A Media Pioneer: Greg Carr

Somewhere in one of my boxes of old papers I have a little scrap of paper with Greg's name and phone number on it. It has survived more than two decades of moves, marriage, children and is a small reminder of my past, of the girl I used to be. It was 1985, Reagan was just starting his second term in the White House and every morning when I turned my boom box on, I heard Tina Turner's voice on the radio asking, "What's Love Got to do With It?'. I was sixteen that year and Greg was a DJ at Sunrise Roller Rink in a Sacramento suburb when we first met. I was drawn to him. I remember sitting in the food court talking while he took breaks and we discovered a mutual love of writing, music and art. There was a fourteen year age difference between us and as I write this today as a mother of a child not all that much younger than I was at that time, it makes me want to raise an eyebrow, but our friendship was as real as any I have ever found. The Greg Carr I knew was fiercely creative and deeply perceptive, a gentleman and I was always safe in his presence.

We traded stories, phone numbers and an intense friendship developed. I remember long phone calls, seeing movies together and lively conversations. Back then I was writing a lot of poetry and in him I found a friendly audience. He helped me publish some of my first poems (as bad as they were) and his consistent encouragement fueled me. As the years passed and I finished my two year stint at Sierra College and prepared to transfer to Southern Oregon State, I remember he talked about wanting to create a 'zine that would showcase local music and promote artists and writers alike. Long before I heard the term "indi media", Greg was describing it. He was a pioneer of new media and envisioned news that could be free of corporate control. Sometime in the late 1980's, he was heavily promoting a local band, I Love Ethyl" and he seemed genuinely happy in that capacity, although at the time I recognized that he was someone who would try different hats on while he was figuring out who he wanted to be.

Once I landed in Oregon, I never saw him again. We wrote back and forth a few times and he sent me clippings of some of the things he was doing. The letters were followed by a single phone call which would have been in 1993, but by then I was living with my husband and our last conversation was awkward. I remember feeling rather badly about that for some time, but figured that someday we would cross paths again. A few years ago I even made a half-hearted attempt to find him through google, but thought he had might have moved out of Sacramento and so I went about my life assuming that he was healthy and happy as I always knew him to be.

This month my mom happened upon a copy of the Sacramento News and Review and saw a letter that mentioned his death. She remembered his name from all those years ago and e-mailed me the news.

I've spent most of my life fighting for the rights of low income and homeless people and to discover that someone who was once an important figure in my life spent his last years living homeless on the streets of Sacramento breaks my spirit. It hurts to think that many people if they remember him at all, will just think of the man I read about who slipped away in October, without knowing or understanding that who he was and the life he lived can't possibly be summed up so easily. He was homeless in the end, but he also had a family and friends who loved him.

Some of his friends have reported that he repeatedly expressed fear of being killed as he lived on the streets and this haunts me considerably. It sounds too familiar to what I have often heard from other homeless friends and acquaintances over the years. Collectively they've told me stories of feeling hunted, of being pursued. In a society that pares human services down to the bone and seems comfortable with the notion that some people can be cast away and the most vulnerable among us remains largely underserved from the basic emergency services and protection that the rest of us take for granted, continues to be something that I reject and will fight to change.

I don't know the circumstances that led to his homelessness although others have suggested that health problems and heavy drinking might have been factors, but I do know that if you had known him back when I did, you would have never guessed that his life would someday end in a doorway of a muffler shop on a cold October morning. And I know that it is human nature for some to find blame with Greg, so they can believe that such a fate could never happen to them.

But I feel less safe than I did last week, knowing that I've lost another creative, interesting friend to death by homelessness. If poverty was a cliff, I worry that too many of us live way too close to the edge and I have witnessed how easy it is to fall.