Click this Youtube link and you will have background music for this human drama.
The year was 1996. The location is the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit, Michigan. A man in a Brooks Brothers suit walks out of a street level exit and turns - looks down at his feet, and simply walks away toward Cobo Hall and away from all he had ever known.
Seven months later that man finally unlaced and removed those good shoes - and when he pulled his socks off part of his right foot came off also.
Homeless but not alone, he had lost weight, but had also began to shed the burden of arrogance, poor priorities and an absence of courage and thought that had led to his decline.
Renaissance Center and Joe Louis "Fist" - 1995
My name is John Hubertz. At that time so long ago I guess you could have called me a lost soul.
Interestingly it was not because I did not know life - I had a lifetime interest in faith and truth and human hope - a passion I began in High School in an effort to embrace my parent's all-abiding faith in God and life itself. My first articles on faith were published in 1978. At that time I was 18 years old.
Degrees and credentials, honors and wealth became my goals, and my evidence of "success".
But like so many men of words, I was deeply unhappy. I'd been living the life of an Irish poet - steeped in alcohol and self-pity and slathered in the crepulence of my own sinful pride.
The person who disliked me the most, was me. "So what?" I thought - I had never lived any other way. My heroes were Hemingway and Hunter Thompson, and I just did what it took to keep the blazing energy in my eyes. Besides - I stayed high enough and successful enough nobody argued about it.
Years passed by... as they always do.
I graduated, was married, had two beautiful daughters.
Then, as I knew it must, the life I had so carefully crafted, and the lies I had lived for over a decade fell apart. Experiencing a simultaneous Catholic divorce and a serious head-injury accident that happened in September of 1996 on Miller Road in Detroit, Michigan, I crashed and burned.
On October 30, 1996 my 10 year marriage ended - due to my own underlying insanity and my constant dependence on alcohol and drugs. I was 36 years old.
On October 30, 1996 my 10 year marriage ended - due to my own underlying insanity and my constant dependence on alcohol and drugs. I was 36 years old.
Lacking any rational reason to continue toiling for money that I no longer needed, to support a family that had slipped away, I simply walked away from myself. I laid my keys on my desk, hit the down button on the elevator, and seventeen floors later I walked away from 10 years in Ford Parts and Service Operations. I was a relatively young man, and I suppose I was successful by any external measure. In fact, I was rich... but I was in no way sane.
I walked away. It was terrible, it was unfortunate, but it wound up creating me, not destroying me.
Then one day, during those dark homeless years, and because I so rarely shut up, my street name in Detroit became "Preacher John". Well, as you may know, what people call you is often what you become.
So, it seemed appropriate that instead of babbling incoherently, and trying to express feelings or interpret a world gone mad, I began to speak the truth - on those streets, in those back alleys, and from that day to this one, I have never stopped. The funny thing is, I had learned perhaps the most wonderful truth of all. No matter who they are, no matter their problems, most people are incredible and have tremendous potential.
So, it seemed appropriate that instead of babbling incoherently, and trying to express feelings or interpret a world gone mad, I began to speak the truth - on those streets, in those back alleys, and from that day to this one, I have never stopped. The funny thing is, I had learned perhaps the most wonderful truth of all. No matter who they are, no matter their problems, most people are incredible and have tremendous potential.
John Hubertz at Fort Wayne Indiana, 2017
