When author Fred Waitzkin recalls Miami Beach, he conjures up childhood memories of boats swaying in the water, luxury cars lining the streets and the glamor of the Fontainebleau Hotel.
His friend Ralph Silverman remembers a different Miami Beach — one where he was homeless, living in a park not too far from that same hotel.
Waitzkin, author of Searching for Bobby Fischer, has released a new book this summer, Anything is Good, based on the story of his friend Ralph’s 20 years of homelessness in South Florida.
“This is my sixth book and I'm a passionate writer,” said Waitzkin. “But I guess I learned more writing this book than any other book.”
As well as Ralph’s story, the book looks at the lives of other homeless people he met, some of the complex ways they found themselves living on the streets – and why they were often there for so long.
“It's a human problem that's profound, with not such an apparent solution,” said Waitzkin.
Anything is Good comes just as homelessness in South Florida has become come under the spotlight. WLRN recently reported how a law passed late last year in Miami Beach, which let police make arrests of those who do not accept shelter, drove much of a massive increase in jail bookings for homeless people. From October, a new Florida law will prohibit sleeping in public across the state.
Waitzkin has been friends with Ralph since they were in high school, about 60 years. He describes them as being close through college.
“One of the smartest people I'd ever known – but he was also very strange,” Waitzkin said. “He was very involved with all sorts of esoteric things, and in his twenties, he left graduate school because it was too slow for him, it didn't interest him enough.”
They drifted apart over time and Waitzkin described it as difficult to talk to Ralph while he was homeless. It was hard to understand or relate to what he was going through, he says.
"When you live in the park and you can't take a shower and there's no wealth involved, and to get a dinner, you have to take it out of a dumpster — you kind of lose all the pretense.”Fred Waitzkin, author of "Anything is Good"
It wasn’t until about four years ago that Waitzkin finally heard Ralph’s full story over the phone, decades of living in parks and under piers in South Florida.
“I didn't have any intention of writing a book about him,” Waitzkin said. “After prodding him, he all of a sudden seemed to remember everything.
“He started to tell me this story that was unlike any story I'd ever heard before. It just completely blew me away.”
He attributes part of that shock to the childhood they’d shared. Both growing up in New York City, Waitzkin recalls that Ralph’s family in particular had a lot of wealth.
In the book, Waitzkin describes the Silverman family as growing their wealth largely through the construction industry.
“Eventually, the castle crumbled and Ralph, who was living in this apartment, inventing and doing esoteric philosophy, had no way to support himself,” Waitzkin said.
So his sister flew him down to Miami Beach from New York. A distant cousin let Ralph stay with him, but with Ralph unemployed, quickly threw him out.
“Ralph was wearing no shoes, he only had 50 or 75 cents in his pocket, his glasses were broken, and he could hardly see,” Waitzkin said. “And then for the next 20 years, he lived on the street.”
READ MORE: Camillus House hospitality program students celebrate graduation day
As he decided to write it all up, he found his perspective radically changed in the way he saw homelessness, both in South Florida and his home of New York City.
“It was eye-opening to me,” said Waitzkin. “Before I started writing this book, I didn't know much about homeless people.”
“I started having my own curiosity about homeless people and I started to talk to homeless people in New York.”
While the book uses some elements of fiction, much of it is the true story of Ralph, with Waitzkin himself a narrator for large portions of the book.
“It's my style as a writer to sort of combine fiction and nonfiction,” Waitzkin said. He refers to himself as a third-person character in the story, telling Ralph’s story and describing their friendship.
“Fred is not acknowledging what's before our eyes in the sense that a lot of people don't acknowledge the homeless people that are all around them.”
No easy answers
The book doesn’t just tell the story of Ralph’s years finding shelter in parks and digging through dumpsters for meals. It illustrates just a few of the complicated reasons why people like him struggle to escape their situation.
“The first couple of years he was living in the park, he was in a state of paralysis,” Waitzkin said. “He couldn't believe what had happened to his life.”
“He kept thinking that his father was going to bail him out: he hadn't realized that his father lost everything.”
But the park became home to Ralph and after a while, he didn’t necessarily want to leave.
“As Ralph described it to me, when you live in the park and you can't take a shower and there's no wealth involved, and to get a dinner, you have to take it out of a dumpster,” Waitzkin said, “You kind of lose all the pretense.”
“What remains is the essential you — whatever that is.”
For Waitzkin, there are no easy answers to solving homelessness. What he hopes Anything is Good leaves readers with, however, is a better sense of the humanity of the people that often go overlooked.
“We're all in the same tribe — that's what I learned working on this for three years,” said Waitzkin. “Everyone wants to climb the hill of life, and some people get to the top. People don't realize how many people fall down.”
“That's what I want people to learn: that the distance between the homeless people that we see living on the sidewalk in Manhattan or in Miami Beach is very small.”
