Homeless in America: Hope amid Hopelessness

Robin Reilly picked at her chef’s salad, frowning at the sight of the wilted lettuce, Every so often, she fiddled with it with her fork, only to gently place down her silverware and dismiss it with her hand. Lou sat across from her, taking big, mouth-sized bites out of roast beef that was piled two-inches thick between two slices of rye bread. Reilly managed a thin smile as she watched Lou eat and smudge a drop of mayonnaise on each corner of his lips.

Seeing Lou eat, or do anything that’s good for his body, always boosts Reilly’s morale. She has to coral him to go to the Heritage Diner in Hackensack, where she takes people who are homeless - or, like Lou, formerly homeless - and buy them a good meal. Unlike a lot of people who know Reilly, Lou rarely goes hungry. His belly is too full with cooking wine, but not what used to be his favorite drink, mouthwash. He drank Listerine because, like the wine, it was cheap, but it made his moods swing so much that he picked fights with people a the bus terminal, at homeless shelters and sometimes even with Reilly. He’d yell at her, curse at her, and once threw a punch at her, even though Reilly is doing everything to keep Lou alive. Drinking mouthwash earned him the nickname, “Listerine Lou.”

But on this February day, Lou felt emboldened. “Today’s been a very good day,” Reilly assured him. “We got some very good news.” The doctor said Lou’s PSA count was down from around 60 to 4. The prostate cancer that has already spread to his bones and lymph nodes appears to have finally slowed, thanks to hormone therapy. He’s 58, and recently got into subsidized housing after two decades on the streets. But he knows he doesn’t have much time left. The possibility of adding even a year to his life expectancy, after suffering for years as an unemployed alcoholic, is the best news he’s had in decades.

Reilly always has Lou’s back. Even when he becomes the Hackensack version of Mr. Hyde, Reilly provides a comfort zone for Lou when everybody else cuts and runs. She transports him to Bergen Regional Medical Center in Paramus for checkups. When Lou, who declined to give his last name, used to spend his nights sleeping in rental-trailers at the Budget Rental Car on River Street, Reilly always got him clothes and a blanket. Recently, she bought him a Yankees when cancer treatment took away clumps of his hair.

This is Reilly’s daily cause, the kinds of things she does for the hundreds of others she’s pulled out of gutters, bushes alongside the railroad tracks and, on occasion, picked them up from jail before transporting them to the nearest shelter. Seeing them achieve any kind of success – whether it’s someone finding housing, or someone who just survived a medical nightmare – turns Reilly, 66, into a bubbly school girl. She’ll talk fast and gleefully whenever, on the rare occasion, someone among the hundreds she’s helped has found a way to move off the streets and move away from the booze.

“I just took a man out of the street, and then I took him to the bank, I took out money from the ATM. Then I took him to a hotel,” Reilly said. “We’re all about doing God’s work through our actions.”

But as excited as she was for Lou, and the many others she’s helped, Reilly is finally tired. Not tired of her work. Saving people from cold weather that leaves them frostbitten never really gets old. She’s just tired of getting jerked around by the city, the police and even other homeless advocates who, she believes, don’t consider her work legitimate. She’s tired of people calling her “a homeless advocate without a home.” She knows its true, and she doesn’t blame people for saying it. She’s just he’s tired of fighting a system that refuses to bend.

Every homeless shelter or drop-in center she’s operated in Hackensack, N.J. over the past decade has been closed because of code violations, or because she's had run-ins with city officials, police, religious clergy and other homeless advocates. Every job she’s had dealing with homeless advocates she’s left in frustration because, from her point of view, they never do the job good enough. Sometimes, she thinks just like the people she pulls out of the alleys and gutters and tries to help. Don’t get your hopes too high, she says, because the disappointment will be worse.

The latest eviction came in December at the 300-year-old First Reformed Church in Hackensack, where she ran a three-day-a-week homeless outreach center. She thought that was it. This would be the end of yet another stint as an “advocate without a home.” She had a place for people who are usually too drunk, mentally ill or drugged up to get into the local county shelters. Many of them don’t last long in life, unless Reilly is there with her safety net of care.

Months back, she prayed to God, hoping there would be one more place that would give her chance. The church came calling, and Reilly saw this as a sign from God that this was her last, but best possible resort.

Then she threw a Christmas party for the homeless and, according to the church, didn’t follow the rules. She served food before the pre-dinner sermon was finished, and then protested loudly when the church made the group of about 100 hungry people and staff members stop eating and serving. The eviction came swiftly; the church, which was already under pressure from city officials who have wanted her out of Hackensack for decades, ordered her to leave in a week.

Now she wonders if God has another plan for her, whatever that is. Maybe God wants her in the streets, being with the homeless and away from the bureaucrats, the politicians and the others who, she believes, stand in her way. She’ll now pursue this mission with the same vigor she’s had before – even if that energy, combined with a strong will that often becomes stubbornness, is what always gets her into trouble.

