I saw the future the other day, and his name is Ike.
He is a stout, gentle bear of a man with a perpetual smile that reveals the large gap where four front teeth used to be.
He is on this day at home in a Federal Boulevard motel room that is about the size of a small-town jail cell. It is paid up for the next two nights, though. The bench in Capitol Hill he has called home for three weeks, well, it will still be there.
I had planned to write about Ike Adolphus as a love letter of sorts to Gov. Bill Ritter, who last week announced he was cutting the $7 million or so the state pays to people like Ike in $200-a-month increments as part of its Aid to Needy and Disabled program.
Yet doing so, I figure, would only unfairly demonize the man. There are few state programs not getting whacked. Folks like Ike are simply friendly-fire casualties.
There are Ikes everywhere now. Their stories are all the same. Yet it is not acceptable, if you ask me, to simply turn a blind eye to them.
So I sat with Ike in his little room. We were joined by Rebecca Jones, a deacon at the St. Francis Center day shelter for the homeless in lower downtown, who had befriended Ike and paid the week’s motel rent.
Ike is 33 years old. He arrived in Denver about a year ago with $80. His family back home in South Carolina had pretty much disowned him. He is just different from them, he said.
He enrolled in community college here. Work eluded him. He found himself living on the streets for a couple of months until a man seeing him board a 16th Street Mall shuttle asked whether he wanted a job.
He started the dishwashing job at a northwest Denver restaurant that night. And he worked it for the next two months, renting a room in a Capitol Hill boarding house and putting some money aside.
As he washed dishes one night, the arthritis in his right hip, the residual of a high school football injury, flared. It landed him in a hospital. The doctors finally told Ike that he would need a hip replacement.
Discharged, Ike went back to work, only this time holding onto the silver cane that now rests beside the tiny bed. He couldn’t work there, his boss told him, if he needed that cane.
“He fired me,” Ike said softly.
He then caught a bus to Las Vegas. Surely there was work for a man with a cane there. There was not. Ike lasted a month on the Vegas streets.
“I applied all over. Nobody called,” he said. “I slept on the sidewalks for a month. Try sleeping on a sidewalk that stays hot all night and reheats during the day.”
He returned to Denver three weeks ago. He has applied to the aid program that gives $200 a month. If he gets it, he said, it will start in September. Budget cuts will wipe it out in January.
Jones simply shrugs when I ask what will become of Ike in a couple of nights when the motel rent runs out.
“I can do only so much,” she said of the man who does the reading at her services at St. Francis. “There is only so much churches and other programs can do.”
Ike Adolphus, fingering the beads of the green rosary he wears around his neck, said he understands and is resigned to returning to his bench.
“I am going to get on my feet,” he told Jones. “I am going to start somewhere. I don’t want the $200 just to be a burden on society. All I am asking for is a little help.”
I left the little motel room feeling just horrible. I knew, too, that I likely could knock on any of the motel’s doors and get the same story.
I know we can do better.
We just have to want to.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
