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When you're homeless and it's Olympics time, too . . .
By Doug Robinson
Deseret News columnist
Jonathan is hanging out on the streets of Salt Lake City, warming in the sunshine just a couple of blocks from the Olympic medals plaza. There are large scabs on his hands, holes in his legs and scrapes on his face, and that's just the damage we can see.
Only a few hours earlier, he shot up heroin. He rose from his cot at 4 a.m. at one of the local shelters, stepped into the bathroom and stuck a needle into a vein on the inside of his thigh. Within seconds the old euphoria washed over him again.
"I know what I have to do, but it's still so seductive and so available, even with all these cops around," he says.
There are dozens more just like him here on Rio Grande Avenue, on the west side of town and the periphery of the Olympics, which is exactly where they are wanted.
Normally, the shelters force their guests to get up and get out early in the morning, but during the Olympics they are allowed to stay all day.
"They just don't want us on the streets," says Jonathan. "But after the Olympics they'll go right back to the same old, same old. They just want to put on a good face for the world. Salt Lake is a child going through the pains of adolescence. Hey, that's a pretty good line."
The shelters are doing a brisk business. Some of the homeless were forced to the streets when their hotels raised their rates from about $160 a week to $150 per night to capitalize on the Olympics. Some of them spent the first night on the street before they learned about the shelter.
Drunks and addicts and trouble makers are not usually tolerated in the shelters, but these are different times. Jonathan struggles to sleep because of the drunks and the fighting and the hacking coughs. He invites you to look inside his ear where something white is pressed deep into the opening.
"Toilet paper," he says. "I've got to dig that out some time."
Four years ago, Jonathan worked in securities. He wore Cole Hauns on his feet and a pin-point oxford every day. He helped put together million-dollar deals. Then a three-year sober streak ended. It took him four months to blow everything he owned. He is 45 — "a child of the bonghead era."
In his youth, he had a theater scholarship at the University of Utah. He once performed in "Saturday's Warrior" at Pioneer Valley Playhouse. He had a wife in there somewhere, too. And always a drug problem.
"I was clean for 10 months, then I relapsed a couple of weeks ago," he says. "It doesn't take long to get back in the quagmire."
Jonathan tells you that the dealers have been forced out of Pioneer Park during the Olympics, which has converted it into a transportation hub.
"Now dealers are everywhere over here, instead of the park," he says. He spends his days "doing what I have to do to get drugs." He asks a reporter for some money. When the reporter hesitates, he says, "If you don't give it to me, I'll just steal something somewhere."
At one point a man named Jonathan Farmouth — a former inmate and recovering drug addict — shows up. He has come to find Jonathan, an old friend. Farmouth hands him a cell phone.
"A member of our church wants to talk to him," he explains. "We're all worried about him."
Jonathan needs treatment and psychiatric help — those large red scabs on the back of his hands are self-inflicted. He knows he needs help, but there is always the allure of drugs.
"Do I want to turn it around?" he says. "There's not a person on the street who's not miserable."
All around him, the trappings of the Olympics are visible — booths and mural-covered buildings and venues — but on Rio Grande it's just another day.
"I saw the torch, and I got as excited as anyone else," says Jonathan. "I touched the thing."
Jonathan accepted some money and walked off in search of his next high.
E-MAIL: drob@desnews.com
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February 12, 2002
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