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Where hope lives

Tom Clark once made his home under a bridge, battling alcoholism and bipolar disorder. Now, with a tenuous hold on sobriety and optimism to spare, he embodies the faith that social programs can make a difference.

By Kelley Benham
Published February 13, 2006

[Times photos: Lara Cerri]

An avid fan of rock ’n’ roll, Tom Clark plays one of his prized electric guitars in his transitional apartment. Clark is close to getting his own place and an independent life again.

	Tom Clark keeps a watchful eye from the passenger seat as he and social worker Marta Gomez scan St. Petersburg for a homeless census. Clark is an invaluable aid in this search as he was once homeless himself.

ST. PETERSBURG -- From his balcony, Tom Clark smiled through the dark and rain, waiting. In his adult life he has had many wet, restless mornings, but not many useful ones.

His social worker picked him up just after 6. They headed south on Fourth Street with a clipboard, peering out the car windows down alleys and under awnings, counting people huddled next to grocery carts or under cardboard. For once, Tom was on the warm side of the car window.

"Okay, Mr. Tom," said Marta Gomez. "The problem is it's raining, so they're going to hide."

"Under bus stops," Tom said. He's been there. In bus stop shelters, abandoned houses, abandoned cars. "Probably by this store over here," he said, motioning. "There's one right there."

There. Curled under blankets on a bus stop bench, a damp lump.

One.

Carrying a clipboard seems like a small thing, but it's important to him. Everywhere Tom Clark goes, people introduce him as a "success story." For the longest time, he felt like human wreckage.

This year, despite the clipboard, he was technically still homeless, one of the first counted.

Next year?

"Never again," he said.

* * *

Pinellas County counted and surveyed its homeless a couple of weeks ago, an annual effort that helps fund programs that try to save people from the streets. Tom jumped to volunteer.

At 54, he has been homeless half his adult life: everything from hippie-on-a-strange-couch homeless to street-wino-avert-your-eyes homeless. Now he's sweet-smelling and sober and living in a transitional apartment called the Oaks. He's on a waiting list for a government-subsidized apartment, a place with support for his bipolar disorder. It will be his first real home since 1997.

He embodies hope for social workers who believe they can make a difference, even as the numbers grow. He is shaky evidence that programs can help even the hardest cases. He is 20 years into a struggle for sobriety. Two days from the anniversary of his last drink. Three hundred-sixty-three days from the day police stopped him from throwing himself in front of a truck. He has both the hard-lined face of someone who has seen everything and the nakedly optimistic grin of someone who must be missing something. He's always this close to making it and one cheap beer from the street.

He has reached a place where people are always telling him how far he has come. From the car, he looked out on the street at where he has been.

Experience told him that Marta Gomez, the social worker, should do a U-turn at the Chattaway restaurant, because the homeless don't usually venture so far south.

Marta whipped the car around, and he scanned the sidewalks.

"That guy right there might be one," Tom said. "He's got a little bag."

The bag had wheels like luggage, and they weren't near the airport.

"Put a hash mark for him," Marta said.

"When I was out there I didn't have no bag," Tom said. "I had nothing. I traveled light."

Again and again he pawned everything he had that was worth anything: his rock CDs and his guitars. What he couldn't sell he abandoned. He lost the last of his daughters' baby pictures a couple of years ago.

He remembers the way his older girl used to smile at him when he came home from work. She'd wiggle her fingers at him through the window. Now the window before him was wet with rain. He willed his mind toward the future.

"I had the interview for the apartment Tuesday," he told Marta. The place he likes is a cute, furnished one-bedroom on First Avenue S. He thinks about it all the time. Walking through the front door. Seeing his electric guitars, Blackie and Goldie, propped on stands like onstage at a concert. His Beatles and Rolling Stones books on the coffee table. It's going to be cool. He tells Marta more about the interview. His optimism fills the car.

"She told me it could be any day."

In Marta's caseload of 50, five are doing as well as Tom is. She can never tell for sure when someone is finally going to make it, but he has the look of someone who has seen the way out.

They focused on the road again, scanning the convenience store parking lots and the alleys.

"Right there! Right there!"

Another hash mark at 16th Avenue S and MLK.

They passed a building where some of his support groups meet, made three more hash marks at the Blue Nile Food Store at 18th Avenue S. The streets of Midtown were quiet. Interstate overpasses were fenced to prevent camping. At the bus stops, people were just waiting for the bus.

Teams of volunteers were spread out all over the county. Around Demens Landing, one team had counted 50 already. Marta worried that the count would be low because of the rain. People will think the problem is getting better when she knows it's getting worse. Last year, the Pinellas County Coalition for the Homeless counted 4,540, up 11 percent from the year before.

