After Stakes was evacuated from the woods, he went back to sleeping in his truck near the train station in Williston and painting decks for $10 an hour. Sometimes it was difficult to sleep in the parking lot. Trains roared by at all hours of the night. Almost every night when the bars closed at 2 a.m., drunken crowds walked past his car, waking him. Other nights, he was part of the drunken crowd. Fights often broke out in the parking lot. “They’d be fightin’ outside my truck and I didn’t know who they were,” Stakes said. “Then I’d have to try and break ’em up.” Stakes was known in the Williston bar scene for breaking up fights—he hated seeing people be violent with each other. One night, Stakes said he broke up a fight between two men and one guy was so thankful, he handed Stakes a $100 bill and took him to the strip club to buy him a lap dance. Stakes took it as a sign from God that he should continue breaking up fights.
For meals, Stakes usually kept sandwich supplies and milk in a cooler in the bed of his truck or gathered donated canned food from the Salvation Army. A mobile church van, run by a man named Pastor Larry, often drove by the parking lot and handed out sandwiches to the men sleeping there. One friend of Stakes’s who was leaving Williston to go home for the winter bequeathed Stakes his camp cookstove, but Stakes didn’t want to draw attention to himself by using it, so he kept it packed away. Stakes missed the serenity of living at Trenton Lake, but he liked being closer to the bars. “It was a prime spot ’cause all the bars were right there,” he said. “You just walk right over, get drunk, and walk back.”
During this time, Stakes frequented KK’s Korner bar almost every night. He made friends easily when he was drinking. One was Eddie Bergeson, whom he met at KK’s when Bergeson yelled at Stakes across the bar: “Hey, Moses!” referring to Stakes’s long white hair and beard. After chatting and discussing their favorite bands, they found out they were both sleeping in the same parking lot. Bergeson had come to Williston from Mississippi to find work as a painter. Back in Mississippi, Bergeson was a drummer in a band. He usually manned the jukebox at KK’s while Stakes simulated the guitar parts for each song. They became fast friends. Then Stakes met Greg Mackie, who came from Portland, Oregon, at KK’s, and the three of them started hanging out.
Mackie was a younger man who liked to smoke marijuana. He wore a bandana wrapped around his forehead and jean shorts and sandals. When he was younger, he once attempted to follow the wind, he said. Literally. He waited until he felt a breeze, then walked in that direction until he felt the wind shift. But the wind didn’t bring him to Williston. He came in 2011 because he needed a job like everyone else.
Mackie was another refugee from the housing market and construction industry collapse. He used to make a decent living working in construction, but ever since the recession, he’d been living off food stamps in Portland, hanging out at the park playing chess and basketball and watching fire dancers. When he ran out of money and heard about the oil boom, he decided to give it a try. He’d been in Williston the longest out of all his friends. When he first arrived, he quickly found a job doing construction for $14 an hour, but the job didn’t provide housing. He slept in a tent behind a grove of trees by the railroad tracks. It seemed like a good spot at first, but he soon realized he was sleeping next to a police shooting range. He didn’t stay there long because he grew tired of being jolted awake every morning by gunshots. Next he hid out illegally in an abandoned, bedbug-infested man camp trailer for a few weeks but worried about getting caught. He then bought a rusted-out Chrysler minivan for $275. “It ran but it didn’t have no brakes, so you had to drive with the e-brake,” he said. “It was pretty scary.” When that broke down, he sold it for parts and purchased an old, 16-passenger school bus to sleep in. He renovated it with the help of his friends, pulling out the seats and installing a fridge, a stove, a stereo system, a heater, and a solar panel on the roof to power everything. The fridge, however, worked only when the bus was perfectly level, which was rare. He parked it near where Stakes and Bergeson slept.
