A Photo Essay by Susan Adcock
Barney knocked hard on the door. A muffled voice yelled from inside, a command that barely came across as "come in." It was Spoon's voice. Spoon is a tall thin man bent slightly by time and by a war that interrupted—then stole—his college education. He lives in the part of his apartment complex that he and other longtime residents call "the ghetto," just across the lot from "the suburbs" and across the street from the Drake Motel on Murfreesboro Road.
Barney opened the door. "You got company," he grumbled.
Spoon rose as the door opened and, with a characteristic soft smile, invited us in.
Early in his life, Spoon spent his senior prom night here at this same place (before it became affordable housing). "It was 1965," he says. "Willie Nelson and my man George Jones, and Waylon, all them guys used to hang out on the porches across the street there, at the Drake Motel. They didn't need no stretch limousines or bodyguards then. They was just people."
For the past 13 years, Spoon has made his home in this little riptide of humanity called Mercury Courts.
It is one of Nashville's gated communities, minus the chandeliers and granite countertops. Many homeless people arrive here from the street, the mission or other social agencies. Here, underprivileged adults get the chance to incorporate themselves into the community in some way if they should choose to. Mercury Courts apartments offer the largest single-room occupancy (SRO) of its kind in Nashville, with over a hundred units. Without it, many of Mercury Courts' residents would be camped under a bridge somewhere.
We sat in worn, comfortable chairs and talked about politics, this war, the Vietnam War and Michael Jackson. Everyone smoked. Barney left early to refill his "lemonade."
When I first met Barney, he was wearing a Barney the Dinosaur costume. It took a minute for me to understand that his name really was Barney. A circus owner named Frank had hired him to work at the circus for the length of the Tennessee State Fair. He was homeless at the time or living at the Salvation Army, I can't remember which. Frank used to keep two or three of the guys he'd hired from the labor pool to work as circus hands through the week. One year it was Steve, whose job it was to feed and water a donkey named Petunia. It was strange to see this guy who'd been systematically hardened by the street suddenly become the caretaker of a show animal.
It was the same with Barney. The costume gave him a gift that he otherwise might not have found. He'd run into that circus tent and the crowd would scream his name and for 10 days he was Elvis. It changed his life for a little while.
He moved into his room at Mercury Courts three years later, there on the backside, "the last mile" as it's called. With little in the way of furnishings, he used to sit in a dilapidated motel room chair and watch the rats carry whole slices of pizza under the fence and into the lot next door. If the rats didn't move fast enough or traveled in the wrong direction, the dog that lived there would have the last word.
It wasn't much, but Barney and his neighbors were thankful for it. It was a place to live. A roof. A door. A door that locked.
Leroy, Barney's next-door neighbor, builds elaborate shrines out of appliances, plastic flowers and old furniture. The staff discourages such activity, arriving at his door with warnings to disassemble his creations and clean up the yard. It took a while for them to realize that Leroy had assumed the task of keeping the yard in order in the first place. His broom, ground down to its lacings, was a testament to the fact. On these occasions, he would retire his current display to the dumpster and quietly set about making another. Undaunted.
In Roman mythology, Mercury was the god of travelers, mischief, eloquence and wit.
Barney and I, and his neighbor Steve, had a conversation about jail last week. Steve had just spent 12 days himself in Nashville's jail, a familiar place to him. He said he ate more there in two days than he had in the two weeks before being arrested. Although he hadn't any desire to go, upon seeing two police officers heading toward his room, he asked them if it was him they'd come for.
It was, indeed.
Steve knew before he went to jail that a "friend" of his had signed a warrant for his arrest accusing him of beating her, when in fact she'd lost a fight with a girl and didn't want to admit it. She ended up with ring marks in her bruises, and Steve doesn't wear any rings (a fact he hoped would clear him when he came before the judge). "I wouldn't lie about it," he told me. "I've beat her before, but not this time."
To address the look on my face, he added, "When somebody smacks you awake with a saucepan, you get up and whip their ass; it doesn't matter who it is."
"Will she change her mind and clear you of the charge?" I asked.
"She's in jail too," he said. "They arrested her for having two 'failure to appear' warrants, so she won't show up at court."
I asked him how many cellmates he had and, to my utter amazement, he said "fifty."
