A nurse for 20 years, she’s now homeless in Houston
Escape from an abuser, robbery put her on streets
Liz Stovall has had a nursing license in Michigan for 20 years, but when she landed a job interview for a waitress gig in Houston, she had to make her way across the city to a charity to get interview clothes.
More than anything, she wanted dress shoes, size 9.
Stovall, 46, never expected to end up living in a red-and-gray tent under Houston’s U.S. 59 overpass near downtown. She completed college and raised three children, mostly on her own, and had a successful career. Then she got unlucky.
“It’s like being bumped
back to a baby,” she said. “If you don’t have identification or money, you’re just screwed. You just are.”
It’s not difficult to become homeless in America. A natural disaster, health crisis or job loss — or an escape from an abuser and a robbery — can put someone on the streets. A much-publicized study from earlier this year found that 1 in 3 Americans are just one paycheck away from poverty. Getting out from being homeless, though, is much harder — even for someone with Stovall’s education. She doesn’t fit the stereotype of homelessness. But it’s been a month since she came to Houston and found herself on the street, and she’s not back on her feet yet.
Stovall didn’t realize how easy it was to become homeless until it happened to her. She fled an abusive boyfriend in Galveston, hitchhiking her way to Houston. When she was dropped off by a corner store in Third Ward, she pulled out her phone and wallet to orient herself. Someone swiped both out of her hand.
It took her just under a month and help from a church group to get a receipt for her Social Security and Texas identification cards. The charity paid for a copy of her birth certificate. She got lucky: It arrived in three weeks. She was told it could take up to three months.
“It’s a bunch of infinity cycles of nonsense,” she said. “You can’t do this because you don’t have this, but you can’t do that because you don’t have that.”
Lack of identification is such a problem in the homeless community that there are charities set up with divisions to help the homeless navigate the process of obtaining their papers, and police departments offer a form of identification for the homeless. But IDs, like everything else, get stolen on the streets. If a person is new to Texas — such as Stovall, who came from Michigan only a few months ago — the stringent Texas ID requirements are even more of a burden. And without an ID, Stovall couldn’t get services at some nonprofits, much less a job.
Stovall has never been homeless. It terrifies her. The noise never stops, and it makes her jumpy. The same six songs play on repeat from a few tents down, a friendly pit-bull mix named Sugar leashed to a pole in a too-tight collar barks constantly, and the traffic screeches so loudly that she feels like she’s about to get run over.
She hates not showering. She hates brushing the dirt out of her tent every morning and afternoon. She hates the lack of privacy. She’s bored. Even Dostoevsky, her favorite author, is only so distracting.
The first night in Houston, alone without her ID, phone or money, she wandered to Buffalo Bayou Park. She spent three nights wide awake. Men kept approaching her with clunky pickup lines that led to the same questions: Did she have a boyfriend? Did she like old guys? Did she like young guys? Would she like to come with them?
She heard about the
Beacon, a nonprofit near Minute Maid Park that serves meals and offers showers, through another homeless person. That’s where she met Charles Jenkins — CJ to his friends. He offered her soup. She was on her third day of not eating and not sleeping.
Jenkins has been on the street for about five months. The two share the red tent. Their possessions — library books, toilet paper, clothes and three pairs of tennis shoes from charity groups that don’t fit either of them — line the sides. Jenkins sells cigarettes on the side for 50 cents each, turning a profit from $3 to $5 on a 20-pack. Even when the flap is closed and Stovall is sleeping, people come and scratch on the tent and ask, “Heyo, CJ, got anything?”
Alliances are important under the bridge. She likes Jenkins’ soothing voice and his optimism and how he’s one of the only men under the bridge with a toothbrush and a morning ritual of shaving his head with the aid of a cracked mirror. She’s uncomfortable with how much she relies on him, and how he doesn’t like her speaking to other men or taking jobs such as flagging cars into lots for Astros games.
“I’m running from a man,” she said. “I’m here because I ran from a guy who was trying to control me, so this does not appeal to me. I don’t have any interest in men.”
Stovall has learned there’s a whole different code for men and women. Men stick together. Women have to find allies fast. And Jenkins has a good heart, she thinks. If someone asks him for a quarter, he usually gives it. One day, Jenkins knows, that person begging for change could be him.
“It’s kind of like being in the jungle without the skills to survive,” he said. “You’ll get ate alive — either by humans or by drugs.”
With her papers, Stovall can apply for jobs. She was a nurse for two decades, but Michigan and Texas don’t have an agreement to honor each other’s certifications. Once, in her other life, she spent $250 on a Justin Bieber concert for her daughter. Now she needs to pay about that much to get her nursing license in Texas.
The Monday after she got her ID, Stovall learned she had a job interview at the George R. Brown Convention Center. The only problem: She had no clothes to wear.
She and Jenkins set off the next day for the Emergency Aid Coalition, an interfaith nonprofit that offers a food pantry and clothes to whoever lines up first at 8:30 a.m. Their journey from the east side of Houston to the Museum District took over half an hour and two train lines. On the second train, they saw a couple they knew from under the bridge and a pale blond boy who Stovall doesn’t think could be much older than 18. They arrived before that day’s sign-up sheet closed at 9:47.
“They mostly just take the first 20,” Jenkins said. “That’s how they’re set up. So if you’re not in that first 20, guess what? You’re outta
there.”
Before she got her clothes, she had an intake session. Did she have an income? asked the volunteer. No. Highest level of education? Bachelor’s.
“What type of work are you looking for?”
“Right now I’m looking for tipped work so I can have cash,” she said. She laughed. “Waiting another two weeks or so for a paycheck sounds horrible.”
“That’s really wise,” the volunteer agreed.
“If they’d hire me tomorrow, that’d be great.”
It took until noon for Stovall to get her two plastic bags of clothing and black flats, size 9. She’s not used to the amount of waiting that goes with homelessness. An errand can be quick, or it can take up her whole day. Planning is nearly impossible.
Stovall’s grown children live in Michigan. She won’t burden them with what’s going on. The year was supposed to be her big adventure, a gift to herself after two decades nursing and even longer raising her three kids. She’d lived in Houston once before, back in the early 1980s. She said she’d let them know when she found her dream apartment.
When she can imagine herself back in scrubs and showered instead of dirty in the same pair of jeans and a rotating handful of Tshirts, Stovall will take her new perspective back to nursing. She took classes in public health nursing and thinks any public health inspector would probably fall over dead in the U.S. 59 encampment. Life under the overpass makes her think of the pyramid of needs, a nursing tool for understanding human priorities. At the bottom of the pyramid is security, something no one around her has.
“If you don’t even have the bottom of your pyramid, there’s no way you can advance to making sure you’re eating well or taking care of yourself or making meaningful relationships,” she said.
Waiting outside the Emergency Aid Coalition for Stovall to get clothes, Jenkins ran into an old acquaintance from under the overpass, a man in a blue sweatshirt and a scruffy beard. He’s not sure where the man lives now but figured that he must still be homeless if he was among the dozens lining up for a bagged lunch.
“Get home alive,” Jenkins said as they parted. “Amen, man.”
“Amen.”