Homeless in Bergen County's suburbs: A life in the shadowsLast updated: Wednesday March 14, 2012, 6:49 AM
BY STEPHANIE AKIN
STAFF WRITER
The Record
If Stanley Kowalski hadn’t almost blown himself up two weeks ago, he would have continued to live out his days in anonymity, carrying the scars of a lifetime of hard knocks.
CARMINE GALASSO / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Stanley Kowalski, 82, in his room at the Airport Motel in South Hackensack. He has no permanent home and recently survived an explosion in his car, where he kept oxygen tanks for his emphysema. But Kowalski’s bizarre accident — he dropped a cigarette ash in his car, setting off a series of explosions from the oxygen tanks he stored there for severe emphysema — exposed the precarious nature of his life.
The retired ironworker, who turns 83 on Friday, has no permanent home. He sleeps in a smoke-drenched motel room in an industrial South Hackensack neighborhood that’s often a last stop for people like him — Bergen County’s invisible homeless. They live among prostitutes, drug users and petty criminals whose arrests periodically put the names of those Route 46 motels in newspaper headlines. But until Kowalski, they seldom made the headlines themselves.
It is a lifestyle somewhat typical of the hidden poverty in the 20th-wealthiest county in the United States, said Julia Orlando, director of the county’s Housing, Health and Human Services Center in Hackensack.
“When you talk about Bergen County homelessness, you’re talking about suburban homelessness, which is different than New York City homelessness, or even what it would look like in Newark,” Orlando said.
Homeless people in Bergen County often sleep in friends’ houses or in their cars, or they move from place to place, seeking a roof and a meal, she said.
“They’re not sleeping on a street,” she said. “But they’re technically homeless.”
Kowalski’s story sounded dishearteningly familiar to Orlando, who said that a disproportionate number of the 1,100 people her center served in 2011 were over age 50. Some boarders are as old as 82, she said. While Kowalski would not be allowed in the homeless shelter because his oxygen tanks pose a hazard, she said, the center could help him receive free meals and counseling if he asked.
But Kowalski, with his yellowed fingernails, short-cropped hair and a jawline that suggests faded good looks, stubbornly insists that he’s fine where he is, his belongings stuffed into garbage bags that take up what little space isn’t occupied by a queen-size bed, a dresser and an upholstered armchair. Easily chilled, he warms himself with a compact electric heater he bought for the bargain price of $23.50.
He doesn’t feel sorry for himself.
“I got no complaints,” said Kowalski, who is hard of hearing and speaks in bursts interrupted by periods of wheezing. “I’ve got my own bathroom. Privacy. A TV. And no one to bother me.”
This is his story.
Born in Palisades Park, Kowalski has never lived the kind of life that would provide a lot to fall back on. His parents were Polish immigrants. His father worked at the Edgewater Jack Frost sugar refinery until it closed in 1942, but money was always tight and the family eventually lost their Palisades Park home, he said.
His mother became ill when he was 10 and Kowalski — the youngest child — was sent to St. Joseph’s Home for Boys in Englewood Cliffs, a $15-a-month orphanage where he said they taught discipline with a bamboo cane. He was there for a year, then went home. But he is quick to defend his parents.
“I never got a beating from them,” he said. “I never got a scolding.”
Kowalski dropped out of high school in Hackensack at 16, convinced it wasn’t for him. He worked odd jobs until, at 25, he said he began an on-again, off-again career as an ironworker — helping to construct bridges, including the entrance ramps to the Brooklyn Bridge and the I-80 bridge spanning the Delaware River. He took a hiatus from the industry when jobs became scarce, driving taxicabs in Wayne, among other short-term gigs, until he rejoined the union in 1977. He said he retired at 63 because Social Security paid more.
His spotty union membership meant no health benefits as a retiree, but he got a pension of about $700 a month, said his former wife and Frank Scanlon, a friend from his ironworker days.
Kowalski offers little detail about the last time he had a true home. But a patchwork of information — from him, from friends, from his ex-wife, from public records — tells part of the story.
He bought a Cape Cod in Deposit, N.Y., in 1998 and lived there for five years until the harsh winters prodded him to return to Bergen County and rent it out, Scanlon said. Around the same time, he took care of his older brother in a nearby home in upstate New York until he died of lung cancer, the last of his six siblings to go. Kowalski lost the house to unpaid taxes in 2009.
His first of three stays at a nursing home, in 2007, led to his eviction from an apartment in Bogota after he failed to pay the rent, according to public documents and Scanlon. His only child, Carolyn, 50, was moved to a state group home at the same time. Kowalski, who has had custody since she was 13, sees Carolyn regularly — she now comes to his motel to watch TV with him. But she can barely count higher than 10, he said.
His most recent nursing home stint, about three years ago, was in Rockleigh for 10 months. He said he didn’t like the coffee and his friends said he disliked the no-smoking rule even more.
After that, his friends said, he rented a room for two years from a friend in Oakland until her husband died and she got sick.
He’s been staying since February at the Airport Motel, where he gets a discount on the $850 monthly rate because the manager, who declined to give his name, said he looked like a nice old man in need of help.