Twice now, I've walked with Steve to the liquor store. It's a straight shot up the street about a quarter mile, placed thoughtfully between the Drake Motel and the projects, one of those liquor stores where the cashier sits unaffected and smiling, behind bullet proof glass. Steve and his neighbors pool their money and buy half gallons of vodka. If Steve doesn't happen to have money, he (or anyone, for that matter) is afforded a drink simply for doing the walking.
The first time we made this trip, he noted the place where he'd most recently been hit by a car. Upon discovering that Steve had been drinking, the man who hit him pretended to call an ambulance on his cell phone, and then drove away.
We talked about homelessness and addiction, and about a life he once had—and lost. A life shattered by a $1,500-a-week cocaine habit that cost him his wife, his children and his livelihood.
"I don't blame her a bit for leaving me" he says. "I'd have divorced myself if I could've. She probably saved my life."
He speaks with an honest regret about the 8-month-old baby he missed out on knowing and, for a brief moment, his tough demeanor dissolves into what I call "the dad face."
Steve moved in at Mercury Courts, having been homeless, with two plastic bags of someone else's clothes. He split his time between his street family and his motel room apartment, which he admitted is mostly a storage closet. He works day labor whenever he can and, even though it's warm and comfortable there, he tries not to check in at the "Crossbar Motel."
Last I saw him, Steve was asked to either keep his girlfriend off the Mercury Courts property or leave. He chose the girl. Knowing he would break the agreement and eventually be thrown out, he chose to go back to the street and is reportedly living nearby in a house made from plastic sheeting.
On Wednesday morning at 10:15, Barney called me from jail. About to see the judge for the third time in three weeks, he'd persuaded someone to let him use a desk phone. You have to be a pretty smooth talker and a pretty likable guy to get that sort of privilege as a prisoner. We talked for about a minute, when he suddenly said, "Gotta go, bye." The phone clicked dead in my ear.
From what I understood, he knew he'd be released today, had no idea when, and although he hadn't had time to ask, I knew he really needed a ride home. A walk in the rain from jail to Murfreesboro Road is not a short one when you're wearing house slippers. He was arrested in his house slippers. Upon his discharge, someone let him keep the orange jail shoes—he calls them "UT shoes"—and gave him a dollar to catch the bus.
For those who haven't been, when you get out of jail, you're released from a steel door that opens to the outside of the building. A camera takes a picture of you as you take that first free breath, then you're alone for the first time since you arrived.
I saw two people open the door before Barney, about 20 minutes apart—a man first, then a tall, thin, pretty woman. The man spoke to me as he passed, his voice rich with emotion, and for a second I felt privileged to have been the first person he saw. Both of them carried a slip of yellow paper, and neither of them had anyone there to meet them. They left walking, home or to the bus stop, in a rain they didn't seem to notice. Barney was next. We had a quick conversation about the day's events and headed for the car. Ten steps later, great friend that I am, I handed him his first cigarette in three weeks.
"Hey look," he said, "the trees bloomed."
"Yes they did," I answered. "You want a piece of gum?"
The last time Barney went to jail, someone broke into his government subsidized motel room and helped themselves to his television. He wondered on the way home if its replacement would still be there, and we cracked jokes about the toxicity of his abandoned Crockpot dinner.
When we got to his house, his arms full, Barney asked me to retrieve his door key by pulling the chain that was attached to his pants and hanging from his pocket. I then very politely put the key in the lock, turned it and flung the door open, which, given that he and the keychain were attached to each other, catapulted him into the room.
"That's what I need," he said regaining his balance, "a broken ankle."
At the end of any given day, looking out the window of what they call the "High Rise," you might see Walter at his door, rearranging items in a grocery cart or lumbering across Murfreesboro Road with stick in hand. You might catch Sammy coming home from the labor pool on his bicycle with a $40 paycheck or Santos carrying a box of groceries gracefully atop his head.
Spoon might be sitting on his porch, waiting patiently for someone to come along and break in his new chessboard, or Jesse might be down on "Death Row" showing off his sword. You might be asked to drive a girl outside the property, a girl who stayed the night without permission because it was 21 degrees and she had no where else to go. You might catch a glimpse of the dope man driving by. Or you just might hear the sounds of Al Green coming from back up on the hill there in "Hollywood."
