Why would a man who has a home live in his car?

Miami Beach, Florida
By David Arthur Walters

Leroy, who happens to be a black man in his forties, would not give me his real name. He virtually lived in his dilapidated compact car near the corner of Euclid Avenue and 6^th Street before the cops made him move it. I say ‘virtually’ because he claims he does not really live in the car.  We have seen him living in it for over a year in the old South Beach neighborhood called Seventh Heaven – the gangsta rap nightclub and crime-ridden neighborhood between 7^th and 5^th Streets. The Flamingo Park Neighborhood, a much better neighborhood to the north, adopted the old crack-hood without its permission, but you would never know it.

Now Seventh Heaven is sometimes referred to as The Toilet or The Capitol of Poop due to the piles of dog feces, some of it deposited directly in the middle of sidewalks, a tribute to the rapidly spreading culture of disrespect aided by a lack of good enforcement and appropriate legislation. Not to mention, by the way, the alley and parking lot near the nightclubs, sometimes so full of human feces and stinking urine that passersby cross the street holding their noses.

A few yuppies moved into the predominantly Hispanic hood following a hopeful attempt at gentrification by property owners. But it is difficult to fight the blight, and the recent condominium conversions suffer an encroachment aggravated by the Great Recession. A large number of people whom Hispanics call gentuza reside in the crime-ridden hood. Many of the Hispanics are hard-working, hard-drinking, paperless men. Yet we have suffered the arrival of a relatively more violent contingent, from Guatemala, which has a high rate of violence against women – one man in our neighborhood, wanted in Guatemala for murder, stabbed his wife seventeen times. Another woman was stabbed in the neck one morning on Meridian Avenue – the paper reported she was not a tourist, so city hall breathed a sigh of relief. Another woman was dragged down the alley and knifed and raped behind the Meridian Market in the wee hours – a yuppie neighbor said she was not surprised that a woman out alone so late on foot would suffer such consequences. You get the picture. And we have low-level drug dealers, and a smattering of old-timers who fled Cuba, many of them on some sort of dole.  White trash is sparse, and there are only a handful of American blacks.

Mind you that Seventh Heaven, call it The Toilet if you will, is paradise in comparison to many other city neighborhoods in the world, so you will pay around $800 a month for your room – a Puerto Rican man and his wife, two babies, stepmother and a dog lived in one studio for three years until he managed to find a big subsidized place for his family in North Beach. A tourist might find the area quite attractive, and would love living in it until she found out where she was.

The refuse that Leroy left on the curb – empty take-out bags, cans and bottles, some of them full of urine, a spare tire – certainly did not detract from the hood’s bad reputation.  He was a pathetic sight when sleeping in his little compact car. You could not see him on a cool night because he covered up the windows with paper and cardboard, but he had to roll them down when the weather was hot and humid lest he suffocate, and there he was, for all to see and pity, hunched up and sweating in the front seat, his back seat jammed with gear and rubbish.

‘Uhma’, a crack whore and sometime drug dealer from Pakistan, pitied Leroy the most and served him food at the curb. Uhma liked to say that every man has a penis, but that she cares only for the men who have the ‘bump’ she loves (crack), so she partied with almost every man in her apartment building, depending on who had the supplies, besides the Italian drug dealer she lived with and dealt drugs for at the front desk of the hotel where she worked. Well, a Samoan once told me that you know when it’s time to divorce your wife when you have your organ in one hand your money in the other and she takes the money.

Uhma got pregnant, lost the child, and then the hood got hot with cops, so she moved away with her most significant other, leaving Leroy a bit in the lurch. Yes, she had a soft spot for Leroy, even though he had no bump to speak of. To give her credit for such charity, Uhma might have been a good girl if she had not left her father in Pakistan. In any event, Leroy liked her cooking, and left the paper plates and plastic utensils on the curb with the rest of the trash.

Almost every morning, Leroy was also seen and heard at the local homeless burger joint, the Burger King on 5^th Street and Alton Road. By that time he had cleaned himself up and changed into nice clothes.  He was heard well and at length by everyone who showed up for breakfast.  He talked loudly and ceaselessly at the two homeless lesbians who breakfasted for two or three hours every morning at Burger King. He often ventured with them to the little library in the upscale South Pointe neighborhood. The lesbian pair, perhaps his only friends, manage to listen to his blathering intently. They are of his color but somewhat lighter. Both are terribly obese. They dress like gypsies and go about with lots of gear, their worldly possessions. They love to use the computers for hours on end – the librarian gives them extra time. Nobody is bothered by them there, except occasionally by the couple’s odor; and once an East European man complained about the scene frequently displayed on their computer monitors – depictions of breast operations.

Now Leroy had himself a residential parking permit for his jalopy, which he occasionally moved a space or two nearer the corner where Las Olas Café is located. He kept his beat-up bicycle, his real transportation, chained to a tree near his car. We figured he was on the dole, got food stamps, maybe disability payments, sold some dope somewhere, whatever.  Survival is the goal, and some people are more ingenious at it than others.  For example, a Cuban-American gay couple, one of whom is an expert at conning people out of money,   had four jobs at the height of the tourist season. They were taking in up to $5,000 tax free in a month, putting the funds on cash cards since they do not want bank accounts. They enjoyed almost fully subsidized housing among other social benefits.