Though the area was mostly empty during the day, by around 9 p.m., the parking lot and adjacent street filled up with sleeping men, feet sticking out of car windows and pillows scrunched up against the doors and seats. Trash from the car sleepers littered the parking lot. Stakes and Bergeson always parked their cars backward in the lot, up against a chain-link fence and under a few tall cottonwood trees. Parking backward helped hide their tags and, for Stakes, deterred stragglers from picking through his belongings in the bed of his pickup. He and Bergeson liked to park in the corner if spots were available. They felt this was the most hidden area of the parking lot, though if anyone was looking for sleeping men in cars, they wouldn’t be difficult to find. Looming over the parking lot was a sign that read VIDEO SURVEILLANCE with a picture of a video camera, but no one seemed to worry about who might be watching them.
Another man named Nate Beatty, in his late 40s and a father of five, soon joined their crew. Beatty came from Seattle, Washington, after he lost his home in the mortgage crisis, went through a messy divorce, and lost his construction business. He also slept in his car when he arrived to Williston. The four men parked next to each other and met up at KK’s Korner nearly every evening after work to drink, talk, and sing along to the jukebox. With Budweiser pints at KK’s costing only $1.50, their daily earnings lasted longer. Beatty and Bergeson started a band called Soul Shaker with two other guys and played a gig at a biker bar called the Shop. It was the only show they played, however. Many nights they ended up at the strip clubs, which Stakes called “the titty bars.”
Soon all of their vehicles were “tagged.” Police officers came by and slapped notices on their windshields. They’d be towed if they didn’t vacate the parking lot within 24 hours. Or sometimes an officer would come by in the middle of the night, tap on a window, and tell the men they couldn’t sleep there. They’d disperse for a night or two, parking closer to the train tracks or in the adjacent parking lot, and, after a few days, return to their original spots. Stakes called them “gypsies, just wanderin’ around.” He paused. “I guess I should say tipsy, kinda stumblin’ around.”
By October, however, temperatures had already dropped significantly. The first snowfall of the year was on October 21. A light dusting of snow covered Williston’s streets. With each passing day, temperatures fell. Anyone who had ever survived a winter in Williston knew what was coming.
Police officers began handing out tickets more often in the parking lot, and eventually the group dispersed. Beatty rented a room about a mile away from the bars, and Mackie moved his little yellow school bus to different parking lots around the city, sometimes hiding out in a junkyard.
But Stakes attempted to stay, rotating where he parked his truck. He collected more blankets and sleeping bags from men who were heading to warmer locations, and wrapped them around himself to stay warm. Sometimes he kept his car running to use the heater, but he didn’t want to burn through too much fuel. He’d warm up the truck and, when it was nice and toasty, turn off the engine and fall asleep. About an hour later, he’d wake up shivering, turn the engine back on, crank up the heater, then turn it off again and fall asleep. He repeated this all through the night. Sleeping with the engine running was common practice for anyone attempting to outlast a Williston winter in their car, but it could be dangerous. People could asphyxiate from exhaust fumes if they left the car running without proper ventilation. But, if they slept for too long without a heater, they could freeze to death or wake up with frostbite.
One night in December, the temperature was around minus 30 degrees. Nate Beatty left the bars at closing time and began walking home to his apartment a mile away wearing only a thin jacket. His hands soon lost all feeling, the hairs in his nostrils froze, and he began shivering uncontrollably. He realized he might not make it back to the apartment without becoming hypothermic. He saw Stakes sleeping in his truck and pounded on the window. Stakes let him in and blasted the heater. “Tom helped save my life that night,” said B
eatty.
When Shorty, the owner of KK’s, found out Stakes was still homeless and living in his car, he said, “Tom, you can’t live out there in your truck, it’s too cold. You’re too old to be out there. Come up here and sleep on the floor.” There was floor space in Shorty’s apartment above the bar, so Stakes started sleeping there. Eddie Bergeson sometimes crashed there as well, but he finally decided it was too cold for him in Williston and left to go to Austin, Texas, for the winter.
