In Memory of Adam Hippa
(July 18, 2007)

            You wouldn’t have liked Adam.  Not the way he was when I first met him.  He didn’t have the skills to make himself likeable.  He was loud.  He was crude.  He wasn’t good at imagining himself in anyone else’s place.  He was prickly about how others treated him, expecting the worst and behaving in ways that often elicited it from others.

            Adam’s judgment was notoriously poor.  He could jump into a neutral situation and turn into a bad one.  Recognizing that the situation was deteriorating, he could transform a problem into a disaster.  He didn’t like to be told what to do.  Long experience had convinced him that when he tried to do what others told him to do it would not work.  Adam figured it would save the aggravation of trying to please others if he just ignored their advice and flew into a rage early on.  After all, it achieved the same dead end.

            I distinctly remember that the first time I met Adam he was dressed in dirty clothes and he smelled bad.  Over time in bits and pieces he told me that he had been abandoned at an early age by his mother to the not-so-tender mercies of foster care.  He never knew with absolute certainty who his father was or if his father knew of his existence.  He was forced to attend school in a school district that did not go out of its way to teach so he never learned to read or write.  Then he was incarcerated for a lengthy stint in prison for killing a man.

            The killing involved some degree of self defense – two men fighting over a gun – and it might have gone better for Adam if he had immediately called the police, leaving everything exactly in place.  Adam had a “better idea.”  He tried to manipulate the evidence to enhance his claim of self-defense.  Enough of the crime scene remained uncontaminated to convince the investigators and later the court that he did not set out to commit murder.  So he did years of hard time in prison, but he did not face execution.

            After his release Adam was accepted into a series of programs and placements, none of which would take him back after he left in a huff or got kicked out.  He could not make a go of businesses on his own.  He never worked for someone else longer than a month.  When I met him he was living under a bridge because he did not like complying with the minimal rules at shelters.  He admitted having a court case pending for possession and the intension to sell of drugs.  He denied intending to sell drugs.

            You wouldn’t have liked him back then.  I didn’t.  Luckily, there was no requirement for me to like the man.  I just needed to work with him in therapy to see if we could improve his life situation.  I offered my minimal baseline respect of one human being toward another.  I acknowledged the reality of his difficult life.  He surprised me.  He came back.

            Understand that offering an appointment at 2:00 PM next Wednesday to a homeless person is like offering him or her an appointment at Windlass o’clock on Saint Sebastian’s Eve.  It is very nearly meaningless to a person whose life is ruled by the search for the next meal and wondering where it will be safe to sleep for one more night.  Adam came back.  He came back on time.  He came back regularly.  He worked on his life.

            I listened to his anger, pain and despair.  I referred him for case management to help him find a place to live and to help him get food on a regular basis.  When he was rejected as being hopeless, I went to the case management meeting where I persuaded the psychiatrist he qualified for services over the objections of the program director.  The director saw him as a “predator” who would take up services that could be directed to someone who might actually benefit from them.  Adam and sticklers for the rules have never meshed well.  Adam had two excellent case managers that didn’t think of him as hopeless.  They devoted many hours of service to getting him food stamps and, after months of trying they got him off the streets into a series of always temporary places.  Even though none of the housing situations lasted and there were few options available for someone with Adam’s history, they refused to give up looking.  They remained staunch allies throughout.

            Offered minimal respect and acceptance, Adam tried to not mess up.  He started clearing up his legal problems faster than accumulating them, but it was not easy.  On a cold sleet-filled day while he was still homeless he got arrested for repeatedly going into a Minimart to get out of the weather.  He was not the sort of person who inspired trust in the staff or customers.  He could not escape notice.  He was too proud to beg.

            Once when sleeping under a bridge out of the snow he was attacked by other homeless men with clubs who stole his warm coat and all his money (less than three dollars).  He regained consciousness, shivering under a thin blanket, while being wheeled on a gurney through the emergency room.  He said he knew who attacked him and that he could track them down one at a time and “make them wish they’d never messed with me.”  He could have, but he never did.  He turned his back on revenge.

            After the first off-the-street placement collapsed, he became a live-in caretaker for his aging grandparents.  He was on call twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.  In return he got a place to stay and meals.  When he tried to drive his grandparents’ car out of the garage to wash it he drove it through the lowered garage door.  He insisted he knew how to drive a car, but he admitted did not have a license and he had not driven for several years.  Adam always maintained that he could drive a car.  I always agreed, adding mentally, “through a garage door.”

            Adam had a higher opinion of his abilities than others around him.  He was more than a little bit vain.  He asked me to see if I could find someone who would donate a computer and a printer to him even though he could not read or write.

            With the help of an attorney he applied for disability.  It took more than a year, but he eventually got it.  He told me that he intimidated the evaluator who asked him to talk about, “stupid pictures and inkblots.”  He said, “I looked at them and told him, ‘This looks like you.’  After one or two more he stopped asking me.”  He was upset at his inability to answer questions on the intelligence test until we discussed the difference between “book smarts” and “street smarts.”  He did not see himself as unintelligent.  We agreed that he knew a lot more about how to survive on the streets than I ever would.

            His happiest memories of childhood included being loved and accepted by his grandparents.  One fairly typical memory was when he stole and ate a whole cherry pie his grandmother had told him to leave alone.  He recalled being “beat” by his grandfather, which he considered fair.  (He said he was usually beaten for things he didn’t do.)  He said he remembered that even as he was being punished, it was clear to him that he was loved.  As a young man, he told me one of his favorite memories was walking into a biker bar as part of a racially-mixed group.  When the group was refused service they started “a riot” taking on first the bikers and then the police.  He said, “I laughed all the way to jail.”

            Once he knew he could count on having food, clothing, shelter and a small income, Adam relaxed enough to start flirting with the female staff members and joking with the few people who had proven to be trustworthy.  He could be a lively, entertaining companion.  If you’d met him then, you would have liked him.

            Adam tried to reach out to others.  He was really lousy at it.  At least twice, he offered shelter to homeless men who robbed him.  Another man he tried to befriend ended up convinced that Adam was after his girlfriend.  Adam had to get a restraining order against the man and his girlfriend.  He occasionally cared for children whose long-absent, drug-addicted mother alleged that Adam abused them.  The charges against him were investigated and found to be without merit.  He stopped caring for the children, which hurt him deeply.  He loaned what little money he had to people who did not re-pay him.

            Someone found him dead of “natural causes” in his new temporary apartment.  By the time he was found, he had been dead for a couple of days.  His wallet was missing and his easily-sold possessions were gone.

            You wouldn’t have liked Adam at first.  I didn’t.  It took me a lot of time and effort before I managed to.  I came to admire his determination to improve his life.  Having no transportation, he worked harder at getting himself to appointments than most people work all day long at their jobs.  Despite all the betrayals in his life, given minimal support and respect, he responded with trust.  He lived with zest and abandon.  He lived in an environment drenched in violence.  He soaked it up, but he did not respond in kind.  When his efforts at helping others blew up in his face, he wiped off the blood and never stopped trying.

            Adam was given little to work with throughout his life.  If you gathered together all the people in his life who truly cared about him, they could fit into one church pew with plenty of room to spare.  He was institutionalized and forgotten for the great majority of his short life.  He was exposed to violence, neglect and indifference almost without ceasing.  And yet, in the end, he used what little he had to make the world a kinder place than it had ever been for him.

            I liked Adam, eventually.  More than that I respected and admired him.  I will miss him.

CLICK HERE to go back to the menu at the top of this page.