January 7, 2008

Heavy rains and wind had clobbered the capital city of Sacramento for the past week. And if that wasn’t bad enough, I was late—really late. I looked away from the flashing lights tracking the elevator’s progress and checked my watch. I glanced back up at the floor numbers and in doing so got a look at my reflection in the fancy mirror overhead. For a moment, I hardly recognized the neatly groomed guy named Rufus Hannah looking back at me. I offered a little prayer to God, asking for the strength to use my voice to speak for so many others who didn’t have one—and, of course, for guiding me out of the darkness and back into the light.

The elevator arrived at the right floor and I got out. As I rushed down the hall toward the main ballroom of the Embassy Suites, I couldn’t help but notice how hard the rain pounded against the windows overlooking the city. I felt real lucky to be inside on a rainsoaked, chilly day like this instead of out on the streets, trying like mad to find shelter from the harsh weather. Back when I was homeless, these days were the worst. It was bad enough already, crawling like a rat through Dumpsters, trying to find food or anything that resembled it. But when the weather was awful, life was unbearable and full of despair on every street corner. Nowhere to hide, no way to ever really feel warm, fed, or rested. All you could do was keep walking, keep moving, and hope that things got better.

I stepped away from the hotel windows, approached the entrance of the ballroom, and looked in. Hundreds of well-dressed people milled around, shaking hands and talking among themselves. Someone pointed me in the direction of my table near the front of the large, elegantly decorated room. As I made my way through the crowd, some people rushed forward to shake my hand and congratulate me on my “remarkable achievement.” They thanked me for wanting to speak on behalf of those who had no voice. Didn’t they know how I used to be one of those same people? They kind of forgot that, looking at me now, all cleaned up.

“Rufus, thank God. What are you trying to do, give us a heart attack?” one of my friends exclaimed. Brian Levin, a Stanford Law School alumnus and national expert on homelessness, motioned for me to sit down. He looked frantic that I was late. I suddenly felt bad about my lifelong habit of always getting into trouble and setting people off, even though most of the time I didn’t mean it.

I sat in my seat, picked up the event program, and started reading it. There I was, on the prestigious list of civil rights award recipients: Rufus Hannah. The program talked about how I “overcame embarrassment, unemployment, alcoholism, and disabilities to turn his life around and in the process help others.” Was this me? Heck, I felt like
I was reading about someone else.

I picked up a pen and started jotting down some notes on the back of the program. I was supposed to give a speech when I got the award, but I had no idea what to say. Given what my life had been like in recent years, I felt as if this were some kind of bad dream. How do you sum up a whole life in a couple of minutes—especially one that started in such a distant place from where it was now? I thought about being born in a small Southern town, beginning my life by drinking beer from a baby bottle, getting kicked out of school, the whole army disaster, the crazy van trip out West, train jumping—and then, all those years I spent as a homeless drunk.

And, of course, the Bumfights videos—when I risked life and limb for booze while some kids filmed the whole damn thing. Looking at all this on paper, I wondered how any man could have survived. I wondered how my body did survive, especially with all the alcohol I drank.

I flipped the program over to see if there were any hints about what I was supposed to say. It mentioned things about the history of the civil rights award they’d be giving me. When I saw the words civil rights I instantly thought of great men like Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy—certainly not me.

As I continued reading through the program, marveling over the impressive list of recipients and their accomplishments—wondering how in the heck I was even in the same room with them, let alone on the same list—I noticed my hands. They were cracked and calloused from my work as a painter and handyman, but that wasn’t what I was looking at. Even after a number of painful and expensive laser treatments, the letters were still there, tattooed across my knuckles: B-u-mf-i-g-h-t. I thought about the damage these hands had done—to me and, even worse, to my best friend…

February 2001

Crack! My tattooed, bloodied, filthy knuckles slammed viciously into Donnie’s jaw, showing no mercy. The attack was a blind side, pure and simple, and Donnie immediately fell to the ground, instinctively throwing his hands up in the air in an attempt to protect himself. I continued to pummel my best friend, even kicking him while he was down. I vaguely heard the sound of bones cracking in one of Donnie’s ankles from the force of my kicks. I caught glimpses of the black-and-blue bruises I was causing and the blood oozing from Donnie’s wounds as the blows tore through swollen skin. But I continued the savage attack, too damned drunk to even realize what I was doing. Next to us, the teenagers filming the attack whooped and hollered in triumph. This was exactly the result they had been hoping for. I swayed drunkenly, barely noticing that Donnie now cowered on the ground, whimpering, crying out in agony, and begging—begging—for someone to call 911. I stopped swinging and stared blankly at my now-crippled best friend, writhing on the ground in pain, and I saw what I had done. Some tears fell down my cheek.

“You know, Ryan, I don’t think Rufus is MAN enough to throw the first punch!” Zachary Bubeck, one of the filmmakers, had called out. It had only been a few minutes earlier when the idea of beating the crap out of Donnie, which the kids had suggested, had sounded like the dumbest idea in the world.

“Yeah, I think he’s afraid Donnie will whip his ass!” Ryan McPherson, the kingpin of the group, had replied. We’d all gathered in a dirt lot behind a former Taco Bell restaurant in La Mesa, California, a nice suburb of San Diego. The kids were shouting excitedly at us—two middle-aged homeless dudes who were so drunk that remaining upright was a challenge. Two homeless guys: me, Rufus Hannah, age forty-eight, and Donnie Brennan, age fifty-three, my best friend of about ten years. Both veterans, we met and became friends while homeless.

I was just a little guy, and I had an overgrown gray beard that seemed to be an extension of an unruly mop of tangled grayish black hair that flew around my face. Donnie was taller than me, a chatty guy with lots of charisma who had straight, long gray hair flattened under a trucker’s cap. And I couldn’t understand why they thought we would fight each other.

When I was drunk, like now, people could barely understand what the heck I was saying. And when they did, my thick Southern drawl complicated things even more. “Whaddya guys want from me? Why’re ya doin’ this?” I remember slurring at them.

“I don’t think Donnie’s playing along,” Ryan said. “He’s not a team player, and I think he’s going to ruin the project for all of us, and you’re not going to make your share of the money, Rufus.”

“What do I care about the money?” I snapped.

Bubeck laughed. “No money, no beer.”