Greenville's free alternative weekly

In just his short time on the streets, J.B. said he’s already noticed Five Points is a hotbed for drugs. A lot of people in Five Points, he said, would ask homeless folks to buy drugs including crack and cocaine for them to minimize the risk of purchasing it themselves. They use the homeless as middlemen to run them narcotics.

What’s going on in the streets

By Corey Hutchins

“I’m in a homeless situation right now,” said a 45-year-old man named Joseph who said he sometimes goes by J.B. “And I’m going to rise above it. It’s just a matter of time.”

J.B. said his situation is a typical one. He’d been working at a local restaurant about 15 hours a week and because of the hours available he couldn’t afford to pay rent on the trailer he was living in. Eventually he was evicted.

Getting help from the City of Columbia, he said, is very hard though there is a lot of help available for people like himself. He also said that for a man in his situation one would have to be willing to “do the footwork” in order to get assistance if they wanted it.

What he means by that is he would have to walk to a lot of different buildings. He’d pay to ride the bus but he doesn’t have the money.

Help agencies in Columbia, J.B. said, would send him from one place to another.

He’s gone to a place called Cooperative Ministry; a place he thought was supported by many churches in Columbia to help people in situations like himself. When you go there and “plead for help,” though, he said, you have to go to several different places before you even see any of it.

He said he would have to walk to DSS and the Social Security building or a rehab center and then return with conformation that he’d done all those things. When you’re on foot and you’re broke, he said, it’s sometimes a discouragement.

“Some of it is nonsense and some of it is very necessary,” he said.

The stall, skinny black man with a buzzcut said that if you showed every bar and restaurant owner in Five Points his Driver License they would recognize it and say he’s been there looking for work.

He said an employee of one local bar offered him work at the end of the night one evening but when J.B. came back later he was turned away. He said he’d spoken to one employee at around 7 p.m. and explained his situation, telling them they’d be very satisfied with the cleaning he would do or whatever they needed done. He said the man told him to come back later and when he did, a manager he hadn’t previously spoken to told him what he could do was “hit the door.”

J.B. said that night he walked up Devine Street and crawled into the hallway of an apartment building, sat on the steps and went to sleep.

He also said he has diabetes and once when he asked a bouncer of another local bar for some water the bouncer pushed him on the chest so hard he fell into the street.

In just his short time on the streets, J.B. said he’s already noticed Five Points is a hotbed for drugs. A lot of people in Five Points, he said, would ask homeless folks to buy drugs including crack and cocaine for them to minimize the risk of purchasing it themselves. They use the homeless as middlemen to run them narcotics.

“I would probably get a lot of backlash, you know what I’m saying? And I don’t need that in my life, but I’m going to tell you: a lot of these guys you’ll see them because they have a pattern…somebody will give them a little money, you’ll see that.”

He said a homeless man might walk up to a couple sitting at the fountain and the guy may open his wallet and give the homeless man money. J.B. believes that sometimes this could be a way for a student to purchase drugs downtown.

But J.B. doesn’t do drugs, he said. Not anymore. Now he’s just trying to find a way to make a buck. More often than not, he said, he gets doors slammed in face. He believes he shouldn’t be in the situation he’s currently in because he’s honest and he likes helping people. When asked how up-to-date he was with current evens he said though he may not know what’s going on nationally he knows what’s going on “in the street.”