Ronnie raises Shaft Tail Finches in his apartment. There are nine of them there now: four adults and five babies. He gave me a tiny egg to take home that looks just like a white jelly bean. The birds are stunning, and when the babies are hungry they make a racket, and then their parents fly into the cage to feed them. I will never be able to see Ronnie again without thinking about the gentleness with which he raises these fragile creatures. He bought his first bird cage before he had housing, and stored it with a friend, but knew he wanted to have birds when he got his own apartment. He got that in 2021, and he has clearly spent time decorating it. There are many pictures hung on the walls, all of which he found at various thrift stores, mostly of nature and wild life. His shower curtain, a gift from Jennifer Livovich, has pictures of birds on it. And in the corner of his living room are two bird cages and a hanging nest strung from the ceiling. After nearly ten years of mostly sleeping outside, Ronnie has a home again.

Ronnie has never met his father. His mom had him when she was eighteen years old, and moved from Texas to Denver when he was six months old. When he was six years old, Ronnie moved in with his grandmother and step-grandfather and lived with them until he was twelve. His grandmother was physically abusive, and Ronnie looked forward to the visits he had with his mom and step-dad in Aurora. Eventually he moved in with them. His mom expected him to be pretty self-sufficient, which he already was. It wasn’t a particularly nurturing home, but there was no physical abuse. He was a good student in Middle School, and an average student in High School, where he started partying a little and stealing from his mom’s personal stash of weed. He had his first drink in 9th grade. Ronnie said he was raised to be tough, and at 17, he dropped out of high school, but immediately went to take the classes necessary to get his GED at the Emily Griffith Opportunity School. Two weeks after he turned 18, his mother kicked him out of the house, giving him twenty dollars and a red suitcase. His grandmother was an apartment manager at the time, and she let him stay in one of the apartments in her building. While living there, he met a woman in the building, and she’d buy him beer. She was 25, had four kids, and was in the midst of a divorce. Soon they started dating, and when Ronnie was 19, she got pregnant. This was not in his plan, and they broke up, but Ronnie knew that he couldn’t walk away from his child. Three days after she was born, Ronnie went to visit and held his daughter for the first time. He said he was terrified, but didn’t want her to grow up without a father. He got a job at Windsor Gardens doing landscaping for $ 7.25/ hour and lived at his friend Jeff’s house, visiting his daughter weekly. His girlfriend was living in subsidized housing with her oldest son and their baby. She was in a custody battle, and her three other children – twin girls and a boy – were living with their father. Ronnie moved in to help with raising his daughter and step-son. Then came the call that one of the twins had been sexually assaulted by her father. A sexual abuse charge was filed, and to avoid foster care, all three kids came to live with Ronnie and his girlfriend. So now Ronnie and his girlfriend were living in a subsidized apartment with five kids, three of whom had been physically and emotionally abused.

Ronnie stepped up, and took on more work. He did a variety of jobs, including restaurant work and car detailing. Eventually he became a detail supplies salesman, and his salary rose to three times minimum wage. By this time, he had rented a house for the family in Arvada. Ronnie said they were involved parents, and that he’d been intent on breaking the cycle of abuse that he’d come from, and that his step-children had experienced. After more than eight or nine years, he and his girlfriend got married, primarily due to convenience, and the ease of following through with paperwork for the kids at school. Ronnie was doing well at work, he had a good income, and life was pretty “normal.” But by his mid-30’s, Ronnie also realized that he was not happy with his home life. He had fallen out of love with his wife, and he was becoming resentful, especially after she lost her nursing license, along with her $ 25/ hour job. Up to this point, he had just been a social drinker, but that rapidly began to change.

By 2008, Ronnie had gone from drinking on the weekends to drinking daily. He said he’d started just having a few beers and smoking a joint with customers at the end of the day, to starting to drink at lunch, and eventually at breakfast. Ronnie said he was drinking 12 or more beers every night. His daughter, over 18 now, had left home, and it was just him and his wife. The car market and the housing market crashed, and Ronnie went from making over $60,000 per year, to having his house foreclosed on. He had to file short-sell, taking a 65K loss. As Ronnie put it, his comfortable life blew up. Ronnie had become part-owner of the car-detailing company, but his two partners forced him out because business was slow, blaming it also on his drinking. Ronnie walked away from the business, filed for divorce from his wife, and began couch surfing.

