The first time I ever heard about the homeless man living in the vast southeast Dallas urban forest was in the late 1990s at a meeting of our neighborhood homeowners association. For the next year, 1999-2000, I watched along Jim Miller Road where he reportedly hiked daily on his way to somewhere. It took me another four years before he let me give him a ride. His name was Charles.
Charles was effectively feral after years off the grid, so we barely spoke as I treated the entire thing as if routine. I dropped him at an intersection near Fair Park where he went to a mission for lunch Monday through Friday.
In time, I learned how to find the rhythm to be his friend. Learning to sense his boundaries while recognizing the necessity of learning, then maintaining, my own.
Above all else, I came to see my friend Charles as a time capsule relic from the past century, held in limbo by this futurist century’s incongruous world. He was already living in the woods when the computer became a household norm. The smartphone confounds him, let alone social media, where I began to post what became the Charles and Randall Chronicles after 2008. Charles never could get my name right.
When two people become one-on-one buddies, an insider humor can develop. With Charles, it was a dry wit exchange, both juvenile absurdist and affectionately droll.
Once, when we had transported god-knows-how-many bags of aluminum cans he had gathered to sell, I asked him how much he netted. When he told me $71, I said, “Charles, you’re gonna live like a pasha.”
His response was to freeze as the words I said scrolled through his eyes and mind like headlines on CNN before repeating, “Live like a pasha.”
Randall: “Yep. Like a pasha”
Charles: “I don’t think I’m a pasha.”
Randall: “Well, Charles, it’s like that old TV show Queen For A Day where, after all the cans we sold, you get to be a Pasha for a Week.”
Charles (grinning boyishly): “Pasha for a week. That’s a lot of French fries.”
I ultimately saw that Charles was probably far on the autism scale while becoming increasingly schizophrenic. He was comfortable nowhere, but was a voracious eater.
Enter Golden Corral, where I would take him every Tuesday for years. He would be waiting at 1 p.m. at the corner. Through Golden Corral in Mesquite, I was able to help him become comfortable in a public space. No one stared at him at Golden Corral, where we always sat in the most distant corner.
Christmas became important. I arrived at the top of the hill and parked to call with our Tarzan yodel in the middle of the darkest frozen mist, “Char-Ules,” until he appeared to be taken to stay in the Hyatt, and later Omni Hotel, on Christmas Eve courtesy of the SoupMan people. He avoided eye contact, restless with emotion and anticipation, saying, “I started crying. I didn’t know if you would come.”
In 2018, I began creating the Charles Dollar Tree on the path to his camp that he would find when he returned Christmas Day. Covered with 100 colorful envelopes my Facebook readers had sent, attaching the cards bottom-to-top with jewel-tone plastic clothespins, each containing $1.
My assistant throughout this process was the little black cat that Charles had rescued from the golf course when he heard it crying one night. The cat he called Zombie disappeared on New Year’s Day 2019.
In 2015, a handsome blond shepherd dog he named Sid adopted Charles. Through donations, I was able to get Sid his shots and neutered, as well as an oversize insulated dog house Charles was certain Sid would never use.
Sid loved it. It was beautiful to see this feral dog and feral man bond. But, like most dreams with Charles, it was not meant to be. When Sid was killed by a car after following Charles, it was Facebook friends who came to help me transport the now decaying dog to the veterinarian because Charles could not accept that his dog was dead.
No good dream went unpunished. That story broke both Charles and Randall’s hearts jointly.
For years, I sought medical help for Charles for what was diagnosed at the Stew Pot as a double hernia. Charles despises doctors since he had been in mental institutions, so it required dicey begging and Golden Corral bribery on my part.
At the crest of that attempt, the surgeon at Parkland Hospital was blatantly condescending when I attempted to fill her in on aspects of Charles’ life, assuring her that I would take care of him post-op until he was recovered.
Her response was tepid, prompting me to lean forward, asking her through clenched teeth, “Do you really believe that I, a retired Neiman Marcus executive, wake up in the morning and think, ‘What sounds good today, Rawlins,’ and the answer is, ‘Go get your homeless friend Charles and drive to Parkland Hospital and wait for hours in a series of doctor waiting rooms. That sounds like fun!’”
That ended that.
In 2020, I was able by happenstance to call Charles’ mother in Louisiana. It did not go well. She told me I should have called the police.
When I said they would have put him into a mental ward, she said, “Isn’t that where he belongs?”
I offered my phone to Charles to call her but he refused. She later died. Charles’ younger brother, Steve, was able to call me after tracing that earlier call, and we have since met. Charles’ siblings thought he was dead. He now stands to inherit a sizable sum. My 21-year-work is done.
When people talk about the homeless, I marvel how “they” are seen as a monolith. We are talking about a million variants; those for whom the bottom fell out circumstantially, those who suffer mental illnesses, those who are in chronic PTSD panic.
What I learned by becoming the brotherly-love friend to the man my HOA in 1999 made sound like a scary creature is that these are real people. Some damaged, some ruined.
I suppose my takeaway was to think of the time when Charles gave me a Hallmark card that he inscribed, “To my friend Randall. I guess you are my friend. I never had a friend.”
Rawlins Gilliland is a writer in Dallas. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.
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