The construction industry typically slows down during winter, even in a boomtown, and soon Stakes’s boss had no more decks to paint. Stakes spent his days drinking at KK’s and looking for work. Occasionally he’d meet a guy at the bar who would hire him for a day of work, but the stretches without work were growing longer. After one particularly long stretch, Stakes was down to $2. He didn’t know what to do. In the morning, he prayed. “God, please help me. I don’t know how it’s gonna happen but if you can jus’ bless me and help me somehow.” That night, Stakes’s friend drove him to Champ’s Casino on the north edge of town to buy him a drink. When Stakes stepped outside to smoke a cigarette, in the corner of his eye, he saw something sticking out of the snow. It was a dollar bill. Then he saw another dollar bill. He dug in the snow a little more and found two $100 bills. He looked up toward the sky and said, “Thank you, Lord.”
Soon Stakes felt like he’d outstayed his welcome at the apartment above KK’s. Six people were regularly sleeping in the two-bedroom apartment—two in the bedrooms, three on the floor, and Shorty on the couch. And since it was connected to a bar, people were walking through the apartment all the time, at all hours of the night. Stakes could hear the thud thud thud of the music coming from below until 2 a.m.
In December, Stakes found a new job. He was hired by a man named Gary Westerman, who paid him $18 an hour to work construction jobs, his highest wage yet. Then Stakes heard his friend Jesse, another man he met at KKs, had found a trailer to live in and wanted a roommate to help split the $900 rent. Stakes agreed. It was a 34-foot camper, but the water and sewage lines weren’t hooked up, so he and Jesse used a five-gallon bucket for a toilet, but it had electricity, heat, and a TV. Compared to where he had been living, it was heaven. The problem was it was a 30-minute drive from Williston, just outside of a town called Alexander, and Stakes had to spend more money in gas to drive back and forth.
I saw Tom Stakes again when he was living in the camper near Alexander. It was Valentine’s Day, and nighttime temperatures were dropping to minus 35 with the wind chill. I bundled up in every piece of warm clothing I owned and met him at KK’s Korner. He looked a little worn and tired but about the same—his white hair was still long and wiry; his beard longer and fuller. He wore a beige winter coat and faded jeans, but no hat or gloves.
He was upset when I arrived. Shorty had died two days ago. He’d been arrested for sexually assaulting a woman while she was sleeping. The day after, he died of alcohol poisoning in jail. Stakes heard that Shorty went through alcohol withdrawal, and the guards didn’t get him medical attention in time. I tried to confirm this, but the only thing it said on Shorty’s death certificate was that he had died of “chronic alcoholism, pulmonary emphysema and pneumonia.”
“He was a drunk and he’d stay drunk all the time,” explained Stakes, “but he was harmless as a flea. Oh, bless his heart. Shorty was a good man.” Stakes nursed his beer. “Man, it’s been a tough winter. It’s been bad. I’ve lost all these people.” Stakes heard that another friend, also a KK’s Korner regular, had committed suicide a month before. “He’d come in every mornin’ when the bar opened. Every mornin’,” Stakes explained. “He was a millionaire here. He had all kinda money. Anyway, he shot himself. He killed himself.”
I told him I was sorry and we sat in silence for a bit.
Stakes continued. “A lot of people left because it gets too cold. But they’ll be back in the spring probably. But luckily, thank God, I’ve been blessed, and I haven’t had to be out in the cold. Every job I’ve had’s been inside. I’ve been nice and warm and everything’s been good. I’m gettin’ too old to do that stuff outside.”
Suddenly he perked up as if he’d just remembered something important. “And a cat came into my life!” he said, his blue eyes lighting up. “I was outside my trailer and I saw this cat walkin’, and I said, ‘Here, kitty kitty kitty.’” He reenacted the scene, leaning forward with his hand stretched out. “She ran over and now she stays with me. This cat, oh my God, when she stretches out, she reaches from here”—he stood up from the bar stool and marked the spot on his thigh—“all the way down”—and slid his hand down his leg. “She’s the length of my damn leg!” He named her Baby.
Stakes had come to Williston with his cat named Miracle from New Mexico, but one day when he opened his truck door, the cat scurried away and he never saw her again. Now he was worried he might lose Baby. His boss planned to send him to a job in Mandaree, North Dakota, 80 miles away, where Stakes would live in a man camp that didn’t allow pets. “When you got an animal, you got somebody to talk to, you got somebody to take care of, you know, jus’ show your love. Rather than jus’ sittin’ by yourself and watchin’ TV.”
