‘This community accepts everybody’
Inside The Life Link’s Clubhouse, a man with scars on his arms types a message two fingers at a time and silently cries at the computer screen. People shuffle, eat, poke at their food, or chat and smile.
That’s what it might look like to an outsider. But for the people who were here for a Thanksgiving meal earlier this week, it’s community. As good as church in some ways, and maybe better, because no one judges people for having a conversation with the voices in their head.
The Santa Fe-based Life Link puts together a Thanksgiving meal every year for the people who frequent the Clubhouse. This year, however, is special because the food comes courtesy of one of The Life Link’s greatest success stories.
Tate Mruz — a man who helped start the popular Santa Fe sports bar Boxcar — was once homeless. He credits The Life Link with helping him restart his life.
“I came here with $112 bucks, a dog, a car and a buddy coming down off drugs. And we camped in the mountains for several months until someone referred me over here to Life Link,” Mruz said.
He would make the daily trek down to the city with “campfire fingers” to shower at the Fort Marcy Recreation Complex and get to Del Charro, where he worked for seven years. Mruz, who grew up in New York City, moved west when he was 20 — “a city kid running around Nebraska just causing terror,” he said.
His life descended into drug addiction and prison time over drug charges, Nebraska correctional records show. Santa Fe was his fresh start.
“I was desperate to leave the Midwest,” he said. “I was involved in the ’90s meth craze. I was a drug addict and in and out of institutions, in and out of trouble. When I hit 30 years old, I said, ‘That’s it, I’m done.’ So, my dad bought me a car that I promised to pay back, [and] I drove down here.”
The Life Link gave Mruz $3,000 to cover a security deposit, first and last month’s rent so he could move out of the mountains and around the corner from his job in 2005, near the Plaza.
Mruz said he was astounded that a nonprofit did that for him. Now, he says he wants to pay it back. For three years, he has helped local Santa Fe nonprofits through an organization called Boxcar Gives Back.
This year is the first that he’s helped with The Life Link Thanksgiving dinner. Boxcar also delivered Thanksgiving meals with Santa Fe High School Navy Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps. volunteers to Esperanza Shelter in Santa Fe and to Communities In Schools of New Mexico.
He and his partner, Sylwia Handzel, started Boxcar in 2015. Both had worked at the bar when it was called Junction and under different management.
“Several years down the line, Boxcar has been very successful. And so I wanted to make sure that Life Link was in our wheelhouse as far as giving back. I feel that it’s really important for me to give gratitude to them, but also for them to see me doing this.”
Homelessness is on the rise in Santa Fe, experts say. The New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness identified 115 more homeless people this year than last as the city works with local nonprofits on new initiatives to help them.
Other projections estimate as many as 5,000 people in Santa Fe don’t have stable housing.
Meanwhile, the city grapples with a severe apartment shortage and too few beds for people without shelter during the bitter winter nights.
Still, for those who can get in, The Life Link and other nonprofits that help people in need of a warm place to sleep can make all the difference. Data from the homelessness coalition shows that 176 of 225 homeless people last year found housing through Life Link or were moved into federally subsidized low-income housing — although more than 20 percent ended up back on the streets.
Life Link also offers counseling, medical and food assistance, child care, job training, and community at the Clubhouse and elsewhere to help keep people in their homes and reintegrate back into society. Most people facing chronic homelessness have disabilities or struggle with mental health or substance abuse problems.
Candice Montoya, a program manager at the Clubhouse, said they serve a hot lunch at 12:30 p.m. every Wednesday and usually have some food around on other days, too. They also teach life skills; offer meditation, art and cooking classes; and operate as a kind of “home base” for folks recovering from a severe bout of homelessness or a downturn in their mental health.
“I think one of the most amazing things about having a community like the Clubhouse is that no matter where people are at on their mental health journey — whether that’s a person experiencing hearing voices and talking to themselves — this community accepts everybody,” Montoya said.
“Nobody is afraid or, you know, thinking that person’s weird. People are just accepting and welcome everybody.”
Dennis Dodson, 59, has been coming to the Clubhouse for six years, after he moved to Santa Fe from Colorado and couch-surfed until he found himself homeless.
In another life, Dodson said, he was a high-end art dealer for 10 years.
“We’re just folks here like anyone else in the community. We’re sons and daughters, husbands and wives. We’re the people [who] sometimes serve your food and work out in public, but we just may have a malady that’s unrecognizable to the public,” Dodson said.
“My note of claim or fame was I hung up Soup Cans by Andy Warhol, which was at the time appraised at $145 million,” he said.
Keri Brooke Eddy, a regular at the Clubhouse from La Cienega, was there Tuesday for the Thanksgiving meal from Boxcar. Eddy said she’s been coming for four or five years to “get away from my sister,” whom she describes as “kinda kooky.”
“I come here for the family friendship,” Eddy said.