It’s
a few minutes before 8 a.m., and Tony Burgio and Dean Contreras are eating
nearly identical breakfasts. Burgio has already polished off a bowl of grits
before a server brings plates crowded with an omelet, home fries, and a
buttered bagel. Another plate of doughnuts eyes them from the middle of the
table.
They
devour their food and wash it down with milk, orange juice, and coffee. A
serverclears their dishes, they joke
around, and Burgio glances at the newspaper, but nobody brings a check. Like
the other 37 people signed up for breakfast at Asbury First United Methodist
Church, they ate for free.
For
more than a year, Burgio and Contreras have met for breakfast every Wednesday.
They have fallen into the safety net churches and other social organizations
have expanded over the last decade. Places like Asbury’s Dining and Caring
Center now offer more than an occasional hot meal for the homeless, and
recognize that many people they serve are trying to make it on their own.
Asbury
has tried to give its center, housed in the basement of what was once an East
Avenue mansion, an atmosphere of dignity. Volunteers consider the people there
guests, and wait on them like it’s a restaurant.
Contreras
and Burgio can rattle off several other places they can get a free meal — St.
Joe’s, Dimitri House, the Urban Center, Blessed Sacrament, Salem’s “Million
Dollar Dinner.” And if you’re willing to put up with sermons and people who
haven’t bathed for a while, they say, there are some last resorts.
“If
you starve in Rochester, you’re an idiot,” says Contreras, whose routine
schedule of eating out often covers three meals a day.
Burgio
has bounced around to many community outreach centers to meet his needs too,
but usually cooks at his apartment now. On Wednesdays, though, he and Contreras
come to Asbury for more than just their meals.
“Ahh,
the bikemasters are here,” a man says to Burgio after breakfast one morning.
Burgio and
Contreras fix bikes donated to Asbury and distribute them every Wednesday morning for
free. The pair has transformed the informal service, started by one Asbury
volunteer, into a high-powered charity enterprise.
The
used bikes are donated from scrap yards, bike shops, and anyone else willing to
pass on a ride, and the crew works without pay. While Burgio loves helping
people in need, he also recognizes the sense of purpose being part of the bike
crew provides.
They
work in a garage behind the church on all but the worst winter Wednesdays.
Apparently, this morning in early March isn’t bad enough to keep them inside.
The temperature is in the teensand
snow trickles from the gray sky. They tell Rand, the 70-year-old volunteer
manager of the Caring Center, they will only work a half-hour. Rand, who asks
to go by his first name only, is the man who started the bike ministry in the
’90s and still oversees the operation Burgio took over nearly two years ago.
When
it snowed the week before, Rand asked the crew to stay inside so nobody got
sick. They moved storage cabinets filled with toothpaste, soap, and other
hygiene products into a supply room and Contreras even finished off a set of
stairs designed to help move bikes off and on a storage truck. “The stairway to
heaven,” he calls it. After missing last week, the bike crew wanted to meet the
requests of the people asking for bikes and repairs.
Burgio
puts on a series of shirts — the third and last one a sweatshirt with
“Results” printed on it — and then adds a thermal coat. Finally, he dons a
black hat with earflaps and grabs the tools he carries in a Winnie the Pooh
lunch box. Burgio and Contreras lead a handful of men — two more crew members
and a few waiting for bikes — to a garage just big enough to fit a pickup
truck. Inside, they’ve crammed more than 20bikes. Some are on hooks, some lean against a wall, and some lay in pieces.
Tires hang from the ceiling, and a narrow column of shelves houses spare
pedals, brakes, seats, and cables.
A
sign usually placed outside when more people are waiting reads, “No swearing,
No pushing, No smoking, No arguing.” Burgio smokes a cigarette and soon breaks
the first rule, too. He and the crew start wheeling bikes out of the garage to
make workspace, planting them in a snowbank.