More than half of his monthly $1,100 Social Security income goes toward his room. He’s responsible for 20 percent of the costs of the oxygen tanks, with Medicare paying the rest. His pals helped him sign up for food stamps, but he qualified for only $10 a month, one of them said. He gets a lot of his meals from Burger King and White Castle. Seven hospital visits and three nursing-home stints have left him tens of thousands of dollars in debt. If he doesn’t pay them, he said, they’ll just go to a collection agency.
“What am I going to do?” he said. “They can’t put me in jail.”
His 74-year-old former wife, a part-time supermarket cashier from Elmwood Park who asked that her name not be used, said she can’t support him — she has been getting the bills from his Rockleigh nursing home stay, but doesn’t pay them. And his grown nieces and nephews probably would not care to help, she said.
“Unless you’re immediate family, people just don’t want to get involved,” she said. “Especially right now. People have got their own problems.”
All the medical treatment over the past five years has done little long-term good, his friends said — partly because Kowalski has failed to give up smoking, a habit he developed at age 12.
“He’s got five people over here to constantly yell at him to change, and he won’t do it,” said John Cabrini, one of the regulars at Times Square Tire in Hackensack who frequently catch him sneaking Newports outside. The group tells him to think of his daughter, who adores him.
“I’ve tried everything,” Kowalski said. “It’s hard.”
Feb. 28 was something of a routine day for Kowalski. He started the morning running late for his favorite White Castle breakfast — a $1.39 sausage, egg and cheese sandwich they serve only until 10:30 a.m. Mission accomplished, he headed to Times Square Tire to repay a loan — for an oil change and new headlights — and maybe kill some time with the old men who spend their mornings there.
At Moonachie Road and Hudson Street, a block from his destination, he pulled his 1987 Mercury Grand Marquis — a slate-blue model with a vinyl top his friends said he bought a year ago for around $1,000 — to a stoplight. In the passenger seat were seven oxygen tanks he stored there because they were too heavy to move.
He turned off his oxygen tank so he could light a cigarette, as he’s done countless times before. Then something went wrong.
“One of my ashes dropped,” he said. “That happens all the time with a smoker. That’s what did it.”
Kowalski’s friends surmised the fire was kindled by the bags from fast-food restaurants that constantly littered his floor. As smoke and flames rose from the front seat, Kowalski said his thoughts went directly to saving the car and the legal documents he stored in it, because he thought they were safer there than in his motel room.
Employees of the Reef Encounter aquarium supply store on the corner described a chaotic scene. Smoke was billowing out of the sedan, and people were yelling, “There’s an old man in there!”
William Smith, a 31-year-old father of two, ran outside and tried to pull Kowalski out, but he stubbornly grabbed onto the car door.
As Smith wrenched Kowalski to the curb, one oxygen tank detonated with a force emergency workers later compared to a hand grenade. The explosion blasted the roof off the car and blew the trunk and hood open. A tank flew through the window of the aquarium store, another landed on the building’s roof.
“It sounded like a rocket,” Kowalski said. “It sounded like a guided missile.”
Kowalski was uninjured but needed treatment for his emphysema. Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck kept him for three days when they found out he had nowhere to go but the motel, he said.
Kowalski didn’t realize the extent of the damage until he called police the next day looking for his car.
At Holy Name, Kowalski had suddenly become a minor celebrity. All the nurses knew his story, and his emphysema doctor called to say he had the man in the car pegged as Kowalski.
“It was the biggest thing that ever happened in that neighborhood,” Kowalski said. “I sure gave them a sight.”
He repeated the story during a series of calls from his hospital bed as he tried to arrange a ride home.
“I’m all right,” he said at one point. “I got no burns. No scrapes. I need someone to pick me up. I can’t depend on too many people. … You don’t know someone who can give me a lift?”
He called his ex-wife, a motel employee and an aide from his daughter’s group home before Scanlon agreed to retrieve him and take him on his errands in exchange for $30 in gas money. Two days later, Kowalski picked up his prescription medicine and oxygen tanks in Hackensack, his pension checks in Oakland. He tried to drop off the money he owed the mechanic, but they had closed early, he said.
By the afternoon, he was back in his motel room, lying on his bed amid a pile of papers and plastic bags. He wore a short-sleeved button-down shirt that exposed the purple bruises on his bone-thin arms from the hospital IV. His shiny black shoes were crossed on the comforter.
A Tupperware container of pasta with red sauce sat on the dresser, along with a can of soup and more papers and bags.
He asked for a pack of cigarettes, a hot coffee and an old-fashioned doughnut, no icing. Then he alternated puffs on a cigarette with pulls of medicated air from a nebulizer humming next to his bed. He gave short answers to questions about his life before steering the conversation to historical trivia and old movies — though he hates “A Streetcar Named Desire” and Marlon Brando’s performance as the brutish character who shares his name.
He said he wanted a new car but didn’t know how he’d ever be able to pay for it. Or how he’d ever be able to make do without it.
“Without a car, it’s like having your legs cut off,” he said.
Email: akin@northjersey.com
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