SEVEN

COMMUNITY SERVICE IS MY LOTTERY TICKET

MY LIFE IN THOSE DAYS WAS FULL, between managing the three-quarter-way house where I lived and going to school. I wasn’t a person who slept eight hours a night in those days. There would be times where I’d have to get up at three o’clock in the morning to get some reading or writing done, especially as I chose to continue my education after I earned my associate’s degree to pursue a full-fledged bachelor’s degree.

At the same time, I knew that I couldn’t put anything ahead of my sobriety. I was still running meetings at our place and taking meetings to treatment centers. It was maybe a 50/50 balance between education and recovery, so when the opportunity came along to get into advocacy, I didn’t know what side of that 50/50 ratio that work was going to fit into. At the same time, I knew I couldn’t turn it down.

The first organization I joined was called the Homeless/Formerly Homeless Forum. The primary focus of this organization was to advocate for sensible policies that would create more affordable housing for individuals and for programs that would help reduce the homeless population in Miami-Dade County. It was led by people who were recovering addicts, people who had experienced homelessness, or people who might have been incarcerated. That felt like an ideal fit for me to begin my advocacy work because I was a combination of all three.

The person who had the most influence over me from that organization was Pauline Trotman. Pauline had walked a lot of the steps that I had, including being homeless, even though she was further down the activist path than me. She treated the people we served as if she were one of them, which she had been. She never forgot where she came from. From sleeping in cars and abandoned buildings, she managed to rise to a very prominent position within the homeless advocacy and recovery community in South Florida, and she continues to be a constant guiding force today.

Pauline used to say that having gone from homeless to homeowner meant that anything was possible. She wanted to make sure that opportunity existed for others. Helping with that organization to get people off the streets, helping them find a safe place to live, made me feel like I was doing something good. I knew that all of a person’s struggles are related and that homelessness can be at the root of so many of a person’s problems.

When you’re homeless, it’s a hustle. This is not an indictment of people living without permanent homes, because you have a lot of folks who are out there through no fault of their own. They could have fallen victim to a bad economy or been part of a family that was turned out into the street. During my time on the streets, I ran across brilliant people who had fallen on hard times without any support system: doctors, lawyers, teachers. You’d be surprised at the wide range of people who live without permanent housing, at least for part of their lives; they include people of all races and ethnicities, of all socioeconomic backgrounds, from many varied backgrounds.

But when you are homeless, you’re susceptible to committing a certain number of crimes each year. In Dade County around the turn of the century, the average number of crimes committed by a homeless person a year was 90. Think about that: just to survive, you will commit 90 crimes within a year’s time. If you’re homeless with a substance abuse problem, that number shoots up to about 150 crimes a year.

When you’re out on the streets, you increase the likelihood of interaction with law enforcement as well. I’ve been arrested for shoplifting and for possession of drugs and for possession of paraphernalia. There are times when I would get arrested for something I wasn’t even guilty of. I’d go to jail and be offered an opportunity to take a plea. The state prosecutor would offer me credit for time served. That means that if you take their plea, you can go home that day. I didn’t have a home to go to, but I had drugs to get to. And so, I would take a plea, adding to my criminal record, so I could get back out to use drugs.

I was mounting up the convictions, which eventually comes back and haunts you. That was the case with the charge that got me into prison. One of my prior convictions, as the result of a plea, made me a felon and was used as a qualifying offense, what they call a predicate, for state prosecutors to be able to charge me with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.

The story of that night went like this: I was in the home of a friend where I was squatting. Late that night, there was a heavy banging on the door that startled me. When I got up and looked out the window, I saw a lot of men in all black. My first thought was that these guys were coming to rob us.

Then I heard, “Police! Open up! Police!”

I went and opened the door and when I did that, the police dragged me outside and laid me on the ground, facedown. There were other people who were pulled out of the house as well. Then, they searched the home. While they were searching, they found a gun.

I didn’t know this at the time, but the owner of the house was there as well that night, hanging out. He had other homes, but he was actually there that night. While they were searching the house, he was lying next to me.

I remember whispering to him, “You need to ask them if they have a search warrant.”

Eventually he did ask them. They asked him if he was the owner, and when he said yes, they picked him up and brought him into the house with them. Several minutes later they all came back out, made me stand up, and handcuffed me. When I got in the car, they told me I was being arrested for illegal possession of a firearm.

