A smoky haven
0:58 AM 4/20/04
Andy Hall and Dean Mosiman Wisconsin State Journal

The pall of cigarette smoke is so thick it feels like glue in your eyes. <

And as people shuffle in and out of his Allied Drive apartment, Jerry Sanders coughs as he sits on a worn couch pocked with cigarette burns. <

A gentle 63-year-old, Sanders offers a haven to the homeless or needy, part of a fragile, changing, underground survival system in the neighborhood. <

But he's also a magnet for hangers-on who crowd inside to socialize, smoke and drink all day and deep into the night. <

"We don't deal with no drugs," says Sanders, dressed in an old, tight T-shirt and black jeans. "I drink. I maintain my drinking here." <

A parade of people of mixed ages, gender, races and need rap on the unlocked door to his place, where cigarette butts jam ashtrays, the television flickers and someone is always sitting at the kitchen table - a communion of the poor, unemployed, addicted, beaten and hopeless. <

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Smelling of booze <

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Some read. Some shoot the breeze. Some smell of booze, even on a weekday afternoon. Some are locals, others not. Some stay briefly and others hang longer. <

Sitting at the kitchen table one weekday afternoon is an older man who will give only his first name, Marvin. "Jerry has always opened his home to people for a bite to eat, or a place to warm up and stay," he says. "It's Jerry's shelter." <

The lifestyle has taken a toll on Sanders, who was born in Mississippi, raised in Illinois, and long worked at the General Motors plant in Tilton, Ill. He's lived in Madison off and on for two decades. <

His wife left long ago over his chronic drinking. But he still sees his five children - a vibrant teenage daughter checks on her father and mingles with the crowd. His girlfriend died in the past year due to liver failure related to drinking. <

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Dumping ground <

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Sanders said he and other struggling people end up on Allied Drive "because it's easy to get an apartment" there. <

"This is the largest dumping ground in the city," Marvin says. <

Janie Mae Tompkins and Virginia Mooney - others who frequent Sanders' place - had apartments here, too. For a while. <

Now homeless for four years, Tompkins lost her apartment and Section 8 housing voucher in a dispute with a landlord, who claimed she was selling drugs. She says she wasn't. <

Tompkins doesn't know where she'll sleep on this raw, chilly early winter's night. <

Maybe a boyfriend's van. <

Maybe Sanders' apartment. <

Maybe not. <

Mooney, a single mom with three children, including a baby, moved to Madison from Texas in 2002. She came to Allied Drive because "no other apartments would let me in." Her mother lives there, too. <

Kids beaten up <

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But work as a certified nursing assistant has been sporadic. A woman showed up last fall at Mooney's place over a dispute about a boyfriend and hit her 5-year-old boy, Mikel, with a beer can. Her kids have been beaten up. Her car tires have been flattened. <

Mooney lost her apartment late last year because a building manager said the unit was frequented by drug dealers. "They weren't dealing drugs at my home," she says. "If I was dealing drugs, I'd have money." <

So on this day, standing outside Sanders' place, Mooney and her children are homeless. <

By December, after a year in the apartment and five years in the neighborhood, Sanders lost his lease, too, pushed to another low-income neighborhood because his landlord didn't like the constant flow of people into the apartment. <

And his smoky shelter is gone, part of the underground collapsed. <

"I don't know how people can stop people from having visitors as long as there's no disturbances," Sanders says, coughing amid the packed cardboard boxes holding the scraps of his life.