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In July, we published a series of stories about San Francisco’s attempt to address the growing number of homeless and addicted people living on the streets. We followed Evan, who had been homeless for years, as he sought to escape the addiction that was threatening his life. Four months later, we check in on how he’s doing.
No Easy Fix is a three-part series from Radio Atlantic about homelessness and addiction in San Francisco.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Last year, we published a series called No Easy Fix. If you haven’t heard it, you should go back and listen. It’s about San Francisco’s attempts to address pockets of homelessness and addiction. It’s also a close and unusually humane portrait of one man—his name is Evan—living on the streets and barely managing his fentanyl addiction.
Today, we have an update on that series.
[Music]
Rosin: When reporter Ethan Brooks met Evan, he was in bad shape.
Evan: It’s raining, and I’m cold, and I’m hungry. (Laughs.) I’m over it. I’m so over it.
Rosin: Years of addiction had left him with a leg that was so swollen and infected that he was at risk of losing it. On top of that, he couldn’t keep food down. And he didn’t know why. His best friend, Joe, was worried.
Joe Wynne: I mean, I expect Evan to die out there. I have seen no pieces of evidence that persisted beyond 72 hours of him heading in any other direction, and I’ve seen 10,000 pieces of evidence of him headed towards death.
Rosin: Evan ended up in the hospital. And he agreed to enter an addiction treatment program in San Francisco—one that looked a lot like the rehabs where he had tried and failed to get clean before.
Evan: I could feel, like—in my head, I’m like, I’m gonna be successful this time. But like, I’m still a little worried about having doubt—like, What if I don’t, though?
Rosin: Ethan Brooks is going to take it from here.
______
Ethan Brooks: The last time I saw Evan, he was in a room in San Francisco General Hospital.
Brooks: Want to rest for a little bit?
Evan: Yeah, maybe a little bit.
Brooks: We spoke for a few hours, and this is how our conversation ended.
Brooks: I mean, I’ll be able to call you on the phone and stuff, but I just won’t be able to get you in person for a while.
Evan: Yeah, I’ll definitely put you on the list of people I can talk to in treatment.
Brooks: Evan had been accepted to long-term residential rehab in San Francisco. He wanted to finally get clean, and give space and time for his leg to heal. And he wanted to reconnect with his son, who he hadn’t seen in years.
Joe—that’s Evan’s friend—bought him a cellphone, started a group chat, plugged in the phone next to Evan’s bed, and flew home, back to his family in Washington State. So Evan was once again on his own.
[Music]
A month passed, and I didn’t hear from him. And then, he texted: He had 30 days clean.
To celebrate, Joe sent videos from Cameo; that’s the app where minor celebrities send personalized messages. In one, a group of burly dancers delivers Joe’s message:
Dancers: Evan is good. Fentanyl is bad.
Brooks: Evan is good. Fentanyl is bad.
Dancers: 30 days sober.
Brooks: 30 days sober.
Dancers: Congrats, bro!
Brooks: Congrats, bro.
Island Boy: Yo, Evan, I heard you’re 30 days sober off fentanyl.
Brooks: Another was from one of the twin TikTok stars in the Island Boys. I can’t tell which one.
Island Boy: So keep on going. It goes day by day, my boy. Keep doing your thing because that fetty ain’t no joke, my boy.
Brooks: About two months later, there was a notification in the group chat, just under the videos. It said, “Evan has left the conversation.”
(Phone rings.)
Brooks: When I called his cell, there was nothing.
(Voicemail greeting plays: “I’m sorry, the person you are trying to reach has a voicemail box that has not been set up yet. Please try your call again later. Goodbye.”)
Brooks: It was the same at the rehab facility.
Operator: So I don’t know—I can’t confirm or deny that the person is here. But I could take a message if you’d like to leave one.
Brooks: Okay. Okay, gotcha.
Brooks: And then, on November 17, seven months since I had last spoken to him, I got an email.
The account photo was of a man in a pressed lavender button-down shirt tucked into jeans, with one hand on his hip, posing in front of a field. It was Evan. We set up a video call.
Evan: I haven’t had an Apple product in a long time, and this MacBook is pretty frustrating.
Brooks: To figure out how to use?
Evan: Yeah, just all I wanted to do is scroll down, and I haven’t quite figured that out yet. So I click on something, and then use the arrow keys ’cause I can’t find the fucking scroll in the corner.
Brooks: Turns out this isn’t easy if you’ve missed the last five years of technological advance.
Brooks: Two fingers is a scroll.
Evan: Oh, I can’t wait to try that.
Brooks: Just getting Evan on a call didn’t guarantee much.