The police later reported that they were driving down the street and heard a woman scream. That made them stop their car, get out, and go onto the property where we were. They said they looked in our window and saw me standing in a bedroom with a gun in my hand. That was the story they used for probable cause. The reality was, police found the gun in a cupboard in the kitchen, and the gun belonged to the owner of the house. He wasn’t the legal owner of the gun, though; it was the registered firearm of his cousin, who was in the military and had given it to him.

Apparently, when police found the gun, they explained to the owner of the house that somebody had to go to jail and who was it going to be. Now, I have never owned a firearm. Throughout my life in the streets, I’ve come across them in various ways, but I’ve never been the person to just be carrying around a firearm. As a former military person, I have great respect for the damage it can do. But the owner of the house decided to name me as the owner of the gun.

He later told me that he figured better me than him, because at least he had money to bail me out. Which was fine reasoning, except with my list of prior convictions it meant my entire life changed in an instant.

THE MORE COMFORTABLE I GOT AT MIAMI DADE COLLEGE, THE MORE I OPENED UP TO other students about my past. I became a student assistant in the paralegal program’s administration, which was headquartered in a place called the Law Center. My role was to help students, not only to decide what they wanted to do in their college career but to serve as a mentor and counselor for those who chose to enter the paralegal program. I was always there to hand out advice, whether it was about their classes or life in general. I heard about their struggles with their boyfriends or girlfriends, or their families, or their living conditions. Some of these kids were young enough to be my daughters or my sons, and I tried to give them some of the benefit of my experience.

I used to talk to the students at the college about these homeless people they saw roaming around the campus. I could remember how, before that happened to me, when I saw a homeless person I would just conveniently turn away. Or, if I did pay that person any attention, it wasn’t positive attention. I would be thinking, That person is never going to amount to anything.

When I shared my story of being homeless with the students, I would challenge them to look at the homeless population differently: instead of seeing someone as a hopeless case or a pariah or a drain on our community, look at the person as someone who could be the next Desmond or even better. “I was once that person,” I would tell them.

I started to realize early on that I actually had the power to help shift the narrative and cause people to look at things differently, in a way that would, in turn, make our community a little bit better. Some of the students could relate because they had come from a background where something similar had happened to someone they knew. No matter what crowd I’m in, I often find people who have been through the same thing I have or have a family member or close friend who has struggled with addiction and sometimes homelessness as well.

Eventually, I revealed my story to my professors, opening up about what I had gone through. Up until then, only people in recovery knew who Desmond really was. Everybody else just saw a guy who was smiling all the time and trying to be helpful. They didn’t know the backstory. They didn’t know that a lot of my happiness was due to the fact that I couldn’t believe I was in college, and I was grateful for the opportunity to do something with my life other than using drugs and being homeless. Eventually, my story made its way to the president of the college, who was amazed by what I had gone through. I had come a long way from being afraid that my secret was going to come out and that I would be hauled out of class one day. Yes, I was being accepted now. Yes, my story was inspirational, but did it only apply to me? Was I the exception and not the norm? Right in the midst of our campus and surrounding downtown area were hundreds of homeless people trying to survive each day. What made them any different from me? How had I been able to stumble upon this great opportunity and they hadn’t? I saw that there was a very thin line that separated me from others, and that gave me an idea.

TALKING TO MIAMI DADE STUDENTS ABOUT WHAT WAS REALLY GOING ON IN THE LIVES of people less fortunate than us felt like a good start. But then I wondered, How can we take this to the next level? How can we get students beyond just being aware of the plight of people less fortunate and actually engage in efforts to address their needs? How to get them to understand that it is not the degrees we attain but rather our commitment to attending to others that can make our communities a better place?

I approached one of my professors with the idea and said, “Why don’t we create a student organization at Miami Dade whose primary focus is community service?” Professor Medina readily recognized the value of what I was trying to do. I think part of the reason she came on board so quickly was that she had advocacy blood flowing through her veins, and the other part was because she had an incredible life story that was filled with many triumphs over adversity. Working together, we were able to come up with an organization called the Society of Law and Community Service. I was the inaugural president of the organization, and it’s still going on today. It has grown from when I first started it, and it is doing amazing work.

One legacy that I left at the Society of Law and Community Service was our annual toy drive. We partnered with the state attorney’s office for Miami-Dade County, the Eleventh Judicial Circuit. We collected toys all over campus and then took them to places where kids were not going to have a good Christmas. Each year we would pick one or two facilities; one time, it actually fell to me to dress up as Santa Claus and hand out the gifts. I’ll never forget that day at the Belafonte TACOLCY Center, impacting the lives of children, most of whom were from single-parent households, and seeing the joy in those kids’ eyes. Knowing I’d made a difference in someone’s life and that, at the same time, I was helping change the perspective of some of the students I shared a college with was powerful. Add to that the fact that I was working with the same state attorney’s office that had prosecuted me, that I was now in partnership with them doing something good for the community—that was almost overwhelming.

