When Deborah was six years old, she started a fire club. To get in, her friends had to steal some matches from their mamas’ kitchens and hand them over to Deborah so she could show them how they worked. During one such lesson, she almost burned down an oil-field camp in Premont, where she lived—a near disaster resulting in a leather-belt spanking from her daddy that kept her out of a bathing suit for weeks.
Another time, just to see what would happen, she collected a bucketful of bullfrogs and dumped them into the laps of three ladies who were playing bridge with her mama. What happened was shrieking ladies, upended iced tea, and another spanking.
So here we were in our fifties, with me hoping some bums in littered alley-ways would scare her when the only things on earth she really feared were black ice, yellow jackets, and rattlesnakes. Not exactly your shrinking violet.
She did have one other fear, though: missing the call of God. And she felt called to work at the mission. I wish I could say I felt God had tapped me for the assignment, too, but I didn’t. But I did feel called to be a good husband, so I went.
The Union Gospel Mission sits just beyond the beauty of the restored section of Fort Worth, a city that became a national model for downtown revitalization, thanks to the billionaires who loved it. In that part of town, soaring glass towers pulse with legal intrigue and high finance. Nearby, warmer-looking buildings refaced with brick and brownstone line sidewalks graced with raised iron flowerboxes, manicured trees, and—afterall, it’s Texas—topiaries of longhorn cattle. A cultural district spans three city blocks, housing three world-class museums, the Kimbell, the Amon Carter, and the Modern. A mile east, cafés open onto cobblestone plazas where dazzling urbanites can sip lattes and mineral water, and watch cowboys amble by in their boots and spurs.
Travel farther east, though, and the colors and flora of restoration fade into hopelessness and despair. Drive under the I-30/I-35 interchange, pass beneath an impossible pretzel of freeways called the Mixmaster and through a tunnel that efficiently separates the haves from the unsightly have-nots, and there are no more plazas or monuments or flowerboxes and certainly no more dazzling urbanites. In their place: tumbledown buildings with busted-out glass. Walls scarred with urine stains and graffiti. Gutters choked with beer cans and yellowed newspapers. And vacant lots blanketed in johnsongrass tall enough to conceal a sea of empty vodka bottles and assorted drunks.
Driving out of that tunnel shocks most people into realizing they made a wrong turn. But on a sun-splashed Monday in the early spring of 1998, Deborah and I drove out there on purpose, she propelled by her passion to help the broken and I propelled by a love for my wife.
As we passed out of the dark tunnel onto East Lancaster Street, we witnessed a curious one-way migration, a streaming of people, like tributaries all flowing east into a single, larger river of souls. On our left, a string of shabby men staggered from the johnsongrass that covered a lot. To the right, a parade of women and children in dirty, mismatched clothes shambled along, dragging green garbage bags. One boy, about eight, wore only a man’s undershirt and black socks.
“They’re going to the mission!” Deborah said, beaming, as if the entire ragtag bunch was long-lost TCU alumni and she just couldn’t wait to catch up. I managed some sort of agreeing noise and a thin smile. To me, they looked as if they’d somehow found a portal from the Middle Ages and squeaked through just in time to escape the plague.
When we reached the mission, I bumped our truck over the driveway dip where a brown-trousered fat man dangled a cigarette from his lips and stood guard at a rusted chain-link gate. I offered my friendliest east Texas grin. “We’re here to volunteer,” I told him.
He flashed back a toothless smile, and I swear his cigarette never moved, just clung to his bottom lip as though he’d tacked it there with a stapler.
I had pulled into the parking lot wondering how quickly I’d be able to pull out again, but Deborah suddenly spoke in a tone that you learn to recognize when you’ve loved someone for years, a tone that says, “Hear me on this.”
“Ron, before we go in, I want to tell you something.” She leaned back against her headrest, closed her eyes. “I picture this place differently than it is now. White flowerboxes lining the streets, trees and yellow flowers. Lots of yellow flowers like the pastures at Rocky Top in June.”
Deborah opened her eyes and turned to me with an expectant smile: “Can’t you just see that? No vagrants, no trash in the gutters, just a beautiful place where these people can know God loves them as much as He loves the people on the other side of that tunnel.”
I smiled, kissed my fingertips, and laid them against her cheek. “Yes, I can see that.” And I could. I just didn’t mention that I thought she was getting a little ahead of herself.
She hesitated, then spoke again. “I had a dream about it.”
“About this place?”
