by Johnny Zokovitch
Jonesy lived in his car, parked day-in and day-out, in the same space on the street in front of where I lived. The proximity to my home afforded him a degree of safety; I lived in a Catholic Worker House, sharing my living space with unhoused folks as well as my family. People understood us as an informal shelter and drop-in center for those who lived on the streets. Local street folks knew they could come by any time, day or night, for solace or support.
Jonesy rarely partook of our hospitality though. He seemed content to simply be close by, as if our protection extended out several dozen feet from the house itself, sheltering those within reach. During the year or so that he lived in his car on our street, Jonesy probably came inside no more than a half-dozen times — maybe for a cup of coffee, to use the phone, or some other fairly minor service.
He was in his 60s, although he easily could pass for much older. Skinny and frail, shockingly white hair, he spent his days walking the streets and smoking his cigarettes. I can’t recall ever seeing him drive his car. The reddish-orange Oldsmobile, a mid-1980s model, simply sat in the same parking space, day after day. At night, Jonesy leaned the driver’s seat all the way back and slept.
I wondered sometimes why a man his age didn’t have a place of his own. He was old enough to be drawing Social Security and probably would have been eligible for a number of low-cost housing programs aimed at serving elderly people. But he slept in his car and he took his meals at the Salvation Army or from other charitable organizations who served food in the evenings in our city core.
I’ve often wondered at how easily we form opinions about people based on their physical appearance or their circumstances, on what we can glean from the most cursory of observations, extrapolating from that little bit of information which is most easily accessible to us.
What I knew about Jonesy that few others did, maybe no one else, is this. Jonesy had worked his entire life up north, and he drew a small pension in addition to Social Security. He didn’t live in his car because he was spending the little money he did have on drugs, alcohol, sex or other vices. He didn’t gamble and he hadn’t lost all of his savings due to bad investments or sketchy purchases or profligate living.
Jonesy had a daughter and a grandchild. Several years earlier, his daughter’s husband had left her and the child, and Jonesy had used what money he had saved to help them find a place to live, buying them food, clothing and other essentials. But his daughter continued to have a hard time — unable to find work that paid enough to cover the bills she had to care for herself and her daughter. So each month, rather than pay for an apartment for himself or spend his money on utilities and food and a television and other items most of us would never think to give up, Jonesy would cash his pension check and his Social Security, and he’d send nearly all of what he had back to Ohio, back to his daughter, so she could stay in her house and provide for his grandchild. And he lived out of an old car.
I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think Jonesy’s daughter knew that he was living out of his car. Insofar as I knew Jonesy, I don’t think it is information he would have shared with her. He wouldn’t want her — or anyone else for that matter — to know what he was doing. He just did it because she was his daughter.
Jonesy never told me outright about what he was doing. I put it together, over time, as I learned small bits about his life and his circumstances from the few conversations we had and some errands for which he asked my help.
As so many are struggling these days because of political decisions and economic systems that force their lives out on a wire precariously – I often recall a saying that I’ve alternately heard attributed to Plato, Philo or Robin Williams (go figure). “Be kind to everyone you meet, for each of us is fighting a great battle that others know nothing about.”
The battles that others are fighting are most often hidden from us, concealed, perhaps, to even those who know them best. So too, sometimes, are the sacrifices others make in fighting those battles, their lives marked by invisible acts of courage and generosity and love, about which no one else knows.
Johnny Zokovitch is the former executive director of Pax Christi USA. He currently serves on the board of the Pax Christi International Fund for Peace and is in pastoral leadership at St. Cronan Catholic Church in St. Louis. Read more from Johnny at https://johnnyzokovitch.substack.com/ and sign up there to receive his articles directly to your email inbox.