Rehab is definitely better than living on the street, but it’s not necessarily a place where you get clean. In 2023 and 2024, San Francisco’s largest publicly funded rehab provider saw a string of overdose deaths inside their facilities. Evan says he’s been in others, where patients and staff were still using.
I had known where Evan was, but until this conversation, I didn’t know how he was, or what had happened in the seven months since we last spoke—if he had changed.
[Music]
Back in April, when Evan was talking about getting clean, this was not the first time the scene had played out—not Joe’s first time flying down to find him, not the first time he was hospitalized. There was a sort of script for what would happen next.
Evan: I would make this whole plan about going to treatment, and as soon as I would be alone and be out outside of the hospital, I would just get out.
Brooks: Evan would get his few days living inside; Joe would go home to his family. Then the hospital would arrange for Evan to travel to rehab via a taxi or a bus—
Evan: And then as soon as I hit the Tenderloin, I would just be gone instantly.
Brooks: In those 10 unsupervised minutes, Evan would disappear. He would get out of the taxi, go back to shoplifting, back to selling what he stole, back to fentanyl.
That was Evan’s choice. It’s true that Evan is responsible for his own actions in those 10 minutes. It’s also true that almost no one beats a fentanyl addiction like his through willpower alone.
This time around, Evan’s first cue, the part in the script where he would normally just disappear, came when the hospital wanted to discharge him. Hospital stays are expensive; they wanted to send him to a shelter for the weekend before rehab admission opened up on Monday.
But the hospital’s addiction team knew if he went to a shelter, he would relapse. They convinced the doctors to keep him for the weekend, despite the expense.
The first opportunity to disappear came and went.
Then it was time to take a taxi from the hospital to rehab, which is called Harbor Light.
Evan: One of the addiction-team nurses after his shift stayed in the cab with me and then rode there to Harbor Light and then stayed there with me for an hour to make sure that I was, like, cool and didn’t have any second thoughts and then left.
Brooks: So another opportunity to exit had come and gone because someone took the time to stay with him.
Brooks: Do you remember your first day, or first days, at Harbor Light?
Evan: Yeah, I remember. I was just sleeping so much. I would get up and just eat and pee. They would just bring me my meals. So it was kinda like I was in the hospital again.
The task of showering again, I was like, Ugh. And just the task of having to unwrap my leg, get in the shower, do the whole—I was just like, I don’t even care. I’ll just be smelly. And it was just my brain deciding what was important and what wasn’t. For so long, that wasn’t important.
Brooks: Before Evan arrived at Harbor Light, there were two things, after five years living on the street, that had pushed him toward recovery.
The first was his leg, which had this huge open wound.
The other thing that brought him here was that he couldn’t keep food down. At first, the doctor thought he might have celiac disease—gluten intolerance. And then they found out that his iron was dangerously low; he was anemic.
Evan: At first, they thought me being anemic was a diet thing ’cause of just eating nothing but candy and ice cream on the street for so long. Even at the time, if somebody were to tell me, Oh, if you keep doing fetty like that, you’re gonna end up becoming anemic, I would’ve been like, So? Obviously, my leg was falling off, so it wasn’t—
Brooks: Yeah, it’s like, Who cares about being anemic when your leg is falling off?
Evan: Right, right.
Brooks: When I first met Evan, he was living a life that, on the good days, felt like a type of freedom: He could fend for himself. He wasn’t responsible to anyone.
But even just a few days into treatment, he could already see it more clearly: It wasn’t freedom; it was dependence, in just about every sense of the word.
Evan was living like a child, literally eating nothing but candy and ice cream.
Evan: I remember being nervous because I was glad to kind of get my life going again, but at the same time, I had been enjoying not being a responsible adult for such a long time.
I was kind of nervous to be like, Great, now not only do I gotta learn how to be an adult again. I gotta figure out how I’m gonna deal with all the shame and guilt of not being one for so long.
Brooks: Harbor Light, Evan’s rehab, is run by the Salvation Army. Apart from being known as a strict, and rather intensive, treatment program, the basics will be familiar: meetings, meditation, acknowledging a higher power, celebrating milestones.
Evan: I feel like everybody’s congratulating me for learning how to, like, pee standing. Like, Pee-pee standing up. Like, Good job, Evan. Like, You use the bathroom on your own. No more diapers.
That’s how I would always be, like, Congratulations for catching up with the rest of us, like, for the last 15—you know? And so I would feel kind of dumb about it. Even two months in, talking about it with some of the counselors there, they were like, How much time do you have? And I was like, Oh, I have two months, and people were clapping or whatever. And I’m just like, Yeah, it’s whatever. It’s two months.