Yes,” she said, gazing at me intently. “I saw this place changed. It was beautiful, like I was saying, with the flowers and everything. It was crystal clear, like I was standing right here and it was the future already.”
Inside the mission, we met the director, Don Shisler. In his early fifties and stocky, with a short beard and close-cropped hair, he looked more like a banker or an accountant than a caretaker of the homeless—though I’m not sure what I thought one of those was supposed to look like. Don introduced us to Pam, the volunteer coordinator, who led us on a tour of the common areas, including the kitchen and the chapel.
Both were dirty and windowless, and reeked of body odor, old grease, and other not-quite-identifiable odors that made me want to turn and flee. In the kitchen, we slid like roller skaters along the greasy floor, straight into the sweltering office of a chain-smoking live wire named “Chef Jim.”
Jim Morgan was the kind of fellow who, like any self-respecting Baptist, passes up handshakes and goes straight to hugs. He first wrapped me in a backslapping embrace like an old college pal, then gave Deborah a kinder, gentler squeeze. Thin and graying, he looked sixty-five but might have been younger. He wore checked pants and a chef ’s tunic, surprisingly unstained.
Chef Jim gabbed with us enthusiastically about God, homeless folks, and to a lesser degree, food. Extremely articulate, he used words I’d never heard before, and he didn’t fit my notion of a homeless person, which at the time was someone who was probably uneducated or at least not very smart for having gotten themselves in such a fix in the first place.
As it turned out, Chef Jim was a fellow TCU alumnus whose teenage son had died tragically, an event that landed his wife in a mental institution. Jim, by contrast, numbed his double-dose of grief with rivers of liquor and drugs, which cost him his job as head of catering at an international hotel chain, then his home. Now, he was at the mission plying his trade for room and board while attempting to rebuild his life.
Jim shared his story with self-deprecating humor and without an ounce of blame or self-pity. Then he encouraged us to come on down and dish up supper for the homeless once a week.
“Infect em with love!” he said.
He couldn’t have used a more appropriate word, since infection was probably my greatest fear. Spending hours each week captive in a kitchen that smelled like rotten eggs boiled in Pine-Sol was bad enough. But I fervently did not want to be touched for fear of the germs and parasites I suspected floated in every particle of the air.
Chef Jim and Deborah chatted easily while I mentally balanced the ledger between pleasing my wife and contracting a terminal disease. I had to admit that his idea seemed like an easy way to start—serve the evening meal once a week, and we’d be in and out in three, four hours max. We could minister from behind the rusty steel serving counter, safely separated from the customers. And we could enter and leave through the rear kitchen door, thereby minimizing contact with those likely to hit us up for money. The whole arrangement seemed like a good way for us to fulfill Deborah’s desire to help the homeless without our touching them or letting them touch us.
Her bright laugh pulled my attention back into the room. “I think that sounds great, Jim!” she was saying. “I don’t see any reason why we can’t start tomorrow. In fact, let’s just say you can count on us to serve every Tuesday until you hear otherwise.”
“Praise the Lord!” Chef Jim said, this time giving Deborah a great big Baptist hug. It did not sound great to me, but Deborah had not asked me what I thought. She never did do much by committee.
Driving home, she reflected aloud on how society generally regards the homeless as lazy and foolish, and maybe some were. But she felt there was so much more below that surface image: dysfunction and addiction, yes. But also gifts—like love, faith, and wisdom—that lay hidden like pearls waiting only to be discovered, polished, and set.
That night she dreamed about the mission again—and this time, about a man.
“It was like that verse in Ecclesiastes,” she told me the next morning over breakfast. “A wise man who changes the city. I saw him.”
She gazed at me warily, as if she was afraid I wouldn’t believe her or that I might think she was losing her mind. But I knew she wasn’t the dreams-and-visions, mumbo-jumbo type. I poured fresh coffee into her cup. “You saw the man in your dream?”
“Yes,” she said cautiously. “I saw his face.”
At first the daisy chain of wilted souls who shuffled by for their Tuesday handouts depressed me. The first in line were mamas with their children, most of whom wore stained, ill-fitting clothes and looked like someone had cut their hair with a kitchen knife. Next came a string of women ages eighteen to eighty-five, followed by the “old” men, many younger than I, but with creased and haggard faces that made them look ancient. After that, the younger men, some beaten and sullen, some hiding behind a loud, false cheer meant to mask their shame. These were the ones who wandered the streets all day, then slept at the mission.