They both know a lot of people think the homeless can't be helped. Give them rent money and they'll spend it on beer. Tom used to think he was one of those people. He looked so pitiful a woman gave him $5 once and he didn't even ask. He'd steal wine from convenience stores if he couldn't buy a drink. Ask him to count the cities where he has been homeless, he just gets embarrassed. New York, San Francisco, Fort Lauderdale, Atlanta, Tampa ...

Ask him the reasons he's homeless, there's no simple answer.

He had good years: married, GED, two kids, decent job, Bert and Ernie dolls and picnics.

Really good years: a one-bedroom apartment with a balcony, sliding glass doors and a fountain in the back. He had furniture from Badcock, a job selling tires and a nice Italian girlfriend.

He also had undiagnosed bipolar disorder and depression and raging alcoholism that he had been fighting since 1985.

He pulled himself off the street time after time and bounced through program after program. He learned more and more about himself, and each time he stayed sober longer. A year, two years. But every time he blew it, he fell harder.

Marta had to unravel layers of mental, psychological and medical problems and decades of remorse and guilt. She had to show him how to navigate bureaucracy and lobby for him with the Boley Centers, the private group that helped him with housing and counseling.

She gets used to seeing people backslide. She met Tom in 2001. He completed a program and stayed sober more than three years. He lived his longest stretch at the same address: the Randolph Hotel downtown. But he thought he was in control and didn't need his pills.

With Marta, the door never closes. People try again when they are ready. Sometimes they have to hit bottom again.

"All right, Tom, I don't see any homeless people around here."

They cruise the bus station, Campbell Park, Lake Maggiore. These aren't places homeless people cluster. They were the kinds of places Tom hid. He was a loner.

In Roser Park, they drove up on a little white bridge over a muddy creek.

Tom knows this place.

"I used to live there," he told Marta. "Under this bridge right here."

It was his last home before he sought treatment. He slept there four days, passed out drunk, listening to the cars above him with his head on his shoes. Then Hurricane Frances made landfall. The trees around him started to thrash, and Tom, who didn't have the Weather Channel down there, got scared enough to make the steep, slippery climb out. He found a shelter, went to detox, tried a work program but couldn't work because of his hernia, got sober and visited his parents, backslid, gave up, stood on the side of Highway 301 wondering what it would feel like to step into traffic. Told the cops he had made a mess of his life.

From a halfway house, he got himself to the HUD-funded program that reunited him with Marta. At first he thought he would never make it. He was the guy no one wanted to be around. He wouldn't dare ask his family for help. He didn't want them to see him at his worst. With Marta's help, he called the Boley Centers for two months asking for a slot in its program. Slowly he began to feel more hopeful. The alternative was climbing back into the mud.

Marta drove closer to the bridge and peered in. There was a pile of boxes and trash nearby. Maybe someone's home. Maybe just trash.

"Let's go there," she said.

"If I go there, I might as well get killed," Tom said.

When the car crossed over the creek, Marta stared down into the shadows where Tom used to sleep. Tom kept his eyes on the road ahead.

* * *

They counted just seven homeless people all morning, although in the downtown areas teams turned in counts of more than 100. When they were finished, Tom went to his volunteer job at the Sunshine Center and then to the Salvation Army to hand out surveys to homeless people arriving for dinner. The surveys tell the county's homeless organizations where people are sleeping, where they came from, how many kids they have.

Tom saw people he knew, including an old roommate he had thought might be dead. Then he went to a support group and back to his little apartment, home for now.

It's impossibly tidy. That's how he is when he's sober: clean and in control. His mail is stacked, large envelopes on the bottom, small on top. His dishes are boxed and ready to move.

In the past year, Tom has gotten a hernia fixed and signed up for Social Security disability benefits. He worked as a mechanic all his life, but a pinched nerve makes it hard to turn a wrench anymore. Stress aggravates his bipolar disorder, and when that flares up, it's harder not to drink. He got on the right medications, in the right amounts, which always takes time. He is slowly rebuilding his CD collection, starting with L.A. Guns and the Rolling Stones. He attends 10 to 12 support group meetings a week. He volunteers at the Sunshine Center at least three hours a day and pitches in at community events when he can. Every day he does something he feels good about.

Three months ago he wrote a letter to his younger daughter, Sherry, who is 35. He last saw her when she was 7. He sent her a Christmas card and put a gift in it for the first time in as long as he can remember: $50. He hadn't talked to her yet, but the check cleared, so he thought that was a hopeful sign. He has new pictures of each of his girls. In them they are grown and smiling. He put the pictures in a Ziploc bag, to keep them safe.

That night he called his older daughter, Sandy, the one who used to wave through the window. She's 37 and lives in Vermont. He was bubbling over with things to tell her. He was proud of what he had done that day.

Sandy wasn't very chatty, so he just told her that he wasn't sure, but he might be in the newspaper. He said if he was, he wanted to send her the story so she could read about her dad.

-- Kelley Benham can be reached at 727-893-8848 or benham@sptimes.com.

[Last modified February 22, 2006, 11:57:26]