Artist among homeless Milwaukee has lost
The role played by Jerry Pfeil in a music video is one he knew all too well. A homeless man.
That’s likely why he’s so natural and watchable in the video for “I Am Not Waiting Anymore,” a 2012 song by Milwaukee folk band Field Report.
It opens with Pfeil in a brown suit standing knee deep in Lake Michigan, then finds him meeting a mysterious young woman in a ghostly white dress and ends at St. Ben’s community meal where he plays both a server and a diner down on his luck.
“If there was ever a homeless celebrity, he would be it. Like Lionel Aldridge,” said Chuck Dwyer, a Milwaukee artist who met Pfeil by chance 10 years ago when he encountered him collecting aluminum cans behind Dwyer’s Bay View home.
He gave Pfeil a little money, which brought him back hoping for more. Soon Dwyer had Pfeil trying his hand at printmaking and etching and painting and writing haikus. He introduced him to other artists who captured Pfeil in photographs and included him in several video projects.
Pfeil was living under a porch when he met Dwyer. Rousted from there, he wound up in a shack along the Kinnickinnic River. Dwyer didn’t know but always assumed his new friend had some form of mental illness that would make it seem like a good idea to sleep outside in freezing weather.
With help from St. Ben’s Clinic social worker Bill Mullooly and Roseanne Norwood at Community Advocates, Pfeil found housing in late 2009 before it turned brutally cold again. Over the years that followed he lived in several south side apartments.
But he never let go of the drinking, heavy smoking and other addictions and habits that led to his problems in the first place. He navigated life in his own way till cancer took him last summer on June 23. He was 63.
On Thursday, Pfeil was included in the annual ceremony at St. Benedict the Moor Church, 924 W. State St., to remember 32 homeless people who died in the past year.
“He didn’t die, thank God, frozen to death or hit by a car or some other ugly thing. He died at peace. He just sort of faded away,” Dwyer said, recalling Pfeil’s final days in the hospital with friends at his side.
Others honored at St. Ben’s Thursday were not so fortunate. At least one was murdered. One took his own life. Included in the group was a Ph.D. chemist from Stanford University named Cornel Pietruszewski who spent many years in homeless shelters and resisting treatment for his mental illness.
As each name was read aloud, a family member, friend or advocate stepped up to light a candle.
“We honor them today by remembering,” the Rev. Michael Bertram, pastor of the church, told the more than 100 people who showed up.
Jerry Pfeil was raised on a farm in Sussex and worked at various times as a truck driver, forklift operator and at other jobs, said Pat Buckley, a video producer who came to know Pfeil on the Field Report video and
other projects.
Pfeil was estranged from relatives, but found a family in the artistic community and help agencies.
“Jerry’s life in the last eight years was infinitely better due to government programs that allowed him shelter, food security and access to medical care,” Buckley said.
Dwyer considered Pfeil a close friend, though he could be maddening when intoxicated. They made a mismatched pair. Dwyer quit drinking in 1993 and goes to AA meetings, and Pfeil would knock back cans of malt liquor while he created art. He rolled his own cigarettes from the butts he found on the ground and kept them in a raisin box.
The two presented an exhibit of their work at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend in 2008. Even today, Pfeil has artwork hanging at the Iron Horse Hotel and at Cramer-Krasselt marketing firm in Milwaukee.
“I would set him up. I was like an art director,” Dwyer said. “We worked together. I loved his smudges and smears by accident. They call it brut art or outsider art where it had more rawness to it.”
Pfeil pretty much stopped making art with Dwyer after about six years, but continued to hang around and do gardening and other paid jobs for him.
Unable to deal with his impending death from his spreading cancer, Pfeil checked himself out of the hospital and wound up at Dwyer’s house. He put him up for the night but convinced him to go back.
There was talk of a memorial service for Pfeil after he died, but it never came together. His ashes, in a temporary urn, remain on a shelf at Peace of Mind Funeral & Cremation Services.
Pfeil’s life did not continue its downward spiral, thanks to people who gave him a chance at an artistic second act and offered him friendship and support.
“He was one of those guys who touched a lot of people,” Mullooly said. “He was treated with dignity and he responded.”