Last to eat were the undiluted street people, shabby and pungent. It took me a while to get over their smell, which floated in their wake like the noxious cloud around a chemical plant. The odor seemed to stick to the hairs inside my nose. I swore I could see the hair on some of their heads rustling, jostled by hidden armies of squirming lice. A couple of the men had stumps protruding where an arm or a leg used to be. One long-haired fellow wore a necklace fashioned from several hundred cigarette butts tied together with string. He wore black plastic garbage bags tied to his belt loops. I didn’t want to know what was in them.
On our first day, Deborah, surveying the street people, looked at me and said, “Let’s call them ‘God’s people.’”
I was thinking they looked more like the extras in the movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
Everyone who ate at the mission earned their free meal only after going into the chapel to sit like dead men on hard benches while a white-haired and nearly blind preacher named Brother Bill roared about the saving power of Jesus and the unpleasant consequences reserved for the unredeemed. From the kitchen side of the chapel door—locked to prevent altar-call escapees—I could hear the hellfire-and-brimstone, tough-love message that I agree often cracks hard cases. But it seemed manipulative to me to make the hungry sit like good dogs for their supper. And it did not surprise me that even when Brother Bill split the air with one of his more rousing sermons, not a single soul ever burst through the chapel doors waving their hands and praising Jesus. At least not while we were there.
The men and women we served seemed pleasantly surprised to have a smiling couple with all their teeth serving them supper. I’m sure they thought Deborah was on amphetamines, or possibly running for mayor, as they had likely never seen anyone who smiled and asked after them as much as she did.
“I’m Deborah, and this is my husband, Ron,” she’d say as though welcoming visitors into her home. “What’s your name?” Often, she received blank stares. Some looked at her slack-jawed and goggle-eyed, as though she’d just landed in the parking lot on a spaceship from Mars.
Some fellows answered Deborah, though, and from that day on she was forever telling rough-looking characters with names like Butch and Killer, “Oh, what a pretty name!”
Of the hundreds we served on that first day, only a handful told us what people called them. Deborah wrote down their names: Melvin, Charley, Hal, David, Al, Jimmy—and Tiny, an affable fellow who stood six-foot-five, weighed 500 pounds, and wore Osh-Kosh overalls, fuzzy blue house slippers, and no shirt.
One man, who declined to share his name, did tell us exactly what he thought of our philanthropy. Black, pencil-slim, and looking wildly out of place, he wore a mauve sharkskin suit and a hustler’s tie, both of which he had somehow managed to have sharply pressed. From beneath a cream-colored fedora, he surveyed his domain through dark glasses with a designer insignia stamped in gold. We later found out people called him “Mister.”
That first Tuesday, Mister strode up to me with an aggressive, proprietary air, as though the mission dining hall was his and I was trespassing. “I don’t know who you folks are,” he growled around an unlit filter-tipped cigar, “but you think you’re doin’ us some kind of big favor. Well, tonight when you and your pretty little wife are home in your three-bedroom cottage watchin TV in your recliners thinkin you’re better than us, you just think about this: You miss a coupla paychecks and your wife leaves you and you’ll be homeless—just like us!”
Speaking for myself—on the “favor” part—he was more right than I cared to admit. I didn’t know quite what to say, but when I opened my mouth, out came, “Thank you. Thank you for helping me see homelessness your way.” Unmoved, Mister eyed me like an insect, chomped his cigar, and strode off in disgust.
The encounter unnerved me some, but also gave me a peek at how some of these folks felt. A thought nibbled at the edges of my brain: Maybe my mission wasn’t to analyze them, like some sort of exotic specimens, but just to get to know them.
Meanwhile, no tally of disdain, strange glances, or silence seemed to bother Deborah. She wanted to know and truly serve these people, not merely feel good about herself. That first day, she fell in love with every one of them. At her urging, we memorized the names we learned that day and, that night, prayed for each one, even the obstreperous Mr. Mister, whose mind I suddenly found myself hoping to change.
After a couple of Tuesdays, we noticed that the only time these folks got in a hurry was when they jockeyed for position near the head of their designated section of the serving line. We found out the reason for this: They feared we might ladle out all the good stuff—meat, for example—leaving only soup or stale 7-Eleven sandwiches for those unlucky enough to have been seated at the front of the chapel, farthest from the door. When the stragglers wound up with such low-end fare, the looks on their faces told a sad story: As society’s throwaways, they just accepted the fact that they survived on leftovers and discards.
