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Donald has tried the shelters but finds them counterproductive. Like the one on Taylor Street where he saw people smuggling in booze and weapons over the fence when they know they’re not supposed to.

Corey Hutchins

A bar fight has broken out outside a college bar in Five Points and with it comes the static-tense air and jittery nerves of those on the sidewalk as they wait for the first sign of blood or police lights. But slumped in the doorway and off to the side is Donald, a 60-year-old homeless black man whose left arm has been severed at the elbow. Gangrene. He wears a comical Huck Finn-style straw hat and around his neck is a bright Hawaiian lay that he pulled out of a trashcan. He has a thick white beard and blue cataract film covers his normally brown eyes. When he talks his stump moves back and forth as if he still has a hand to gesture with.

“It’s been miserable to me,” he says about being homeless in Columbia. “I mean, I been surviving…most of the times I get things out of the trash.”

Donald has been homeless for just under a year. He used to work for a truck company and also at the Lizard’s Thicket. Now he’s homeless and only has one arm. “I’m still waiting on my disability but I don’t know if I’m going to get it or not,” he says. “It’s been seven months.”

The hardest part of getting what he needs is that he has to “go through so much red tape.” He also says they’ll turn you down at least two or three times before you even get it. Just part of the system. Donald says a lot of people on the street can get money for their disabilities but certain kinds of homeless folks “don’t know how to budget themselves.”

“They’re getting $1,600, $1,700 a month and go to the motel– with a bunch of crack heads– and stay three days and then they’re back on the street begging again or whatever,” he says.

But Donald himself “doesn’t do crack.” He smokes marijuana when he can but stays away from the hard stuff. At night he sleeps in the bushes or behind a certain building he may or may not know is actually within pissing distance of the mayor’s own office. “I comes down here every now and then so I can be seen,” he says, noting that he generally hits up the college bar area on Thursdays, Fridays or Saturdays. “I been so tired I can’t get down here some of them though,” he says. As for city street life he says “there’s a lot of crazy things that happen out here.”

“I’ve seen guys sitting down on benches and guys just walk up and knock ‘em off the benches and all kinds of stuff,” he says. “Being homeless [you see] all kinds of stuff like that.” One thing Donald doesn’t have a problem with is the police. A majority of them are actually all right, he says. They talk to him, harass him sometimes, but generally they “don’t try to drag you or nothing.”

He knows that many homeless people do have problems with the cops and says a lot of the time it’s because of an attitude problem.

Some of the area’s homeless just don’t know how to handle authority and “if you’re not doing something wrong then you don’t have to worry about it,” he says.

What Donald misses the most about not being homeless is studying and reading. He says that now he just doesn’t have the leisure time. “Every time you get a spot where you can read or something there’s always somebody come in there and harass you or whatever,” he says.

As for the every-day citizens, well, “they look down on a lot of you.” In the old days it was different, he says. They’d smile at you. Act like you were somebody. Not anymore.

Donald has tried the shelters but finds them counterproductive. Like the one on Taylor Street where he saw people smuggling in booze and weapons over the fence when they know they’re not supposed to. He was once threatened with violence there for turning down a drink.

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