Trying to Get Back to Stockton
People can be homeless for a long time, or temporarily. You can be homeless in your own town, or in a town you’ve never lived in before. There is just no set story. Dewey said he has a home in Stockton, but just doesn’t have the means to go back right now, so instead he’s been homeless in the Biggest Little City amid the recent rough winter weather.
“It's a nightmare. It's the first time we've ever been homeless, you know, snow and cold, but being homeless in the snow, crazy cold, freezing … My wife's diabetic and sometimes I ain't got the food to feed her and much less feed ourselves, but we're going to get home somehow, some way.”
He says he feels like he’s going crazy, trying to find the money he needs.
“I just gotta have faith and I'm losing that. But my wife, she tries to stay faithful. It's been crazy hard and people out here are stronger than I ever thought they could be. You know, I thought I was tough, but this right here broke me.”
Dewey said he’s had a rough life, including being in prison, but that now at 52 he considers being homeless in Reno during the winter his worst experience. “You know, I've been in prison riots, I've been stabbed, I got shot and everything. Nothing's broken me as a man as this has. When your wife looks at you with a tear running down her eyes, she says that she's hungry and you can't do nothing about it. Your pride and manhood, everything goes right out the window.”
Turned His Life Around, But Still Fragile
He said meeting his wife 13 years ago, saved him, convinced him to stay off drugs, but that his financial situation makes it so he was still living day to day, and that a mishap can derail all the progress he’s made to have a simple, safe, sober life.
”You know, I had a good life going and then like I said, my truck blew up. I didn't expect that, you know. And we've been here ever since, so I'm trying to get the money to go home. “
His dogs he says are eight weeks old, and that he’s trying to keep them fed, while also figuring out how to get money for bus tickets back home.