WANTING TO GROW THE MEMBERSHIP OF THE SOCIETY OF LAW AND COMMUNITY SERVICE, I went around to the different classes on campus and shared my story with folks. I talked to them about the importance of giving back and how fulfilling it was. Through those discussions, students wanted to be a part of it and volunteered. I became almost like a disciple of community service. I was sold on it, and I could convince others to participate because it flowed so naturally from who I was.

Every good thing that’s happened to me has happened because I committed to community service and to giving back—not because I wanted it to happen or I asked for it to happen or I prayed for it to happen. I didn’t pray for the traditional form of success. I just prayed to do God’s work.

Service is my lottery ticket. I told the students, “If you want to hit it big, serving your community is what is guaranteed to win. It’s much better than trying to garner some kind of prize that comes from outside of yourself.” After all those years of wondering who I was, and what my purpose in life was, when I stumbled onto my purpose, I embraced it and didn’t want to let it go. Now, every day I woke up, I had something to engage with, so I knew that whenever I died, I would have made an impact on this planet in some form or fashion. People’s lives have been altered either because they heard my story of recovery or we met each other and I did something to help them along the way, whether it was minor or major. These people might not fill up a stadium at my funeral, but what they were doing in response to a little help from me and people like me was so much more important.

Not every student easily bought into the idea of community service being a moral duty to our fellow human beings. I wasn’t dismayed by this; I understood that everyone had their own personal experiences and perspectives on engaging or not engaging in community service. For those who didn’t get the moral appeal, I spoke to their own educational self-interest. I recounted the opening scene in the movie 21, in which the main character is a smart student who is applying to medical school. He is sitting in the office of the dean, and the dean is describing the thousands of students who had applied to attend the same medical school, all with the same grades and letters of recommendation from all the right people. After noting how tough the competition is to get into medical school, the dean asks the young man, “Where is your bling?” What the dean wanted to know was what this young man had done that would distinguish him from all the other applicants fighting for the few coveted seats. That distinction, I would tell the students, can come from engaging in community service.

Whether it was education, recovery, or advocacy, it all led back to the same question for me: What am I doing to make our society better? And I was not alone at Miami Dade. It was a special time and place, and we didn’t even realize it.

I was among a group of students who were selected by the university to go to Tallahassee to lobby at the state capitol on behalf of the college. There was some legislation that would have freed up some funds so Miami Dade could expand its programs and maintain affordability for people coming in. The group was made up of student leaders from various parts of the university. We were chosen because we had all been active and had participated in student government in some form. We just stood out.

On the bus were a group of Latinx kids I got to know: Felipe Matos, Gaby Pacheco, Juan Rodriguez, and Carlos Roa—you probably recognize those names by now. They were talking about how they were going to walk from Dade County all the way to the White House to deliver a letter to President Barack Obama to ask him to change immigration policy. That was the start of the movement for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which allows some rights to individuals, known as “Dreamers,” who were brought to the US as children outside of established immigration channels. These four would later organize in 2010 the Trail of Dreams, a 1,500-mile walk from Miami to Washington, DC, to support the passing of the DREAM Act, proposed federal legislation that would provide conditional resident status to undocumented immigrant students of good moral character.

In retrospect, it’s pretty amazing that we would all come out of the same place. We didn’t realize at that time, of course, that the five of us would go on to impact the lives of millions of people. I’m not sure what it was in that environment that helped us believe we could create change on a large scale. At that moment, though, we were just people who were experiencing some type of pain. It was a shared pain of not belonging to society, not feeling a part of it. Undocumented folks had to pay crazy fees just to go to school and lived constantly under the threat of deportation. Carlos and I sat together, and he told me about how, between work and where he was forced to live to escape detection, he had to get up at three o’clock in the morning to catch the bus to school. He was functioning on very little sleep but had dreams of being an architect. He is one now.

I knew what it felt like to believe I was unwelcome in this country. I didn’t feel like I was a part of society because of my criminal history and having my core rights taken away: to serve on a jury, to run for office, to own a firearm, and—most fundamentally—to vote. I felt ostracized because of my previous drug abuse. I was appreciative of the opportunities that I was getting—we all were—but at the same time, it was not enough. Change would have to come.