The Chicago Tribune
January 23, 2012
Once-homeless brothers trying to adjust to warm rooms, caseworkers’ rules
From The Chicago Tribune:
After 30 years of living like ghosts on the streets, sleeping under a bridge and drifting through warming centers, Frank and Anthony Nowotnik are learning to live inside.
There are advantages, including heat and hot water, that come with the move indoors.
But nearly every day, the 43-year-old twin brothers feel the pull of their old life under the bridge. The shopping cart that held their belongings. The bottle of vodka that they tucked under their heads at night. The dull, rhythmic thump of the cars passing — bump, bump — on the expressway overhead.
“I miss it. I actually do miss it,” says Anthony, of the years the brothers spent living under the highway. He folds his rough hands and looks down.
“The freedom,” adds Frank.
They had lived on the streets since they were 13, two men amid the roughly 1,700 homeless people who shun the city’s shelters and instead survive on the margins — parks and underpasses, abandoned cars and cardboard boxes — places the twins call “out there.”
Now the brothers have a home at Pathways Safe Haven, a place of last resort for the most desperate homeless. But the transition inside hasn’t been easy.
Thrown out of two housing programs in the last year for excessive drinking, the brothers are trying to face down their demons and scrambling once again to gain a foothold inside. The stakes are never far from their minds: At least 50 homeless men and women died in Chicago last year, most of them while living on the street. If not for a place to stay, Anthony says, “I probably would have been dead too.”
Now, they pay their rent, have bank accounts and stop at the dry cleaners to have their shirts pressed.
But every night, they open their windows and spread their blankets on the floor. They can’t get used to the warmth of the indoors. And it’s difficult to sleep in a bed when, as Anthony explains, “I’m so used to sleeping on the ground.”
For the last year, that is how the twins have lived — reconciling inside and out — caught between two worlds.
They know they can live on the streets. Now, they wonder, can they navigate a world on the inside?
