“I’m feeling like a human again. Got a little bit of dignity,” Mike Stewart said after his life on the streets came to an end….with help from Mary Vasquez.
FORT WORTH, Texas — Mary Vasquez has a recipe for success; a recipe that requires she share that success with as many hungry souls as she can.
One of the most recent was a guy named Mike.
“I always gave him money. I never passed him and not gave him anything. I always gave him something,” Vasquez said of the homeless man with a cardboard sign often panhandling at the intersection of Summit Avenue and I-30 in Fort Worth.
She found out later that his name was Mike Stewart. His cardboard signs varied. One read, “The circus left without me.” The other, making light of his 5-foot-three-inch height, said, “I’m a little short. Can you give me a hand?”
“Two to three hours every day,” Stewart said of the time it usually took to get at least $30 so he could get enough food to last him through a day. But it always came with a cost.
“I could just feel people’s disapproval,” he said of the drivers who glared at him, threw things at him, and sometimes gave him a single-finger salute. “It takes (a) toll on anybody. It’s very stressful. It’s very humiliating.”
With a series of petty crimes and past drug problems, Stewart was in and out of prisons and county jails and bedded down most nights in a wooded corner or underneath a picnic gazebo at Trinity Park in Fort Worth.
“You turn your back on anything it’s gone,” he said of the multiple times he’d been robbed by other homeless people. He once lost a jacket and the shoes he was wearing while he was asleep.
“Homeless people get killed or found dead out on the street pretty much every day,” Stewart said of the dangers he knew he faced.
But each day, if he wanted to live, wanted to eat, he would become one of those guys with one of those cardboard signs.
“Back of my mind I was thinking, nobody is gonna help me, you’re a piece of crap,” Stewart said. “I wouldn’t call it suicidal but I was just getting tired man, because I did not like holding that cardboard sign at that highway ramp. That’s the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done.”
But then, one driver rolled down her window.
“While I was standing there thinking that, looking at the ground, a lady honked her horn,” he said.
It was Mary Vasquez.
“He had his sign. He always had a smile though,” she said. “He has a beautiful spirit. Just a beautiful spirit.”
And, as the owner of three Enchiladas Ole’ restaurants, she made Mike an offer.
“I said here’s some money and would you like to work? Would you work? And he came the very next day. He rode a bicycle!” Vasquez said.
Mike Stewart is now one of the busiest busboys and dishwashers at Enchiladas Ole’.
“And that was a year and a half ago. And he’s never missed,” Vasquez said with a laugh. “He’s never missed. He loves working and we love having him. He loves working.”
But Mike was still homeless and life in Trinity Park was challenging: a dispute over a stolen bicycle for example.
“Oh he folded me up like a pretzel, like origami,” Mike said of an unfortunately memorable encounter with a much bigger man. “Oh, he beat the crap out of me.”
But then he got another offer, a one-bedroom apartment, one mile away from the Camp Bowie location of Enchiladas Ole’. The first place of his own, he says, in the last 15 years.
“I’ve got it made,” he said standing in his new bedroom. “This is a blessing.”
Mary, however, thought he needed one blessing more. So, at Christmas, she and her family gifted Mike Stewart an electric scooter. Now, the man who hasn’t missed a work shift in the last year and a half is always at work on time.
“It touches my heart. I’m very thankful,” Stewart said. “It gives me a little bit of dignity back.”
“About the last six months before I got this job I was thinking, ‘Man this is it. This is my life now,'” he said of his life on the streets. “Now, I’m starting to feel like a person again.”
“People are people. Whether they’re homeless or ex-offenders they’re people. It’s a soul,” Mary Vasquez said. “And that’s what we want, to be able to help people to have a normal life.”
“A person, a human,” Mike added. “Got a little bit of dignity.”
Estimates place the homeless population in Fort Worth near 2,000 people. But Mike believes his days on his old street corner are officially over.
“I’ve met a lot of nice people out here. I’ve met some turds too, you know,” he said with a laugh. “But it’s hard talking about it kind of now. I’m just happy I don’t have to do it no more.”
And back at his new apartment, complete with donated and purchased furniture, a framed painting near his bed reminds him how those days came to an end. It shows a man reaching over a ledge to offer a helping hand to lift someone else up.
“Everybody needs some help sometimes. A hand up,” Mike said looking at the painting.
A hand up, from someone who took a chance, with a serving of hope on her restaurant menu, too.
Mary Vasquez says she also offers free meals to cancer patients, police officers, widows, and the homeless.
“It doesn’t hurt us., you know. In fact, it helps us because I feel like we get blessings. We get blessings. It comes back you know,” Vasquez said. “This restaurant is not just serving food. I feel like we serve kindness and compassion. It’s a mission for us.”
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