Contreras
opens his toolbox, and it reveals a cartoon he’s taped inside. It shows a woman
walking in on her husband in bed with a bike. “I knew it,” she exclaims. Before
any bike work, Contreras sticks a tape in the stereo and tells Donald, one of
the men helping today, to listen. Contreras raves about this speaker who came
to the Alcoholics Anonymous convention he worked over the weekend.
“If
you want to know what it was like for me growing up in California, just watch
Jerry Springer,” the speaker says as the bike crew laughs. “I consider myself
one of Jerry’s kids.”
Nearly
everybody who works on the bike crew is in recovery for substance or alcohol
abuse, and Contreras and Burgio say they try to show their workmates how good
life can be without addiction. Their chosen method is sarcasm.
“Donald,
I need you to go make a run,” Burgio says about going to find a tool inside.
“Not
that kind of run,” Contreras reminds him. “Not a beer run.”
But
they can get serious, as they did the week before when Donald failed to show up
before lunchtime. When Contreras finally saw him, he ran up to him and sniffed
his breath. “Whoa,” Burgio cried when he saw Donald and escorted him into the
supply room and shut the door. Contreras turned on the vacuum, so nobody would
hear this spontaneous counseling session. Later, Burgio said Donald hadbeen drinking.
Donald
came early this time, and helps the crew until leaving for his outpatient
meeting at Main Quest Treatment Center on West Main Street.
Within
minutes of opening the garage, both Contreras and Burgio hoist bikes onto
stands that lift the frames above waist level. Usually they pass out a sign-up
sheet and operate first-come first-serve, but instead they keep a mental list
of the few customers jittering outside the garage.
Burgio first
worked on a BMX bike for the son of a friend from Narcotics Anonymous. He wears a gold
“NA” earring and is the chair of the NA phone helpline. His business card reads
“Twisted Tony B.” on the front and has a message about the success of the
12-step program on the back. He goes to at least four NA meetings a week and
regularly encourages addicts and people in recovery any way he can.
Wearing
cotton gloves with their fingertips cut off, he tries to squeeze oil onto a
chain, but the fluid comes out like glue. “Damn, it’s too cold,” he says.
Nevertheless, by the time a friend arrives to pick up the bike, Burgio’s
managed to eke out enough oil so the pedals spin freely. He tells his friend to
keep the bike inside for the rest of the winter to keep the chain from
catching.
While
working on the bikes, Burgio tells his story. Like many who go to Asbury, he is
open about his hardships when asked. Burgio talks with a raspy voice and is
missing his teeth from years of neglect. A nomadic life of crime — using and
selling drugs from New York City to Los Angeles — led to a stint in prison
and finally three years of homelessness.
Burgio
started coming to Asbury in 2001, still addicted to crack and heroin and living
mostly in the old downtown subway tunnels. “Tony went through more sleeping
bags than anyone,” says Bill Lisi, who helped start Asbury’s Dining Center in
1993 and now assists people looking for housing.
At
first Burgio wanted to help with the bike ministry in order to get a good ride
for himself and scam other primo parts. He would fiddle around on a couple
bikes each Wednesday, gashing his hands with the tools, but says Rand never
knew he was still hooked. In March of 2003, he decided he was getting too old
to survive Rochester winters so he checked in to Main Quest.
“When
I finally got clean Rand said, ‘Man, you’re flying through those things,'” the
43-year-old Burgio says.
Shortly
thereafter, Rand decided to hand the reins of the bike ministry to Burgio. By
December of 2003, Burgio found an apartment on Mt. Hope Avenue using the money
he started receiving from the Department of Social Services (DSS). This is
rare, Lisi says, since few landlords will risk taking rent from DSS money.
In
the spring of last year, not long after Burgio found himself a place to live,
the bike crew found a new home out in the garage. The demand for bikes combined
with the increased number of people eating at Asbury led to the move from the
basement Dining Center.
