In the afternoon of the Thanksgiving holiday, Theoplus Clayton took a nap on a couch while watching the football game. When he woke up, he felt embarrassed.
“I fell asleep on someone else’s couch!” He talked about his day with his friends while eating dinner at the church. This thanksgiving, his family is not around. He doesn’t have his own place to stay. He is technically homeless.
“I’m actually living my dream due to someone else’s compassion.” Clayton said. “I don’t even think it was so much that they believed in me, but they saw I believed in me, and that is good enough for them.“
Clayton hitchhiked with a thousand dollars in his pocket from Iowa to New York after a man who claimed to be a music producer offered him a chance to make his own CD. Clayton expected that the a thousand dollars would include the whole package of production: recording, promotion, marketing, and so on. At the end of the day, he still had a thousand dollars in his pocket. The “producer“ gave up on him because he refused to meet with Theoplus before receiving the money. It was a scam.
“All my life, I have sang,” Clayton said. He has been a singer ever since he and his siblings participated in a gospel group at church. He tried to make his own way out in New York, but wound up throwing away his money on alcohol. He went broke.
It has been about two months since Clayton showed up at the Hearts for the Homeless, a daytime homeless shelter in downtown State College.
“It’s a place that you can go if you’re trying to get back on your feet,” he explained, and described the shelter as a “home.”
“We heard him singing,” Ginny Poorman said as she recalled the day Clayton started to open up to them. Poorman is the director of the shelter and a friend of Clayton. She believes their friendship can best be described as “a cigarette together.” can well describe their friendship. She went on to recall a memory of Clayton she found particularly hilarious, “He laid down on the ground, and when people who were rude walked back by he just yelled ‘Get out of my living room!’ really loud.”
"I'm getting help from everywhere," Clayton said. By now, he has three recordings published on SoundCloud and started making a music video for his second song. Moreover, he just became the highest ranked musician in State College area under the Hip Hop chart of ReverbNation, an online promotion platform used by music industry.
Life is tough for anyone that is homeless and jobless. With a long past of drug use, he struggled to get to where he is and has been clean for a whole year now. Whenever he feels depressed, he will go get a beer. He can’t help but to yell at people who make him feel offended. Sometimes, he even can’t help but to take a pee at the back of a building on Atherton Street. However, he will always ask what he can do to help any person who is willing to give him a few spare dollars.
“I like where I am now,“ Clayton said, “I’m just going to keep the good and the bad, and go from here to do better."
One pay check away from homeless
Ginny Poorman, the founder and the director of the Hearts for the Homeless, said that homeless is not that far away from one's life, especially for the college students.