A Letter from Jimmy

I don’t even know how to start this bio thing. I haven’t had to do anything in 30 years or more. I keep trying to start. When you are homeless long enough, time passes and it all just seems to melt together in a blur. I’ve had no real jobs. I’ve never even filed a tax return or had an ID.

It all started in 1981. The parents were going through a divorce, a nasty one. There was a lot of fighting. It got so bad… and family services put me in a juvenile detention center because they couldn’t find foster parents for me. I had never gotten in trouble before, and here I found myself in a detention center.

After six months my social worker came to take me to some kind of meeting or appointment. She stopped at a red light. When I looked around everything was so beautiful. I had spent the last six months locked up in a two-man cell. And there I was, looking at all the colors, smelling the fresh air and feeling the heat in it. I got a cold feeling because we were on our way back to the detention center. I couldn’t stand it. I opened the door and I ran. As I did this, the social worker started yelling at me to come back. I just ran until I saw a house that I was able to dive under and hide. After some time I could hear the social worker yelling for me to come back. I could see the street from my hiding place. She was not alone; she had a police officer with her. After a while I fell asleep, and when I woke up it was dark and I was cold.

I had to survive as a juvenile and I didn’t want family services to get me again. They had locked me up, not because I had done anything wrong, but because they couldn’t find me a foster home at that time. Once there I think that they stopped trying, because it was just easier for them. To this day I still wonder how long they would have left me there if I hadn’t run that day. By 15 I was labeled and I hadn’t committed a single crime. That was the beginning.

I spent the next years hitchhiking around the country. I got to the point where I had hitchhiked to every state except Alaska and Hawaii. I need to tell people that if you build a bridge to Hawaii I’ll be the first person to hitchhike across it.”

Boots is a six-year old chocolate Labrador retriever raised by Jimmy since he was a puppy, and registered him as a service dog. He is my baby. I got two kids I never got to raise and when that happened, he was the only thing that kept me sane. He never asked for anything, only a little love.