Volunteering
at Asbury has allowed Burgio to go from what Rand refers to as someone with
“four walls and a floor” to someone who enjoys the luxuries of American life.
His apartment has an answering machine, a CD player alarm clock, and a laptop
computer, all of which were donated to the church. His living room also
includes a bike stand, where he fixes bikes for his neighbors.
On
March 24, Burgio celebrated two years of sobriety. After years of taking from
society, he says, working on bikes gives him the sense of giving back. On a
busy summer day, the bike crew fixes up more than 20 bikes, and Burgio says
they have given out more than 1,000 bikes over the last two years. For many, a
refurbished bike is their only transportation. Lisi has encouraged Burgio,
who’s unemployed, to use his people skills to go back to school and become a
substance-abusecounselor, but for
now Burgio is content using his street-smarts for the bike ministry.
Years
of scamming help Burgio sniff out people who come for a bike, sell it to buy
drugs, and then return for another within a month. To prevent this, the crew
started taking pictures of people with their bikes and recording serial numbers
to match with their name. If someone says a bike was stolen, the crew asks for
a police report before replacing it.
Still,
some are less subtle than others. One man approached Burgio the week before and
told him he got drunk and couldn’t remember where he left his bike. Burgio
sensed a scam and said they weren’t doing any bikes that day. “Give me a bike
or I’ll pull a knife,” the man threatened. “Go ahead and pull it,” Burgio said,
calling his bluff before the man backed off.
Burgio’s
responsibilities have grown into more of a supervisory role since Contreras
started coming to Asbury in the fall of 2003. “Tony’s a great delegator,”
Contreras says while replacing the gears, derailleur cables, and brakes on a
bike. He wonders aloud why he always ends up with bikes that need complete
overhauls, and Tony laughs off the razzing.
Contreras,
also 43 years old, never envisioned himself in this position. “I came in for a
bike,” he says, “and never left.” Contreras was a functional addict, he says,
holding jobs ranging from construction to trucking despite a cocaine habit that
cost as much as $300 a day.
At
Asbury, he’s become a jack-of-all-trades. Two weeks earlier, he built a Dutch
door to the supply room so a volunteer can stand behind the closed lower half
and set the hygiene products on its countertop for guests. The
six-foot-four-inch Contreras, whose large frame and thick beard gives him the
look of a rugged lumberjack, regularly uses words like “please” and “thank
you.” Gail McClain, the first full-time paid director of the center,
affectionately calls him the court jester.
It’s
fortunate Contreras maintains his sense of humor. His bout with alcohol and
substance abuse has broken his families — he has a 22-year-old son with his
ex-wife and two younger boys with his ex-girlfriend — and left him unemployed
for almost a year-and-a-half, what he calls the longest period of his life.
In
the fall, Contreras started shopping a résumé with the help of East House, the
program that finances the supportive living apartment he shares with a
roommate. Through DSS aid, East House gives Contreras a personal-needs
allowance of $240 a month. To receive this money he must work 16 hours a week
as part of the Work Exchange Program. The WEP is intended to give people
experience to put on their résumé, but Contreras laughs at the idea of including
his broom-pushing position along with his other credentials.
Contreras,
who grew up on Joseph Avenue, says he hopes to hear about a long-haul trucking
job with a business called Dependon in
Chicago any day. If that falls through, though, he may drive South in the 1995
Toyota Corsica he bought off a crack head for $170. He says they pay better
down South and like the work ethic of Northerners. When Mark Hill, who
volunteers with the bike crew, agrees that it’s hard to get work in New York,
Contreras says that’s not entirely true. “You can find a job,” he says. “If you
can live on $5.15 an hour.”
Contreras
has been occupying himself with AA meetings, where he says people are more
serious about recovering than at NA, and loves meeting people at the places he
eats. Contreras also works on bikes more than just Wednesdays; Burgio sometimes
opens the garage after a weekend and finds several new bikes ready to roll.
