A Tribute to a Friend

A good friend of mine passed away unexpectedly at the end of February. His name was Eugene Johnson, but his friends called him Slim because of his six-five height and lanky frame. He was 72 when he passed.

I met Slim when I retired in 2015 and started volunteering at Our Lady of Lourdes in downtown Atlanta, which holds a lunch twice a week to feed 200-300 homeless people in the neighborhood. Slim was a fellow volunteer but interestingly, was homeless himself. He spent his nights couch surfing at friends’ homes, staying in cheap motels when he somehow found or scrounged the money, and sleeping on the streets and in shelters.

His job at Lourdes was to hand out sequential numbers to the crowd we served each week so they could queue up in an orderly fashion for their hot meal. It was a tough job as scuffles often broke out and Slim had to use his size and street cred to restore order. Sort of a soup kitchen bouncer, I suppose. We hit it off and I gave him rides each week to various places he was crashing.

He disappeared one day, as often happens with folks in his straits. I didn’t have much hope in seeing him again, but one day he turned up in a homeless recuperative care clinic I helped out with, recovering from open-heart surgery to repair an aortic aneurysm. He was later diagnosed with tuberculosis and the Fulton County health department arranged for him to stay in a motel near the airport, where a registered nurse visited with daily medication and meals.

Slim was a veteran. He served in the U.S. Army from 1975 to 1980. Thankfully, another volunteer friend of mine from Lourdes named Jim, a retired doctor, took the same shine to Slim that I did. Together, we worked with the VA to get his supplemental security income (SSI) checks flowing and secured Section Eight housing for him, a studio apartment in a high-rise that he moved into in October of 2019.

My son and his friend helped me move him in, with furniture and other supplies donated by local nonprofits. Over the next seven years, Jim and I were Slim’s primary caregivers as he had no family that we could find. I opened a bank account for him, got him a cell phone, arranged auto-pay of his rent, played a lot of rounds of rummy 500 with him, took him shopping for food and clothes and to doctor appointments, brought him word search books, took him out to lunch and arranged to have his apartment cleaned. He came to our home multiple times to play cards with my wife and I and eat hot wings, which he loved. He was happiest when my wife kicked both our butts in rummy, which was most of the time.

Jim and I, along with a neighbor in his building and an old friend from his days on the street, were the folks Slim called when he needed anything. The four of us were “the village” it took to keep him moving in the right direction.

It wasn’t always easy. He was given a few eviction warnings from his apartment complex, once for excessive drinking, another time for berating a fellow resident in the hallway. We always stepped in with tough love and admonitions to straighten up, which he appreciated and responded to. He knew in his heart he had come too far to screw things up with his behavior and end up back on the street.

Those weaknesses aside, he was an amazingly bright light in the world and had a magnetism and personality that drew people to him. In addition to cards, he loved Gunsmoke (and did a great Festus imitation) and knew the lyrics to every song on Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy,” joking that he was a “black hippie” in his youth. He was a decent cook and a big flirt with the ladies, who always flirted back. He was always showered and dressed neatly, and kept his apartment tidy and clean, as his mother taught him. He would talk to any stranger who crossed his path and they usually ended up smiling or laughing.

His stint in the Army was well documented, but beyond that, the details of his life and how he ended up on the street were sketchy. He was born and raised in Cleveland and loved his Browns. He claimed to have twin daughters in Germany, a by-product of being stationed there, but none of us could confirm that or much else about his life. As my friend Jim would jokingly say, “Some of what Slim tells us might be true.”

I know this is an opinion column, so beyond using this space to honor my friend, which I deeply appreciate having the opportunity to do, I also want to express an opinion, namely: we need to stop thinking about “the homeless” as a problem, and start thinking about them as people, as individuals.

A lot of people walked past Slim during his life on the street without a thought to who he was. In their mind, he was a blight, a nuisance, perhaps even a menace. He was none of those. He was a man who served his country, was dealt some obviously bad hands in life, and made some equally bad choices for him to end up where he did.

After he passed, my son shared a voicemail Slim left him on the occasion of my son’s engagement a couple years ago. Slim said, “Congratulations Jack. I hope you have a beautiful, lovely marriage. I love you, man, like my own son.”

All of us loved Slim and will miss him. He taught me a lot and I’m forever grateful for the time we spent together, good and bad.

Godspeed, my brother. You’re in a much better place than most of the life you lived.