[Music]
Brooks: In real terms, two months was definitely not “whatever” for Evan. It’s the longest he had been clean in a very long time. But the old temptations were still there.
To start, Evan was still in San Francisco. Just about every day, he saw people he knew from his life before. And beyond that, even after two months clean, his leg just wasn’t healing the way he hoped it would.
Evan: My leg improved, and then it just stopped, and it was a really slow progression. I didn’t know if I was doing something wrong or if it was going to get worse again.
Brooks: It started to feel like, If his leg wasn’t going to get better, if he stood a chance of losing it, what was the point?
Evan: I was like, All right, just—we’ll do the six months, show everybody that I can, I’ve tried, and then I’ll go back out.
Brooks: After the break, six months.
[Break]
Brooks: In his years living on the street, Evan managed to look after himself. But there were other people, important people, who he overlooked.
Evan has a son. They talked on the phone sometimes, through Evan’s mom or sister. But as his kid got older, he didn’t want to talk to Evan, and Evan didn’t want to talk to anyone.
That changed at Harbor Light. If Evan wanted any shot at reconnecting, he’d not only have to learn to be an adult in just a few months, but also learn how to be a father.
Evan: I had this in my head, like, a game plan for how I was gonna tackle talking to my family again. But my counselor there was like, Nope, that’s not how we’re gonna do it, not definitely gonna do it like that.
Brooks: What was the game plan, and why was it rejected?
Evan: Like calling them, like, once a week and then calling my son and then talking to him. But my counselor decided that You can’t use your phone at all for the first 30 days; it’s a complete blackout. And then, after that, you only get two 10-minute phone calls a day.
Literally, when I would call my mom, one, by the time she answered, it would probably kill a whole minute, two. She would spend, like, five minutes crying. So now I’m left to have, like, four more minutes. I’m like, Mom, you just—what am I supposed to do? I—and then there’s my whole phone call for the day, and then, if I call somebody else, and they don’t answer, and that’s it.
So he was like, You’re going to write letters, and that way you can speak more, get it down, and honestly, it’ll feel more heartfelt that you’d spent the time to write it all, your feelings and everything, out on paper and mail it.
Brooks: So that’s what Evan did. This was the beginning of what would become a relentless mailing campaign aimed at his son.
It hasn’t been easy to get much out of him. Evan hadn’t seen his son in eight years. No one would blame him for not wanting to talk.
But over the months, Evan began to learn what he had missed. Everyone thinks his kid looks like him. He’s an adventurous eater like Evan, has a sweet tooth too, also like Evan. There was a picture of him trying a chocolate-covered cricket on a field trip to D.C. And he was a bit of a performer.
Evan: For example, for his fifth-grade graduation, he surprised everybody and dressed up as a banana—
Brooks: Awesome.
Evan: —and walked across the stage in a giant banana suit. He really likes the clarinet. Actually, he’s, like, first chair in his class and then third chair all-county or something. He is really into it.
Brooks: In October, six months into treatment, Evan’s family flew out to visit him: his mom, his sister, and his son. Evan’s friend Joe and Joe’s son, Barrett, came down too.
The last time Evan saw his son, he was 5 years old. Now he was 13, and was growing a mustache.
They went to the arcade, did an escape room. Evan said they’ll still be in there if it wasn’t for the kids. Barrett and Evan’s son were fast friends.
Evan: The first night we went out somewhere, they were throwing something—it was like candy or something—and something bounced off and then hit me. And then they, like, giggled and ran away. And my son was like, Where’d it go? And then Barrett was like, “It hit your dad.” And it just—I have never—I hadn’t been a dad for such a long time, so it was just a kind of surreal moment. He didn’t even call me Dad; it was somebody else calling me Dad. But it was more of just a reminder of like, “Oh, yeah, I am.”
[Music]
Salvation Army officer: Do you have any guests that you wanna welcome?
Evan: I do have a few.
Brooks: The same weekend his family visited, after six months of treatment, Evan graduated from Harbor Light. In the video, he’s standing at a lectern, wearing a yellow plaid shirt. He says he’s trying not to cry.
Evan: A wise woman once told me, “The only thing that you have to change is everything.” I look forward to being the best son, brother, and father and friend I can be. Thank you.
Brooks: After graduation, Joe and Barrett and Evan’s mom and sister and son flew home.
Brooks: You guys are still writing letters here and there, or no?
Evan: Yeah, yeah, definitely. I just sent one. I’ll take the—I sent him letters. He doesn’t really send me anything back. I don’t know if the option was given to him, kind of, like, Your dad wants your cellphone number. Do you want to give it to him, or do you want to just keep writing letters, or what do you wanna do? And I could just see him being on his phone, like, Yeah, whatever, letters.
