Postcard from downtown Sacramento: Home of the naked, the sick and the dispossessed

A mostly incoherent man wearing only a towel, draped in all the wrong places, walked barefoot down K Street in downtown Sacramento Thursday.

“How can I get something to eat?” he asked us. When directed to Francis House, where he might also get some clothes, he answered: “Now see, that’s the problem.”

Because the shoes this man was carrying in his arms had no laces, the city intervention team I was with thought he might have been dumped there by the county jail; unfortunately, that does happen.

But no, other homeless people on the street said he’s there every day, always wearing almost nothing, and routinely dropping his towel to masturbate in front of some shop window or other where he sees a woman inside. On Thursday, that unlucky woman was in a 7-Eleven on J Street.

Not only merchants and shoppers but other people living on the downtown streets are not OK with that.

One homeless man named Gerald, who was dressed in four coats on a hot day, spends his time using his own cleaning supplies to try and keep the streets as tidy as possible. He said that he sees this man, whom he calls “Vincent Price” every day, and had words with him after he dropped his towel on Thursday. For a while now, Gerald has been trying to convince him that he needs help, and that he’s got to stop going around “buck naked” and scaring people.

“It’s demoralizing,” to everyone on the street, Gerald said. “I told him, ‘Sir, you can’t do that.’ I think he’s bipolar. He needs to get the extracurricular monsters out of his mind. He looks at these women and does that, and I tell him, ‘That’s not the way. Take her a flower.’’’

When last seen, other homeless folks said, “Vincent Price” had been punched in the mouth, was bleeding, and then had been stopped by Sacramento police.

This is why law enforcement can’t be left out of responding to the problem of homelessness in our city. But broken people aren’t restored by being jailed, either, and obviously, this man should be in treatment.

The team I was with — Jay Sharifi, of the city’s Department of Community Response, and Jon Strohl of the Downtown Sacramento Partnership, try to intervene in whatever immediate ways they can, while also trying to match unhoused people with services.

They do help people living on the street, and in doing so help all of the rest of us. But what they are up against is human misery in an almost endless variety of forms.

On Thursday, they gave new size 13 shoes to a man who was standing in the middle of the street sobbing and throwing things.

They checked on a boy living in a car with his dad and his pit bull — Dad had gone to court with his girlfriend, leaving his shaky son all alone with his barking dog.

And they gave some local bus passes to three men with developmental disabilities who had been, as one of them said, “bouncing around the country” with no place to stay once they got there.

One of the men had grown up in Sacramento, but said he has no family he’s still in touch with in the area now. They seem to have gotten free ticket after free ticket to go somewhere else, and have chosen Richmond, Virginia, as their next stop.

Jay told them that no, Sacramento wouldn’t send them to Richmond unless they could put officials here in touch with family members who were waiting for them there.

The second man showed signs of the movement disorder tardive dyskinesia, which makes those who suffer from it twist and grimace, and is usually a side effect of antipsychotic medication. He kept repeating, “I almost feel like what’s the point.”

The third said nothing at all, but just sat on the street with his head down and hugged a stuffed animal.