They are train hoppers from Southern California. I’ve seen them for a couple years now. According to Stone (the man), when they arrived and got off the train in Northwest Chicago, they bunkered down to sleep on what they thought was a dead-end street. While they were sleeping, they were run over by a truck. You can still see the scars. By the time they got out of the hospital months later, they were addicted to the painkillers prescribed by doctors. So then they started doing heroin to replace the prescribed opiates they were getting for their pain. I think they recuperated from their wounds, but now they’re really addicted to heroin.

That was under Lower Wacker. She’s from the Northwest Side of Chicago but she’s lived all over the place. She’s young, like 20. She told me, and so did a guy that she was with, that she had been raped twice while she’s been homeless. So she hasn’t had an easy time of things. In that picture she was dope sick. She’s wearing a bracelet that shows she was recently in the hospital. She’s in and out of ERs all the time because life on the street is so difficult.

He’s been on the streets of Chicago, addicted to heroin, for seven or eight years. I just texted him to see if he needs some rigs (syringes). He’s from the South Side of Chicago and then the southern suburbs. He does odd jobs and panhandles. He used to own a flooring company, and he employed people. He was married and has kids. Then he became addicted and lost everything. He doesn’t see his family anymore. Most of these people burned bridges with their families. I keep in touch with a couple of their parents, just because I’m involved with this community and people know me, and they sometimes ask if I can let their family know that they’re ok. Every once in awhile I’ll get a call from a parent. And they’ll send me things to pass along — a little money, some clothing, sometimes personal IDs. Homeless people seem to get robbed and lose things all the time. They carry things in backpacks that are often stolen when they’re passed out on the ground. But Jimmy has no contact with family. Jimmy’s relationships were severed long ago.

She died right after I took this picture. It was a year ago. Rhonda’s from Jamestown, New York — near Buffalo. Her partner was Dan. I knew her arm was bad but she would never show me all of it. She would lift her sleeve just a little bit to show me the edge of it. I tried for months to get her to go to the hospital to treat it. But she was so afraid of getting dope sick. One guy told me being dope sick is like having the flu ten times over and then getting hit by a truck. So a lot of addiction is just avoiding the dope sick. One day, I ran into Rhonda and Dan. She had been bitten on the foot by a rat, and she said, I’ll go to the hospital. And I’ll let you take the photo now, so that maybe it will help someone else. She took off her sweater and showed me. I took the picture and brought her to the hospital, and she died a week later. She was 34 years old. She was a really beautiful person. She had a very loyal group of people who would give her money when she panhandled. She looked very destitute on the street, so she made a lot of money. Sometimes she says she made up to $300 a day, because people felt sorry for her. (Women make a lot more than men, because people just feel sorry for them.) And it all went to heroin. People liked her. But underneath her sweater, she was being eaten away. I had to take that photo, because I wanted to show what could happen to people. To get Rhonda into the hospital, I had to take her to the West Side of Chicago to buy dope first. Rhonda shot up into that mass of flesh in her arm, right in the back seat of my car, then we went to the hospital. The infection travelled through her bloodstream into her heart, so she died of blood infection — MRSA infection. I thought she was gonna make it. The hospital gave me the news early one morning. I had to find Dan and tell him.

This is the day after Rhonda died. That’s along Chicago River near Harrison Street. Dan went crazy after I told him Rhonda died. He was beside himself. Rolled around on the ground screaming. I tried to calm him down but just had to let him go. But I stayed with him until he calmed down. He took it very bad. They were like husband and wife and sharing this incredibly difficult existence. When they first came from Western New York they were alcoholics. But then it was pills, then it was heroin, and then they became addicted.

I do some work with the Night Ministry. If I know someone on the street that needs their help I’ll guide them to that person.Their title is religious, but I’ve never seen anyone peddle religion. They just try to help people. They distribute needles, clothes, food. There’s a van that I meet up with. Sometimes it carries a nurse, a paramedic or a doctor. They’re part of a program called Street Medicine, where they tend to people that need medical attention right on the street, with cuts, bruises, abscesses. … In this photograph you’re seeing a med student from University of Illinois Medical School in Chicago. He’s checking on the health of two homeless people.They’re camped in a field south of the downtown area of Chicago. He asks basic questions. “How ya feeling?” “Do you need any medical attention?” They open up a little bit and supply answers. If it’s serious, they’ll take them to an ER. These two are from the southwest suburbs. They go by the street names Lucy and Ricky, so yeah, they’re a couple.

Rats are the plague of the homeless community. My friend Jimmy is in the background. As soon as the sun goes down, the rats come out. They run over people while they’re sleeping. I gave Jimmy a rat trap to see how many he could catch. I gave him two snap traps, and peanut butter, and he caught these in just two hours. Anytime there’s a homeless group of people, there are rats. It’s an unclean environment. Rats are smart, they go for easy pickings. People get bit, or sometimes they wake up with rats on their chest.

That’s along the Chicago River. I can’t give you the exact location because it’s a shooting den and I don’t want to alert the cops to it. Cops will allow this population to panhandle, but they don’t let them use drugs in plain sight. Cops might wait for people and hassle them. There’s not too many places along Chicago River west of the downtown area. That’s roughly where it is. That’s a homeless guy I met. He just bought some dope. Most people shoot here in the evening because there’s a light that shines down on the area. If they don’t have a flashlight, they can come here, because they need light to find a vein, so they can see where to poke the needle. It’s also a safe area away from the highway and set back from the river.

This is Greg and his wife Stacy. Greg is a poet. This is toward the end of Lower Wacker Drive. It’s hard to talk there because of the cars streaming by — the noise is constant and sometimes overwhelming. Oftentimes, people will say, “Let’s go up top.” That means, let’s go up to the street.

This is Tony. He’s from Northwest Indiana. Nobody knew too much about him except that he was a veteran of the Iraq War. He died on Thanksgiving night. This photo was taken just weeks before he died. He kind of played around with heroin when he was over in Iraq. When he got back, he really jacked up his addiction. His life just went down hill. Lost everything. Somebody said he had a sister in Indiana. I don’t know how I’d get a hold of her because I don’t have his last name. I researched what they do in Chicago with bodies of homeless people. They take them to the Cook County Medical Examiners Office. They’re either buried, or they’re cremated. If they are buried it’s in a plywood box and the bodies are taken to a cemetery about an hour’s drive south of the city. There’s one headstone for everyone. It reads, “This monument is dedicated to the deceased of Cook County who were poor or forgotten. May their souls Rest in Peace.” One day, I ran into Danny, Tony’s friend, and he told me that Tony had overdosed. Danny was the one who found him. Danny was by himself on Lower Wacker Drive. He ran up to the street to find someone with a cell to call 911. Paramedics came down, but he was already dead for at least an hour.