* * *
Twenty years before, when Tom Stakes was homeless in Atlanta, it was one of the loneliest times in his life. His family still didn’t speak to him, and the drugs had completely taken over. He made several attempts to stop but always fell back into the suffocating grip of addiction.
In 2009, it had been more than 10 years since he’d seen his sons. He lived south of Gainesville, Georgia, and was arrested one day for writing bad checks. As he sat in jail, waiting out his sentence, a new inmate walked in. Tom immediately recognized him. It was his oldest son, Jay. Jay had been arrested for a probation violation. “It’s funny how God is,” said Jay. “God has a way of bringing people back together sometimes.” Jay could tell his father had been through a lot. “He was pretty much a skeleton,” Jay said. “His eyes sunk in—he looked terrible.” They were ecstatic to find each other and spent the rest of Tom’s sentence catching up.
Tom discovered that his sons, Jay and Dan, had been searching for him for years. They searched online to see if there was any address or record for Tom Stakes but found nothing. “We’d look for telephone numbers or anything at all, but we couldn’t find anything because my dad likes to live under the radar,” said Jay. Jay was released soon after Tom, and he and Dan went to Auburn, Georgia, where Tom was living, to spend time with their dad.
Tom vowed to change his life after reuniting with his sons. He was done with drugs, he told them. “Once my children found me, that was a big changing point,” Tom said. “They says, ‘Dad, we love you, we’ve been looking for you for years.’ That was when I decided I’d had enough. I’d had a hard life. I wish it on nobody. Nobody needs to go where I went.” He and his sons found an apartment together, and Tom started weaning himself off crack. He turned to alcohol to help with the cravings. They spent a lot of time in Auburn’s bars, drinking cheap beer and getting to know each other again.
Tom discovered that his sons had both struggled with heroin in the past. They also lived in Atlanta around the same time Tom was there. Tom couldn’t believe they had been so close. Tom was heartbroken to find out that a few years before, Jay’s fiancée had been killed in a car accident when she was seven months’ pregnant with Jay’s child. Both his sons were unmarried. “I felt like … that I was a dad again,” Tom said, “and I wanted to try and do the right things by ’em.” Tom wanted a change of scenery, so they headed to Orlando, Florida, where Jay had a girlfriend. When Florida didn’t work out, the three of them moved around and eventually ended up in Red River, New Mexico, after Tom met a traveling preacher named Brother Russell Howard.
Tom had recently become reacquainted with God. Tom wanted to be rebaptized and had the ceremony in a friend’s backyard pond. When they arrived in Red River, he attended Brother Howard’s fellowship, the Jerusalem Connection, and found a j
ob as a dishwasher at a popular Mexican restaurant in town. Jay fell in love and married a woman with two children. Dan found work giving snowmobile tours in the winters and cooking at a pizza place during the summers.
Though Tom attended church and stayed sober when he first arrived, he soon returned to drinking and struggled to stay in control. Tom would visit Jay and his wife, but he would fight with Jay and get drunk around the kids, who were three and six at the time. “I grew up watching that, and I wasn’t gonna let him do it again,” said Jay. “I told him he needed to go.” Tom left the church and became estranged from his son Dan as well. Once again, his life was spiraling out of control. He soon lost his job, his housing, and most of his friends. With nowhere left to go, Tom took shelter in a cave.
When Brother Russell heard Tom was living in a cave, he helped Tom find a rehabilitation and homeless outreach ministry called the Adullam Project Men’s Home in Española, New Mexico. Tom stayed for six months and sobered up.
After rehab, Tom and Jay briefly worked on a construction project together, building a mining town tourist attraction in southwest New Mexico. But during the housing market crash, the project lost its funding. Construction jobs all across the country were becoming harder to find. Jay and his wife divorced after two years together, and he decided to head back to Georgia after an ex-girlfriend called and announced that Jay was a father. But Tom didn’t know where to go.
The New Wild West Page 17