Up to this time, Ronnie would have told you he didn’t think much about people who were homeless. They were on the fringes of his life; maybe every now and then, he’d give someone a little money. But he hadn’t given much thought to the circumstances of unhoused people. He was a registered Republican (still is), who was about to have his assumptions about homelessness cracked wide open.

By the time Ronnie was 39 or 40, his problems with drinking were not a secret. He’d also started drinking hard liquor. Ronnie’s friends were willing to let him stay with them, but told him he had to lay off the booze. He’d stay with someone for a while and then have to leave. Ronnie went to stay with his best friend, Vic, in Strausberg, CO, and Vic warned him that if he didn’t stop drinking he’d have to go. Ronnie didn’t stop, so his friend dropped him off at the Rescue Mission in Denver and told him to get his act together. As Ronnie put it, he couldn’t think of a worst place to be as a middle-class white man. Two years before he’d been hanging out at a car event with John Elway, and now he was in a homeless shelter. He said the first night was terrifying and super cold. Ronnie said he kept to himself; he could not wrap his head around what was happening to him, and how he had ended up in this place. He only stayed at the shelter for a couple nights. The third night he’d arrived too late and wasn’t admitted. It was freezing, so he decided to sneak into a garage, a location he knew from having done a side-job there a few weeks prior. When the family discovered him there, they called the police, and Ronnie got taken to Denver County jail. Ronnie said the cops roughed him up, and he then detoxed in Denver County jail with Librium, staying there for 13 days. [Side note: I asked Ronnie to elaborate on detoxing in jail and he shared that Denver County jail was good about giving Librium and decent medical attention, compared to some other places. He described Adams County detox as medical lock-down, basically solitary confinement; Jeffco detox locked him down for the first day, but gave the minimum of Librium needed to get by; Boulder County jail was better than ARC, and did a good job with detox].

While this was not Ronnie’s first time in jail (he’d been once before when a neighbor had called the police because they heard him and his wife yelling), this was the start of what would become a cycle: Ronnie would stay with a friend for a while, get some work, pay a little rent, and then lose his job after 35-40 days because he couldn’t maintain it because of his drinking. Ronnie said he still was not willing to admit that his drinking was a problem, but it got worse and worse. He’d get kicked out of a friend’s house, get picked up for shoplifting trying to get food and supplies. “There’s no guidebook to being homeless, especially coming from the world I came from. I just did what I needed to do to survive.” Ronnie was in and out of jail by this point, estranged from his mother because she couldn’t handle his drinking, even though she herself was living with an alcoholic. He roamed around from county to county: Denver to Jefferson to Weld to Adams. He had court cases all over. He didn’t want to stay in shelters, so when he wasn’t with friends, he stayed outside. He didn’t run with a crowd; he kept to himself. He slept in Tuff Sheds in the Home Depot parking lot, in vacant buildings, in apartments under construction, and in trash dumpsters because the recycled cardboard kept him warm. He told a scary story of waking up in a dumpster moments before the trash collector dumped everything in the compactor, and Ronnie jumped out, making sure to grab his bottle of liquor.

This was Ronnie’s life for nearly a decade. He said he blew over 5 three times. His daughter, who’d become a mortician, worried about him constantly, especially since she had access to his medical care. At one point he went to live with her for a few months, and promised her that he wouldn’t drink in the house. When he broke his promise, she told him he had to leave. The night she kicked him out, she told him she’d already picked his casket out, and was just waiting for a phone call. Ronnie said it was a truly hopeless time: his best friend and his daughter had had enough, and kicked him out, and his other close friend refused to talk to him. I asked him if he was suicidal, and he said that it was a good thing that one of the friends he’d stayed with had his guns locked up, or it could have turned out differently. He said his only hope was not to wake up the next day, and when he did, he was angry that he had. It was around this time that Ronnie ended up in Boulder County. He met a guy who told him he knew of a tunnel in Superior, and they stayed there for 8 months. They peed in bottles, and pooped in boxes that they put in bags and then threw out, or sometimes just went to the bathroom in dumpsters. He flew a sign to support himself, and said some people were really kind, sometimes giving him gift cards. He maintained irregular contact with his daughter. Ronnie somehow managed to get sober a couple times, but would then relapse. It was a period of crashing hopes and expectations.