And so I was like, Oh, well, if that’s what he wants to do, then I’m just going to bombard him with letters, to where he’s like, “Damn it, I should have did phone call.” So he hasn’t caved yet, but I definitely send him two or three a month.
Brooks: Evan is now in a sober-living house. He works in a kitchen a few days a week, and on the other days, he takes classes to become an addiction-treatment peer counselor.
That question of if it was possible for Evan to stay clean this long, so far, has been answered. His leg isn’t fully healed; even after eight months, the wound is still there. But he can walk around fine and will have a surgery soon to help with his circulation.
So now the question for Evan isn’t so much if he’ll live, but how.
A few weeks ago, Evan was riding the bus home from a meeting when he ran into an old friend from when he was living on the street.
Evan: And I talked to him the whole bus ride and when I got off I helped him carry his stuff off and hung out with him for a little bit, but when I had went to talk and hang out with him and invited him to sit next to me, it was just kind of like, Here’s this really dirty, gross-looking homeless dude, and I’m cleaned up enough to where people wouldn’t suspect that of me at all. And then I’m inviting him over next to me. When he came up to talk to me, before I had noticed him. They were thinking, I’m probably gonna get pissed-off; this homeless guy’s coming to ask me for money or something. And it totally wasn’t what they expected.
Brooks: They see like a homeless guy approaching somebody who’s just, like, a normal guy working a job in San Francisco or something—
Evan: Exactly, coming home from work late at night and—
Brooks: —and you kind of see an old friend.
Evan: Right. Or me. When I see somebody in that same position, it’s kind of hard for me to—like, someone with a fucked-up leg, or just can’t get up from somewhere ’cause they’re so sick. It’s like, Fuck.
Brooks: This isn’t the only time this has happened recently. Evan sees himself all over the city. When cops and EMTs are trying to move someone along passed out outside of a coffee shop, there he is. When his co-workers at the kitchen complain about homeless and addicted people, he fantasizes about telling them about his past.
He lives just two blocks away from where he spent the last five years, but he might as well live in another world. Still, the boundaries between old and new can be porous.
Evan: This last couple nights, I’ve had to go to meetings because I’ve been bored, and I really kind of miss that hustle of—kind of the excitement of, I gotta go boost from here and dodge the security guard and then get on the BART and then dodge the BART police and then steal from this store and then come back out, and then just all that excitement bullshit. I kind of miss the chaos.
Brooks: He tries not to think too much about the future. A lot of treatment, at this point, is still focused on the present. But he does have one idea for what he might do.
Evan: My background permitting, I would like to be an armed security guard. I think that would be cool.
Brooks: Whoa, why?
Evan: Because that’s the kind of craziness that I think I need. Not, like, with-a-gun armed, but like with a baton or pepper spray. I’m not saying that every day I’m gonna go to work that I’m gonna be like this, this douche security guard that, like, pepper-sprays you.
Brooks: It’s so funny. It’s like you’re just becoming your like worst enemy from not long ago.
Evan: In a way, yeah. But I would also think I’d have—I think I could give back to Target for all the shit I stole by being a good security guard.
Brooks: Just going back to that same Target and going to work that. Where was that?
Evan: Emeryville.
Brooks: There was a story Evan told me back before he started treatment. To support his habit, he was going to the same Target in Emeryville, outside of Oakland, day after day after day, stealing stuff and selling it in the Mission District.
He went to that same Target in Emeryville so many times in a row, it had begun to feel absurd that he hadn’t been caught yet.
Brooks: You were like, I can’t believe this hasn’t happened. It feels like Groundhog’s Day.
Evan: Oh, that’s right. Yeah.
Brooks: He told himself that when they did catch him, that’s when he’d get clean. But it never happened.
Brooks: Does that at all feel like an attempt to go back and stop your past self? Fulfilling that wish you had for someone to catch you at that point.
Evan: Right, and just give them that, like, Oh, it’s over finally.
[Music]
Evan: It rains here on Christmas for a week every year, and I always know it’s coming, and I know it’s gonna come this year, and it’ll be the first time where I will be inside, and I’m so grateful for that.
Brooks: Evan will stay in San Francisco for the time being. In the spring, he’ll fly out to Washington to visit Joe.
This episode was produced by me, Ethan Brooks and Natalie Brennan. Edited by Jocelyn Frank and Hanna Rosin. Engineering by Rob Smierciak. Fact-checking by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
If you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.
Thanks for listening.