“I get tired of fighting the system. I get tired of fighting everybody because it’s not going to get better,” she said while still fiddling with her lettuce. “But, what do you all day? Knit? What else am I going to do?”

Just weeks ago, she found a long-time member of her homeless family, John, partially “frozen” and literally “stuck” to a sidewalk, she said. His body temperature was around 76 degrees.

John, whose last name Reilly did not want to divulge, has been been in the street for decades. He's been on life support systems. He’s had episodes where he’s excreted nothing but blood. Every time, Robin’s been there to take him to the hospital, usually to the Hackensack University Medical Center. Each time, he’s emerged just days later, alive and as well as he could be, before returning to the streets, the booze and the heroin that eventually brings him back to the hospital.

But with a sub-zero wind chill turning Hackensack’s streets into lifeless alleys, Reilly thought, for the first time, that John's hard-scrabble life was finally over. She took his pulse, and couldn’t feel one. He could have been dead, but he was too cold, so it was impossible to tell. She called for an ambulance and got him to a hospital, as she always did.

Within a week, he was sitting up in his bed and talking. Now he’s out again, walking the streets and surviving as he always does, but staying within arms reach of Reilly.

“I don’t want to get a call anymore, saying, ‘We’ve got this frozen guy. Can you come out here?’” she said. “I don’t want any more calls like that.”

Reilly’s convinced that if she wasn’t out there scouting the neighborhoods, looking for people lying along railroad tracks, she wouldn’t have found him. One of the luxuries of working out of her car is that she can be a one-person search-and-rescue team. She knows where all the hiding spots are. Besides the homeless themselves, she’s also the first person people go to – including those who give her a hard time, like the police – when they want to get help for someone, or themselves.

In the months prior to moving to the church, Reilly was doing the same thing, riding around Hackensack, dishing out food and water and giving homeless people a chance to cool off from the heat by sitting in her air-conditioned car. She had been thrown out of her State Street outreach center in June because, according to city officials, she was breaking the law by feeding homeless people on site. They were also “closing their eyes” on her couch, police said – the same couch she’s dragged with her wherever she’s gone to set up her advocacy work.

To Reilly, this was perhaps the most traumatic closure she’s had to deal with. She had been at the State Street site in Hackensack for seven years, by far her longest stint. Usually, she lasts anywhere from three months to no more than a couple years at any given place.

For those three months after her State Street departure, she did what she's doing now, which is what she's always done between stints. One of her “lieutenants” – a sixtysomething man with a dark blue knit cap and a scraggly gray beard known only by the name of “Coach” – scouts the neighborhoods carrying a cell phone, looking for people who were wasting away. He’ll call her, and then she’ll drive 10 miles from her Oradell home, and find them. Then she usually drives somebody who was on their deathbed to the hospital, or calls and ambulance, to get medical assistance.

Since getting thrown out of State Street last year, most of them have lived; some of them haven’t. In the last year alone, four died before Reilly was able to get to them and give them assistance. In the meantime, Reilly has lost weight. “I’m sick – sick with worry,” she said last year, about 40 pounds lighter than she as three years ago. She's never lost this much weight before.

The First Reformed Church gave her fourth place in a decade, and granted the space that opened to the public on Oct. 23. It was the kind of place she had been kicked out of before – an old church that’s part of the city establishment, where some members have been attending for 90 years.

It’s also the kind of place that’s given Reilly a chance in the past, such a church-based homeless shelter called “Peter’s Place” that employed Reilly as a homeless advocate nearly a decade ago. Usually, at these types of places, Reilly’s self-described demands to put the homeless first run afoul with management, she said, and she finds herself out in the street again, pulling the homeless into her car.

Before State Street, she operated out of a 12-by-20-foot office at the nearby Salvation Army and provided assistance to more than 1,100 homeless and poor people. The place was only temporary, but she attracted the same of legion of followers who always come to cry on her shoulder or sleep on her couch. They're the same people who have stuck with her since she was an administrator at Peter’s Place. In just a few months at the Salvation Army, she referred hundreds of clients to hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and employers.

"I'm not working for anyone right now. I'm working for God," Reilly said in 2001 as she packed furniture, a sewing machine, and cans of food and prepared to move. Several homeless people watched, and they hugged her when she grew misty-eyed.
Before Peter’s Place, Reilly was an interior designer who decorated medical facilities. Back then, she dabbled in homeless causes, and she was so moved by the people she met that she gave up her lucrative career to become a full-time advocate.
When she worked at the Hackensack University Medical Center, she had an opportunity to see the problem, for the first time, up close.

She saw people with missing toes and thumbs hauled in on stretches, quivering after spending the night in below-freezing temperatures. She saw them arrive with no one standing by them as they were hauled off to the ambulances or wheeled in on wheelchairs.

