appeared in this column, Lisa says she doesn’t like being around a lot of people.

“There ain’t nothing really…nothing against it. I just don’t like a crowd of people.” Unlike a lot of the homeless folks who have appeared in this column, though, Lisa says she doesn’t do drugs.

“I smoke a hell of a lot of cigarettes though,” she says. “I smoke the hell out of them.” Lisa thinks if the city could get the “drug population” under control it would decrease a lot of homelessness in the area. How exactly they would go about doing that though, she says is a “good question.”

While Lisa is out here telling her story, trying to get a few bucks for something to eat on this big Thirsty Thursday, not only does she have more prospects but more competition– a panhandler’s law of diminishing returns. Just up the block a man who says he works in the Russell House at USC is asking passersby for “Just a couple dollars” to get home. No doubt the concrete wall outside the College Mart is getting ready to fill up like a “gimee gauntlet.”

“I think there’s quite a few homeless people out here,” Lisa says, surveying the area, giving a special nod down past Group Therapy and toward Martin Luther King, Jr. Park. “More than back where I’m from.” But being homeless in Columbia for Lisa is a test of humanity. The worst part about it, she says, is the lack of respect. Especially for her because she’s HIV positive and isn’t afraid to tell people about it. “I come out and tell a person the truth, you know?” she says. “Sometimes it benefits me, sometimes it don’t.”

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