This
morning they’ve finished off a few bikes, and it’s approaching 10 a.m., an hour
later than Burgio originally wanted to stay outside. Most of the men, including
Burgio, have complained about their fingers going numb, but they keep working.
A man standing quietly inside the edge of the garage has been waiting more than
an hour for the crew to repair his bike. He had cushioned the seat by filling
plastic bags with towels and wrapping tape around them.
The
tape of the AA speaker has ended, giving way to a classic rock station, and in
between a sing along to REO Speedwagon’s “Roll With the Changes,” Burgio says
he understands how much this man relies on his bike. “This is such a blessing,”
the man says repeatedly.
Meanwhile
a man the crew calls “Dreads” has just come back outside from the dining center
to check if they have a bike ready for him. The crew already told him they
weren’t passing around a formal sign-up sheet for bikes today, but he asks for
the list again in hopes of moving them along. Then Dreads tells the man who
waited patiently how he had been homeless for seven months, has a bare
apartment now, and needs a bike to get around.
The
crew finishes a bike for Dreads last. With a disposable camera, Contreras snaps
a photo of Dreads smiling with his bike. He rides off and they lock up the
garage a little after 11 a.m.
The crew heads
inside and soon eats soup, tuna sandwiches, and chocolate-chip cookies. Eighteen
people have signed up for lunch, most using first names and possibly aliases.
Asbury will serve anybody, but uses a sign-up sheet to gauge how much food they
need to order.
Rand
is pretty certain anyone who eats there must need to, but he is unsure how many
guests will ever reach self-sufficiency. Most volunteers accept that at least
half are lifers, but they believe some just need temporary help.
Many
of these people come to Asbury’s popular Sunday meal. The last Sunday of the
month is busiest, often drawing families and others who eat there occasionally.
Several of the 100-plus guests they serve on these Sundays are paid at the
beginning of the month, and cannot make ends meet.
On
a recent Sunday, a man who owns a fruit-paring business sat alongside a friend
on the verge of losing his printing business because of a drug and alcohol
relapse. Near the door, two young children sat at the piano, one of them
banging out the opening melody of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” above the
commotion.
During
the bike crew’s lunch on Wednesday, the piano sounds much smoother. A man works
his way through a songbook of Beatles and other pop hits. When he plays the
chorus of a John Denver tune, the bike crew breaks into song. “Take me home,
country roads, to the place I belong,” they bellow.
The
following Wednesday feels like spring. The sun is out and the temperature is in
the 30s. Several more men than the previous week mill outside the garage, and
Contreras tries to convince a friend how popular Beach Cruiser bikes have
become.
“I’ll
look like a grandpa,” Patrick Snyder says about the bike Contreras is urging
him to take.
“Now
you can take girls on dates,” Contreras says while pointing to the passenger
seat above the back tire.
Eventually
Contreras wins Snyder over, telling him they’re so popular that someone stole
the Beach Cruiser they gave “Old Man Bill,” who cooks at the Rochester Urban
Center on Amherst Street.
Contreras
jokes even more than usual this Wednesday, with good reason. He found out he
would be starting the trucking job within a week.
“I
can’t wait to be back out on the road, listening to my tunes, my books on
tape,” he says.
Contreras’s
good news is bittersweet for Burgio.
“I
guess I’m going to have to go back to doing bikes,” Tony half-jokes, before
wondering aloud how he’ll replace Contreras. “We’ll manage. If they have to
wait another 10 minutes for a bike then they’ll have to wait.”
Contreras
will come back to Rochester periodically, because his job requires him to haul
products from Xerox in Webster. He also plans to return once a month to help
with a bike-repair mentoring program for at-risk youth at Second Life Bikes on
Borchard Street.
“I’m
not giving up my keys,” Contreras says about the likelihood of sneaking into
the garage every once in a while. “I’ll just have to find a girlfriend so I
have a place to crash when I come back.”
This article appears in Apr 6-12, 2005.
