;)
Darren Riehl
I ASKED PAUL FOR A SHOW DURING A ROUND, after I politely turned down an offer to play. He had promised there would be one and that I would want to write about it. He was right. Twice. On the 8th hole, a par-5, Paul went all Hollywood on me, pounding his tee shot 250 yards down the middle of the fairway before hitting his second shot nearly as far, placing his ball near the green. I hollered after each. He smiled. He whispered that he didn’t know how he had done that.
He loves a saying he’s picked up, though.
“I’ll pray that my next shot is my best shot,” he said.
“I can’t stay with that hole in one.
“I got to move on.”
Before coming to the shelter, Paul lived in a rental car. A home on wheels, but he felt he was spinning only backward. Paul, though, once rented a Mercedes, because, well, just because. “I was homeless, sleeping in a Mercedes,” he said. He used to sneak into a multistory parking garage about a mile from Niagara Gospel, find a spot isolated enough and sleep. Sometimes, he would just think. Mornings were good for that. As far as he knew, no one seemed to mind a 6-foot-2, 50-something man either dreaming or daydreaming while they parked before going to work at the hospital across the street.
“I didn’t want to startle the women because there’s a lot of women working here,” he said.
Before coming to the shelter, all the residents lived somewhere. But somewhere shrunk, either physically or psychologically. Often both. Paul had owned a home, with a porch where he liked to smoke. One night, while checking the mail, he felt an envelope on the side of the mailbox. It was addressed to his wife and written by a co-worker. Paul opened it and found evidence of his wife’s affair. He had also held a job, as an environmental inspector, until the effects of an accident crippled his neck and deadened his legs. He was let go. Eventually, he was living in cars.
Before coming to the shelter, no one wants to come to the shelter. John, the mission’s 35-year-old director, has been spit on at check-in. The new arrivals’ thoughts are bleak. How did I get here? What if even here doesn’t work?
And there’s this, which some residents started asking last July — ironically, given the perception that golf can drive a person mad:
Why am I holding a golf club?
John had been an Army sniper who was so precise with a rifle that he said his beloved Bills had asked if he would patrol their stadium’s roof during games. (He declined, choosing to watch games instead.) His only experience with golf had come while serving, when he had ridden golf carts around courses while stationed in Hawaii. But then he took a lesson about a year and a half ago in the PGA Hope program for veterans and saw all of the things that golf lifers wax romantic about. He wondered whether the game might work as part of a shelter rehab program. He has seen the effects himself.
;)
Nick Piastowski
A FEW DAYS AFTER THE CRIES OUTSIDE NIAGARA GOSPEL, another resident, Renard, was on the driving range. He commanded me, the reporter, to swing. I said no. He asked again. No. He’s the story, I told him, and, Renard will tell you, it’s remarkable that he’s still around to tell it.
He wears reminders. Four bullet holes. A tattoo that reads “Thug Life” on his right forearm. He had been in gangs in the ’90s, when “the crack epidemic was out there.” He once was shot over a drug deal gone bad. Family members begged him to leave, but the money and the lifestyle felt fast, and his name had gotten out. “A bad guy,” he said. A night working at a restaurant also nearly killed him. At the end of a shift, his boss made drinks, and while driving home in his ’79 Cadillac, Renard passed out before somehow waking up just in time to swerve out of the way of a few kids, ramming his car into a pole instead. He broke multiple bones and lost teeth.
The accident might have scared him straight, but it didn’t.
“I went right back out to the street,” Renard said. “Kept calling my name.”
Today, he is sure that most everyone he ran with is dead. For stretches as he got older, he lived in and out of rooms and shelters. Last September, Renard was staying with his daughter in Ohio, not long after his son had been killed at a party. His parents had also died; he came to his mom’s funeral wearing a shoe with one of his toes sticking out. “That’s pretty low,” he said. He had stopped drinking, but he craved a bottle. He said he felt like giving up. On his phone, he typed “rehab homeless shelters.” Then he boarded a Greyhound for Niagara Falls, where he had never been.
He now has found some peace, which he had never really had, at another place he had never been: a golf course. His game is still developing, but you can tell that mishits don’t bother him. As part of a skills challenge during one round, he relished outdriving some of his competitors — with a putter. At Niagara Gospel, he now manages the floor below where I stayed. Golf, Renard said, “did something” to him. “I told Frank that I’m a football player,” Renard said. “And he groomed me into a golfer. But changed a lot in me. Peace, the whole atmosphere of golfing, is wonderful, man.”
Perhaps more than anyone else at the shelter, Renard could relate to the men shouting outside on Monday night. He’s been there.
Stick the knife in me!
I want to f—ing die!
Golf is only a small piece of the club members’ lives, and all of whatever brought them there is ever present. John is optimistic but not naive. A game can’t possibly alleviate every deep-rooted issue. There will be problems. What happens when they leave the shelter, a day that will come for everyone? “What happens to someone when they first become homeless are several things, but then the longer someone is homeless, those things all compound,” said Aykanian, the researcher. “And I think the longer you’re homeless, the more difficult it becomes to exit homelessness.”
