Homeless plea: ‘I’m not leaving town without my dog’
Patrick Gillespie drew the sign carefully. It was simple: A piece of flimsy cardboard with thick, black-markered letters spelling out his plea: Dog in Pound Need Help
He found a tree — one that would block him from both the oppressive September heat and the view of any Huntsville police officers rolling through the Wal-Mart parking lot — and began flying the sign beneath its branches.
Sign-flying is a lonely business at the best of times. Most people don’t stop for a homeless guy. They look away. And without his dog bouncing around, Gillespie found it soul crushing.
But his message caught Wilma Price’s eye as she cut through the Wal-Mart lot. She’d just picked up supplies for the animal rescue she runs. She stopped her truck.
“People were pissed because I’m blocking the exit to Wal-Mart,” she recalled. She rolled down her window anyway.
Gillespie looked wild. His thick curly hair poured out madly from beneath a faded blue Rice University ball cap, and his khaki shorts and T-shirt were dingy. But it was his sad hazel eyes that caught Price’s attention.
“He looked like a little boy, sitting there lost,” she said.
She asked what was wrong, and Gillespie — a man of few words — told her: He’d been arrested for public intoxication a couple of days earlier while swimming in the pool at a nearby Motel 6, where he’d been staying, and spent the weekend in the Huntsville drunk tank. When he returned to the motel, his dog, Franklin, was gone.
He’d thought it would cost about $30 to get Franklin back — the kind of money a few hours flying a sign could turn up. But the shelter said the bill was $120.
“And I’m not leaving town without my dog,” said Gillespie, who keeps a dog bowl clipped to the outside of his backpack.
Price sighed. She wanted to help. But $120? She called a friend.
“I called and I said, ‘OK, I know you’re going to tell me I’m crazy. But there’s this guy standing here, and his dog is in the pound.’ And I said, ‘Please, loan me the money to get him out.’ Then I said, ‘No, please just give me the money to get him out.’ ”
Within a few hours, Price was back in the parking lot with the $120 Gillespie needed, and they were off to the shelter. At first, the workers at the front desk hesitated to release the dog.
Is a homeless life a good life for Franklin, they asked. Was Price sure she wanted to do this?
“They’re looking at me like I’ve lost my entire cotton-pickin’ mind,” Price recalls. “But being homeless doesn’t mean you don’t care about your animals.”
Price paid. And a few moments later, a small dog made his way to the lobby, wiggling and barking with joy at seeing Gillespie. Fourteen pounds of pent-up energy and puppy kisses “went insane,” Price said.
That’s Franklin. A ‘deck dog’
A mixed breed with sandy-brown hair, Franklin looks like he stuck one of his white-tipped paws into an electric socket. He acts like it, too, with an endless supply of jumping-bean energy.
“He was a deck dog,” Gillespie says one day in November as he and Franklin ride the 46 bus south on Gessner. “When I got him, he was so matted, I had to cut his hair. And they thought he was brown — dark brown — but it was all just dirt.” He ruffled Franklin’s fur to show where it’s grown back funny.
Gillespie guesses that living beneath a deck in someone’s yard for the first few months of his life affected Franklin’s psyche. That explains Franklin’s separation anxiety, too. Why he cries when Gillespie steps away for a moment, why he keeps his eyes trained on his owner, and hops up in Gillespie’s lap whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Franklin doesn’t want to be lonely. Neither does Gillespie.
“Having a dog, it just kind of preserves my mental stability. Without a dog, I’d just be going further down. But with a dog, it pulls me up,” says Gillespie. “Hitchhiking and all that, it’s better to stand on the side of a road for three hours, getting rejected by 1,000 cars with a dog. Someone else to talk to and be with, rather than doing it alone.”
Gillespie hasn’t had much stability. He says he was kicked out of his North Carolina high school his senior year, and when he was 18, he went to jail for the first time after taking a car from a gas station and joyriding to Myrtle Beach. Through his 20s, he stacked up a steady stream of misdemeanors. At 30, he’s living through his second or third stretch of homelessness, depending on how you count.
But he’s always had dogs. Growing up, he had Woofy. Then came Bailey, Lucy, Charlie and Linda, all of whom Gillespie would let curl up against him in bed. On the road, there was Bean Dip. Then in May, he found Franklin.
When they’re on the move, Franklin climbs inside Gillespie’s sleeping bag at night, snuggling in close. After Price sprang Franklin from the pound, she posted a photo of Gillespie and his sign on Facebook. It went viral, and a GoFundMe page Price created for the duo raised about $20,000 — enough to put the pair in a small hotel room for the past couple of months.
The kindness of strangers, most of whom are dog lovers. But it hasn’t fixed everything. Gillespie wants to find a job so he can keep an apartment after the GoFundMe money runs out, but he lost his driver’s license and Social Security card a few years back. That’s what brought him to Huntsville this summer; for months he’s been crawling westward to Arizona, where he heard it’s easier to get an ID. Red tape
On a recent morning journey to get the required paperwork, Gillespie and Franklin wound their way from the motel where they’re staying on U.S. 290 to downtown Houston. They hopped a southbound bus before transferring in Memorial City. Once they reached downtown, they walked the rest of the way.
Franklin soaked in the scents, pausing to mark every bush. Gillespie rolled his eyes and waited.
By 10:12 a.m., when they arrived at the nonprofit where Gillespie was hoping to find help, the line was so long the front-door attendant told him he wouldn’t be able to make it in that day.
It wasn’t the first time that had happened. Gillespie tossed his backpack on the ground and sat against a tree, pulling a small orange ball from his pocket. He tossed it with one hand. With the other, he searched for options on his phone. What other organization might be able to help him that day?
Franklin chased the ball, running so hard that he turned one ear insideout.
Gillespie furrowed his brow as his Google searches and phone calls failed. But then, tired of fetch, Franklin hopped onto his lap and licked his chin. Gillespie smiled and fixed Franklin’s ear.
They sat there, beneath the tree, a few more minutes. Gillespie prepared for the hourlong return ride on the bus.
Another day without a resolution. Even after the happy ending with Price, even after all the financial help from GoFundMe donors, Gillespie can’t tie the red tape in front of him into a big red bow.
But he has his dog. And right now, that’s everything.