Gunter and Taylor: A life together on the streets

Gunter Rodrigues and Taylor Trowbridge are tucked into the recessed entryway of a vacant building at Montana Avenue and North 28th Street.

If you’re used to sleeping on the streets, this isn’t a bad place to be. The entryway is a long rectangle, maybe 15 feet long and 6 feet wide, with brick walls on two sides to stop the wind. Over the concrete there is a strip of well-worn outdoor carpet, a sliver of warmth and comfort.

They’ve got three or four blankets under them and three more over them. A shopping cart holds most of their worldly possessions, mostly clothes and food, wrapped in plastic grocery bags. Taylor also has a walker, which holds a few more things — another sweatshirt, a stuffed animal, a snack or two.

Under the blankets is their dachshund, Chewy. He tends to growl when somebody walks by. If it’s another dog or a child, he’s more likely to stick his head out of the blankets and commence barking.

I sought them out because I had seen them several times a day for many days, bundled up on their little piece of the streets, usually lying down with the covers pulled over them, sometimes sitting up, one of them holding Chewy, looking at the passing scene. Once I saw them sitting 20 feet from their belongings, leaning against a concrete planter and soaking up some sun.

I wondered, as you can hardly help doing, how they had reached this point in their lives, what they did all day, how they got through our brutal Montana winters.

And as usually happens, what I learned was a bit disjointed and not entirely clear. They didn’t mind talking about their life on the streets, but they were also eager to talk about what they had done with their lives before their lives came to this. They told stories that were sometimes contradictory, full of jumbled chronology, often wildly digressive, then suddenly piercing or poignant.

She is 64, he is 62. He’s originally from Hawaii, the son of a military man who was always moving. Taylor’s from Miles City. Her husband died 16 years ago in Great Falls and she’s been with Gunter ever since.

They said they’re “just friends.” Gunter knew her husband and told him before he died that he’d take care of her. Taylor’s husband made Gunter promise he wouldn’t marry her. During the years Gunter and Taylor have been together, they figure they’ve spent a total of eight years on the street, off and on.

Taylor said they came to Billings in 2002 because her doctor sent her here for thyroid treatment. The surgery nearly killed her, she said, and since then she’s had both knees replaced and metal plates implanted in both hands to treat ganglion cysts. She’ll show you her surgery scars.

She said she also has diabetes. She unwraps one of her plastic grocery bags to reveal a couple dozen or so paper bags, each containing a bottle of medication. She doesn’t dare drink, what with taking all those drugs, she said, and Gunter said he swore off booze in 1972, after going on a phenomenal bender that left him unconscious for a week and a half. That’s what he says.

They’ve lived in different places on the South Side but lost their latest apartment, they said, because a new management company stopped treating the place for bedbugs, then evicted them when they had bedbugs in their unit. That was three weeks ago, when they took up their position on Montana Avenue.

Gunter said he was in the Air Force in Great Falls from 1972 to 1975 and later spent 12 years in the Air National Guard and the Army Reserves. He said he didn’t qualify for a pension but has all his medical needs taken care of by the Veterans Administrations.

And his time in the service, including a cold, cold stint on the prairies of North Dakota, toughened him up.

“To me, this is second nature,” he said of living on the street. “I learned a lot in the military. I can and I will survive on the street.”

He was a truck driver for many years, too. Asked why he quit, all he said was, “I got tired of hauling haz-mat materials up and down the highway.”

But he loves talking about driving trucks, about learning the ins and outs of the job from an old-school trucker. Later, when he had to attend a truck-driving school to qualify for a certain job, he said, he astounded the class and the teacher with his understanding of how to calculate his fuel-to-weight ratio.

Taylor talks about her proficiency in the martial arts, at which she was a natural. She also spoke with great fondness of the five years she and her husband spent in Calgary, Alberta. One year, at the Calgary Stampede rodeo, she was one number away from winning the grand prize in the Stampede lottery. The prize, she said, was a “dream home.”

These days she’ll settle for the Lazy K-T Motel on First Avenue North. Once every couple of weeks, the Salvation Army puts them up for three nights in a row at the Lazy K-T.

“It’s not the greatest in the world,” Gunter said, “but it’s a roof over your head.”

They don’t stay in the Women’s and Family Shelter and they avoid the Men’s Shelter as much as they can. They talk about mean workers, or other homeless people who harass them, and they complain of an ornery nurse at another agency they frequent.

Whatever the cause, they’re fine with staying on the street. They go to the St. Vincent de Paul charity office on Montana Avenue, a block and a half east of where they’re staying, for coffee in the morning, every day but Sunday, when it’s closed. They usually spend most of the day there, where they’re fed lunch and can use the washer and dryer for free.

They get their clothing from Family Service Inc., where everything, they said, whether it’s a pair of socks, a shirt, a jacket or a pair of shoes, is 25 cents. They also use the Hub, the Mental Health Center’s drop-in location on North 27th Street, and the Crisis Center, on North 30th.

The Crisis Center is their last resort on the coldest nights of winter. On rare occasions they can sleep on one of the few beds available. Otherwise, street people take turns resting on the chairs in the tiny little lobby, then going outside for a while to let others warm up.

Because of her health, Gunter said, he usually gives Taylor his turn inside, so she doesn’t have to leave the lobby.

Most of the time, though, they stay on the street even on very cold nights. As long as you can get out of the wind and can gather up enough blankets, they said, you’ll make it.

They said they never panhandle. Taylor gets a Social Security check — Gunter hopes to start receiving Social Security soon — and they both get food stamps. They spoke scornfully of Taylor’s granddaughter, who they said panhandles every day with her boyfriend.

Other street people will occasionally hit them up for money, they said, but they don’t give them any. Gunter said he told one man, “I’m not gonna give you a can of beer so you can get stupid and pick fights with people.”

They don’t feel threatened, they said, but one drunk woman fell on the knee Taylor recently had replaced, and it hurt bad. They mostly keep to themselves, and Chewy, whom they appear to adore.

“I know most of them by face,” Gunter said of other street people, “very few of them by name.”

I asked them what they thought of a plan being talked about by city officials, of building a one-stop campus where homeless people could get shelter, food, medical and psychological services, help with benefits and even job training. Plans for a summit on the subject are in the works for this fall. They didn’t answer the question straight on, but Gunter basically advocated the same thing at the end of a long speech.

He said “these college students” shouldn’t just be spending a night in “cardboard cities” to learn about homelessness. They should live on the street for two months with just $40, he said.

“And don’t even let them have a cell phone,” Taylor said, warming to the idea.

“Oh, let ’em have a cell phone, with limited access to certain people,” Gunter said.

“Even some of the local politicians — let them try it,” Gunter continued. “Give them a firsthand chance to see what it’s like to be a street person instead of making all kinds of rules for people that are homeless.”

That’s when he said what the city needs is a single center for homeless people, open 24 hours a day, with none of the requirements — sobriety, attendance at religious services, etc. — that keep some people out of other agencies.

“See,” he said, “these are some of the ideas that pop into my head. But tell it to these city politicians and they just turn a blind eye.”

I asked Gunter and Taylor what the worst thing was about living on the street. I thought it might be the cold, or maybe the concrete. But no.

“Boredom,” Gunter said. “Just straight boredom.”

Comments

comments