Four Walls: A Tribute to Bobby Messick and the Homeless of Chestertown By Christa Blackmon

The sun has set over the Driftwood Inn. A full moon hangs in the sky, covered by a hazy summer cloud. Bright fluorescent lights illuminate the faces of those who came to pay tribute to Bobby Messick, a chronically homeless and nearly blind Vietnam veteran struggling with addiction who I found collapsed on a slab of concrete while taking a walk with my two and half year old daughter just a few days before.

It is a gathering of between forty and fifty people. His two sisters stand strong on the spot where Bobby died with tears in their eyes and lit candles in their hands. They are flanked by some of the community workers who have been involved in fighting homelessness in Chestertown and came to Bobby’s aid in the last few weeks of his life. Also in the prayer circle are formerly homeless people who only knew Bobby by sight, members of the town council, and parishioners from local churches.

A few people stay back and pay their respects from a distance. The Driftwood Inn’s housekeeper, Mae Green, can’t bear to look. Whenever she saw Bobby is distress, she would call around town to find him help.

Mae was the second person on the scene when emergency services arrived. She and I watched the police perform chest compressions despite little hope of revival. We pieced together that she must have been the last to see him alive, not 20 minutes earlier, while my toddler and I were the first to see him dead.

“I just want to remember him as he was,” she tells me as we look at the crowd gathering just twenty feet away.

Who was Bobby Messick anyway? A former war hero? A solitary man who couldn’t stomach being inside four walls? A loud and belligerent drunk? A ragged addict? A friend to talk to in the park late at night when you couldn’t sleep?

Bobby was all of those things. He was flawed, as we all are, and substance abuse took its toll. Yet numerous people tell me that although he had many troubles in his life, he never asked anybody for anything. Trish Taylor-Brady, a longtime family friend, tells me that Bobby still wanted to help others. When nightmares about her own father’s PTSD from the war in Vietnam plagued her, she would look to Bobby to help her understand the complicated man who has already been gone for eight years.

“That’s how I want to remember Bobby,” says Trish, echoing Mae’s sentiments. “As a friend.”

What stopped Bobby from being the man these people cared about? It’s unlikely there was only one cause, but certainly, being rejected by health services couldn’t have helped. There had been times when Bobby was ready to get clean, only to be told the system had no place for him. Each time, being eager to change the trajectory of his life and then tossed out like a piece of trash must have been devastating.

It took real time and effort from both men to get Bobby to drop his guard and admit he needed help. A month before his passing, Mae called Father Henry Sabetti, a former addiction counselor of Shrewsbury Parish, to alert him to Bobby’s condition. Father Sabetti pulled in his colleague John Queen, a community organizer and founder for the Bayside HOYAS. Together, they started prepping Bobby for his last trip to rehabilitation. Bobby would constantly refuse their offers for water, food, or cigarettes, but one day, he let his guard down. He asked Queen to go to the China House at Kent Plaza and get him some dumplings and hot sauce. This request set the wheels in motion for Bobby to secure a place at the Baltimore VA Medical Center to detox and then be on his way to treatment at Perry Point. The timeline and reasons are unclear, but although Bobby was admitted to the medical center in Baltimore, he was back at the Driftwood a few days later.

And then, a few days after that, he was dead.

“We’ll never forget Bobby,” says Tim Lloyd, the commander of the local American Legion and one of the former servicemen who provided transportation to Baltimore. “He touched our souls. Because of Bobby, we want to help more veterans,” he continues, though he and his brothers in arms hope the next opportunity will have a better outcome.

Every year on a single night in January the US Department for Housing and Urban Development (HUD) does a count of all individuals residing in a homeless shelters across the country. In 2022, that number was 582,200. In 2023, the number rose to 653,104. While this count cannot give an accurate picture of the scale of homelessness in the US, it shows us how the problem is growing.

So what do we do in Chestertown to measure the crisis of people living on the street when there is no shelter? For now, we might rely on public perception. Nearly everyone I talk to in town agrees that the number of people suffering from homelessness is “too many“. Christine Petrone, one of Bobby’s sisters, works at a hospital in Delaware and tells me she is always shocked at how many people are living on the streets in Chestertown.

As I talk more with locals about homelessness, and especially about Bobby, the crisis of drug addiction inevitably comes up. While these two crises are linked, it’s important to note that most homeless people in the US do not have substance abuse issues. In California, the state that consistently has the largest homeless population, a correlation was found between the two problems. Contrary to popular thinking, it was the trauma of homelessness, including systemic failures in obtaining stable housing, that caused drug use.

It is perhaps just as difficult to measure drug addiction in Chestertown, but again I hear from people that the number of people with an addiction is “too many“. So when we look at the case of California, we have to wonder how much the dilemma of homelessness is pushing addiction into our own streets. No one abuses drugs for any one reason, but it would be a mistake to dismiss economic hardship and ease of access as a major driver here in Chestertown.

A recent book called The Urge: Our History of Addiction, written by a psychiatrist and former addict Carl Erik Fisher looks at the dislocation theory of addiction. “People use drugs to address an alienation from cultural supports,” he writes. It’s hard to imagine how anything could be more alienating than a literal dislocation. Housing insecurity, the lack of affordable and stable homes, is on the rise nearly everywhere. Dark clouds are gathering on the horizon.

If there is no shelter, no transportation to shelters in other counties, and ad-hoc emergency housing is few and far between, we will have desperate people on our streets. And with a national opioid crisis that is ravaging rural communities at a heavier rate than urban areas, we have the perfect storm here in Chestertown. The cycle of poverty, trauma, and addiction is as vicious as it is self-perpetuating.

Though we can point to many failings in the local, state, and even national system, there seems to be good news. A formerly homeless man who attended Bobby’s vigil speaks with warmth about our future: “The love is here in Chestertown,” he says. “But the bureaucracy gets in the way”. Another formerly homeless woman standing with us nods her head in agreement. Their success in getting off the streets in not just a testament to their own grit, but to Chestertown’s community activists. If all of us in Chestertown agree we want to be part of the solution, there is no problem we can’t solve.

Christa Blackmon is a new arrival to Chestertown. She has a Master’s Degree in Social Anthropology and experience in writing about human rights. She currently works as a secondary school teacher.