Ronnie said that at this point his life was completely upside down. He desperately wanted to get sober. He described his addiction to alcohol as a monster that he could not escape. After a couple tries at rehab, Ronnie went to Fort Lyon in 2017 (where he met Jennifer Livovich). At one point, he also ended up homeless in Washington State for a few months. And then he got a phone call from a friend of his who used to drink the way he did. She told him that she was at the Wyoming Rescue Mission in Casper, and that she’d been sober for five or six months. Ronnie’s best friend, Vic, let him stay with him again for a couple nights, and then paid for his Greyhound ticket to Wyoming. Ronnie stayed at the Wyoming Rescue Mission for 10 months. It was his sixth rehab, and he says their faith-based program and his belief in God was a salvation to him.

It wasn’t the last time he drank though. He relapsed a couple more times, and the Wyoming program offered to send him to an intensive 60-day rehab and let him back in. He refused, drank for a few weeks, couch surfing again, and then got very sick and was in and out of the hospital in Wyoming. One night he went to the movies, and then ended up at the top of a five-story parking garage. He called his friend, Lori, who had gotten sober in Wyoming, and said he was scared because he was not afraid to kill himself; instead, it was a soothing thought. Lori called Melissa, a young friend of hers whose husband had recently died after being shot six times, and Melissa immediately called Ronnie. “I’m here,” she said, “let me take you to Wyoming Behavioral Institute.” Ronnie credits her with saving his life too, and says she will always hold a special place in his heart. He finished the bottle he had on him, and she took off work and took him there, where he stayed for 10 days. It was the first time he’d been in a mental hospital.

Once more, Ronnie turned to his friend Vic. They’ve been best friends since they were 14. Ronnie asked if he could stay with him again because he had a hernia surgery scheduled in Denver (a medical issue he’s had since birth), and Vic said he had to ask his wife. She agreed, and they arranged for Ronnie to take a Greyhound Bus from the mental hospital to downtown Denver, where Vic picked him up. Ronnie ended up having the surgery at BCH, which unfortunately was not successful. After the botched surgery, Ronnie’s disability claim got approved. Ronnie stayed with his friend Vic, and then at the shelter while he waited for housing, which he got in 2021. He said it was incredibly hard to stay sober at the shelter, but his desire for drink had finally gone away. He describes himself as “98% sober” since March 2020. He said by every medical measure, he should not be alive. Ronnie said two losses in particular haunt him. He had to give up his black lab, Chelsea, because he could not take care of her. And, on the day of his daughter’s wedding, he was too drunk to walk her down the aisle, and his step-son had to drive him home.

It is not surprising that Ronnie’s life experiences changed his assumptions about who ends up homeless. He said he met people you would never expect, like a doctor who lost his license, and a police officer who used drugs on duty and ended up going to jail. He said his own drastic change of circumstances gave him insight into things he’d never understood before, like mental health issues, incarceration, and the cost of homelessness. (He estimates the cost for the number of times he has been in and out of jail, the hospital, and the expense of ambulances, at near 500K). Ronnie now works and volunteers for Feet Forward, and he mentors other people struggling with alcohol (one man came over during our interview, and it was clear he was leaning on Ronnie for support). I was touched by something Ronnie said later over the phone: “people don’t really fall between the cracks -- they’re actually right there in front of you; they don’t disappear.” Ronnie’s life has taken a great number of twists and turns, but today he’s got his own home, he’s got a girlfriend, some really good friends, his daughter, a son-in-law, and a baby grandson. And, on top of that, he’s raising some very beautiful little finches.