It brought out her aggressive spirit that has helped her prevail for so many years. It brought out a side of her that is only witnessed by people who stand in her way – such as Bergen County Community Action Program, the county homeless agency that she calls “a toothless bureaucracy” and, in her view, doesn’t do enough to help.

Reilly doesn’t worry about her image, either, because she’s more than an advocate, she says. She’s a diplomat and an ambassador for a homeless population that numbers in the hundreds in Hackensack, largely because the city is the Bergen County seat and, therefore, offers county-sponsored welfare services. In public, she’s shown herself to be as sweet-as-pie, one who is not afraid to curry favor with the media and present herself as maybe the one person who actually makes an effort to take care of the homeless.

Mostly, though, Reilly is a self-described “rebel,” and that’s what she’s most proud of. Rebels, she believes, make the best advocates. They don’t worry about what could happen to them, she says, because that kind of worry only impedes progress. They get things done because they’re not afraid of pissing people off, she says, and she’s done a lot of that.

Some of the homeless and poor, as a result, consider Reilly their guardian angel. Unlike the local county homeless agency, the Bergen County Community Action Program, she takes people who are in every condition – drug addicted, alcoholic or on the brink of death.

Many of them, like Lou, had decent paying jobs at respectable companies. Lou worked for Bell Telephone when drinking and the early 1990s recession threw him out in the streets. For nearly two decades, he’s been licking his wounds over this. Reilly was his only safety net. “This was supposed to be a permanent job,” said Lou, who worked at Bell as a technician. “I thought I’d be there forever. I thought I’d be getting the 40-year pin by now.”

Hackensack city officials, the First Reformed Church and representatives of Bergen County CAP declined to respond to this article. But they’ve spoken publicly before, saying they consider Reilly an “enabler” who allows the homeless to continue their self-destructive ways without giving them a healthy alternative. They also blame her for breaking rules too often – as the First Reformed Church claimed when they threw out in December after just two months.

While she has plenty of detractors, she has hundreds of supporters. Many of them are homeless, obviously, who have followed her around for years, and they know that wherever she is, their chances of getting food, guidance and a sense of morality have improved.

Some of the people she’s cared for have died, but many more have lived. At the First Reformed Church, she hoped to save hundreds more – at least that many – as long as she could stay on her feet, maintain good health and keep doing what she’s famous for in the Bergen County, N.J. area.

“’You’re going to put us on the map,’ they told me," Reilly said. "‘You’re going to put us on the map. They were not ready for the city. They said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ I said, ‘Maybe you should worry.’"

At the October event, Reilly faced about 75 other homeless advocates and people without a home – many of them mentally ill or substance abusers, but nearly all of whom were refused care at the county homeless shelters. The event was peaceful; but it also attracted publicity in the local media.

Just days later, city code officials warned the church that Reilly was breaking the law, she said. Reilly claims the city’s call for upgrades seemed impossible to satisfy and seemed to have nothing to do with homeless outreach – such as installing a new sprinkler system.

Reilly began to worry again. The church, however, told her not to. “They said, ‘We’ve been in this community forever. We know how to handle them,’” she said.
But over the next two months, Reilly heard nothing about the city’s gripes, which made her worry even more. She asked the church again, and got the same response. Not to worry.

The end came on Dec. 21, when Reilly treated the homeless and the poor to a Sunday Christmas dinner. Reilly got upset when the guests had to sit through a 20-minute sermon before being served Christmas dinner. The Rev. Timothy Ippolito, pastor at Faith Reformed Church in Lodi, was quoted in The Record of Bergen County, N.J. as saying that the worship service was “first and foremost for the community of Hackensack" and feeding for the "economically disadvantaged" would begin after the sermon. At one point during the service, the newspaper said, the food servers were told to "drop" their utensils. Reilly said Ippolito threatened to call police if she interfered with the sermon, an accusation Ippolito later acknowledged, according to the article.

Reilly "sabotaged the agenda," said Ippolito, adding that he gave Reilly an "itinerary" for the night before the gathering and described Reilly as "another example of someone who likes to buck the system," he was quoted as saying in The Record.

Tempers flared between a church member and one of Reilly’s lieutenants. Reilly interceded, and said the sermon was interfering with what God intended. “You’re of here, Robin,” the man said, according to Reilly and others who were within earshot. A week later, Reilly was packed up and gone.

Outside of her car, her favorite place now is the Heritage Diner, where she’s treated countless homeless over the years to lunch and dinner. There, she gets a chance to talk to them without worrying about whether she’s violating a city code, or if she has enough time to pack her belongings and move to another place. Over wilted lettuce, she gets personal one-on-one time that’s almost impossible to get when she’s running a busy shelter or outreach center, and catering to the needs of hundreds of people who are tired, cold, hungry and wet.

She still hopes that she someday, finally, will find a place that won’t kick her out. She dreams of just the perfect place, with the perfect city administration, police department and local support to make it work.

For now, however, chatting about PSA counts over wilted lettuce will suffice.

“Nobody ever knows how to get rid of me,” she said.