It seemed to us such a simple thing to prepare a little more food so that the street people at the end of the line could eat as well as those who slept at the mission, so we asked Chef Jim for that favor and he agreed. From then on, it thrilled us to serve the street people the good stuff, like fried chicken, roast beef, and spaghetti and meatballs.
That was the first time I tried to do something to improve the lives of the people Deborah had dragged me along to serve. I hadn’t yet touched any of them, but already they were touching me.
On our third Tuesday of serving, Deborah and I were in the dining hall helping Chef Jim prepare the extra food. Blind Brother Bill had just finished preaching on forgiveness and his congregants were filing in to eat, when we heard the crash of metal and a man roaring in anger near the chapel door. Alarmed, we turned to see about twenty people scatter as a huge, angry black man hurled another chair across the dining hall floor.
“I’m gon’ kill whoever done it!” he screamed. “I’m gon’ kill whoever stole my shoes!” Then he sprayed the air with a volley of curses and advanced into the crowd, roundhousing his fists at anyone stupid enough to get in his way.
It looked for all the world like a gangland brawl was going to explode right there at the chapel door. As I scanned the room for mission personnel to save the day, Deborah leaned in and whispered excitedly in my ear.
“That’s him!”
“What!” I said impatiently. “What are you talking about?”
“That’s the man I saw in my dream! The one who changes the city. That’s him!”
I turned and looked at Deborah as though she had truly gone over the edge. Across the room, a group of mission workers burst in and began pouring soothing words on the raging man’s temper. Grudgingly, he allowed himself to be led away.
“That’s him,” Deborah said again, eyes sparkling. “I think you should try to make friends with him.”
“Me!” My eyes widened in disbelief. “Did you not notice that the man you want me to make friends with just threatened to kill twenty people?”
She laid her hand on my shoulder and tilted her head with a smile. “I really think God’s laid it on my heart that you need to reach out to him.”
“Sorry,” I said, trying hard to ignore the head tilt, “but I wasn’t at that meeting where you heard from God.”
I wasn’t about to invite a killer out for tea. But we did start tracking the man Deborah said she had seen in her dream. He intrigued us both. Probably in his sixties, he looked younger and, somehow, older at the same time. He dressed in rags. A loner, the whites of his eyes had gone an eerie yellow. He never smiled and seldom spoke. Nor did we see anyone acknowledge him. But it wasn’t as though others at the mission ostracized him; it was more like they kept a respectful distance, as one might give wide berth to a pit bull.
On Tuesdays, when the serving line had nearly dried up, he would suddenly appear out of nowhere. With a poker face and no eye contact, he’d indicate that he wanted two plates, claiming one was for an old man upstairs. It was a clear violation of the rules, but we weren’t there to be the mission police. So we served him double and blessed him, to which he responded with a wall of silence. One Tuesday, someone in the kitchen told us they thought his name was Dallas.
Dallas always ate one plate in the dining hall, picking out a spot in a corner far from other human contact. If anyone dared to sit nearby, he got up and moved. While eating, he stared sternly into his plate, chewing slowly with his few good teeth. Never glancing left or right, he methodically scooped the food into his mouth until it was gone. Then he would vanish. I mean that—vanish. He had this strange knack: You rarely saw him come or go. It was more like he was there . . . and then he wasn’t.
Often, driving up to the mission, we’d see Dallas standing alone in a parking lot across the street in the shadow of a Dumpster, his face a stone slate. A couple of times, I overheard people saying this loner was crazy and not to mess with him. Deborah wrote his name in her Bible, next to Ecclesiastes 9:15: “There was found in a certain city a poor man who was wise, and by his wisdom he saved the city.”
Occasionally, Deborah reminded me that she had a feeling God wanted me to be Dallas’s friend. But I wasn’t looking for any new friends, and even if I had been, Dallas from Fort Worth did not fit the profile.
Still, only to please Deborah—God would have to wait—I began a gingerly pursuit of the man.
“Hey there, Dallas,” I’d say whenever I saw him. “How’re you doing today?”
Most of the time, he ignored me. But sometimes, his yellowing eyes skewered me with a look that said, “Leave. Me. Alone.” Which I would have been only too happy to do had it not been for my wife.
After a couple of months of this, someone at the mission heard me call Dallas “Dallas” and laughed at me like I was the town idiot. “His name ain’t Dallas, fool. It’s Denver.”
Well, maybe that’s why he looks disgusted every time I speak to him, I thought, suddenly hopeful.
“Hey, Denver!” I called the very next time I saw him out by the Dumpster. He never even looked at me. The man was about as approachable as an electric cattle fence.