Despite our neighborhood’s reputation, many of my neighbors complained to the Miami Beach Code Compliance Division and Police Department about the man who lived in his car. But they were told that there is nothing that could be done about him unless he was seen committing some crime. 

I felt a little sorry for Leroy because I was homeless several times in my youth, some time before it was politically correct to feel very sorry for homeless people, and I was amused by Leroy’s cheap rent, the small fee he paid for his monthly parking permit. It was only after he was observed selling residential parking permits to tourists that I decided lodge a complaint myself.  I stopped two Parking Enforcement officers and informed them of the illegal sale of parking permits. Everybody knew Leroy was living in his car there, including Sanitation and Parking. I figured Leroy was getting blank temporary or monthly permits from friends in Parking. I was incensed by the possibility of public corruption; otherwise I would not have complained.  Nothing was done.

As fate would have it, Leroy was getting out of his car one morning, half-dressed, stretching out his limbs, right across the street from Las Olas Café, when the July 2010 Las Olas Conference was in session. Gathered there were representatives from the City Manager’s Office, the Police Department, the Miami Beach Community Development Corporation, and the Code Compliance Division. I was the sole representative of the Public because of inadequate public notice, and they were sorry I showed up. The officials were there to pat themselves on the back for what a good job they were doing and then to walk around the neighborhood. Whenever I tried to make a constructive suggestion or to present evidence contrary to the positive mental attitude affirmations being made, the officials tried unsuccessfully to shut me up. Finally, they gave up, got up and left without doing a Potemkin walkabout.

At one point, the City Manager’s representative who coordinated the Conference was shushing me when I tried to object to the claim that city officials were doing a great job enforcing the Code in my hood. I objected, and said that she and the city manager are the ones who should shut up and listen, and take a good look at the violations.

“Look, look right behind you, at the man who lives in his car,” I said. “He leaves rubbish on the curb, and sells parking permits, and he’s been there for a year or more.”

Detectives showed up across the street immediately, flashed their badges and questioned Leroy. In less than ten minutes, Leroy and his car were gone. Apparently, the police representative at the Conference had waved her magic Blackberry, or detectives were cruising the area during the Conference.

I encountered Leroy a few days later, and I identified myself as a reporter.

“I saw the cops swoop in on you the other day, and then you and your car disappeared. It was your unlucky day. There was a meeting of cops and officials across the street going on when you got out of your car half-dressed. What happened to you?”

“The police made me move to another area,” he said. “They asked me for my identification but not my registration. I was getting dressed from my trunk, and they were looking for drugs.”

“Do you sell drugs?”

“Hell, no. The cops know me.  There were undercover drug cops all over the neighborhood at night, and they didn’t bother me.”

“You said ‘were’ – have the undercovers left the neighborhood?”

“Yeah, they moved over to Michigan Avenue. There used to be drugs dealers all over Euclid, but they arrested some of them, and some moved. They know I don’t sell drugs. But when I go to the beach, tourists come up and ask me for drugs all the time.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m black, that’s why, and I look homeless. Tourists can get anything they want from the homeless who hang out in the park by the beach. The narcotics detectives should take care of that, get to their suppliers.”

“So you had to move your car?”

“I didn’t have to – I have a permit to park anywhere in a residential area I want to. But I moved the car anyway.”

“So you live in your car. Is it legal to live in a car in the city limits?”

“I don’t really live there. I have an apartment.”

“Huh?”

“I have a place to live.”

“Why don’t you live there?”

“I do. But I don’t get along with my girlfriend. She’s Cuban. She doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Spanish, and she won’t teach me Spanish.”

“Maybe if you could communicate you would hate each other,” I reflected, thinking about the Hispanic woman who learned English and found out her American boyfriend was the kind of man she did not like let alone love.

“She stays there. It’s my home. I take care of hygiene there,” he said, showing me his keys.

“I thought you were homeless, or that your car was your home.”

“No, I don’t live in my car, because I have a home. I just go to my car sometimes.”

“I see you there a lot, sometimes every night.”

“I’m trying to get back in the workforce now. I got a part-time job with the County. I have a Class A license, I can drive trucks, you know. “

“Good. You were observed selling residential parking permits. Where did you get them?”

“Oh, they were mine, I get them.”

“From whom do you get them?”

Leroy would not answer, and started to move away.

“It’s the valets who make money off tourists, sixty to ninety dollars a night, with those permits,” he said over his shoulder.

“You had a bicycle by your car.”

“It was stolen.”

“What’s your name?”

He shook his head negatively, and hurried away.

“Okay, I’ll call you Leroy,” I yelled after him.

His story reminded me of the time my latest wife got fed up with me because the expenses of my Mark IV Lincoln Continental exceeded the house payments. She said my brown-capped white coupe looked like a phallus, and ordered me to drive it down to the beach and live in it. I eventually would up living in a swank oceanfront condo with a Swedish masseuse. I was not about to live in my car! In fact, I eventually took my ex-wife’s advice - I no longer have a car. I don’t envy Leroy at all.