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By John Thibedaux as told to Matt Warren

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I was born and raised in San Francisco. I became homeless when
I moved to Houston, Texas, back in 1980, after I found my father
deceased one Christmas morning. I went to jail; couldn’t get out.
I got locked up in the system. I kept bouncing in and out, in and
out. Finally, I got out after doing 18 years. I stayed out, and I was
trying to find work. I don’t have any work experience. I went with
Jim Jones. I became homeless. I went to school with Jim Jones. I
just kept bouncing around.

I got in with the Jim Jones that killed himself and 900 of his fol­
lowers. He claimed to be the Messiah, but I don’t think the Messi­
ah would have threw the Bible down and stepped on it. But when
he did that, it made me curious and drew me to him. And then he
called my mother, my aunt, myself and he seemed to know things
about me that no one else should have known. He wasn’t around
when I did certain things but he still knew things. At the time I was
out of control, living with my mother. She decided to put me with

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Jim Jones and maybe I’d straighten up…I was always curious about
things. I learned as much as I could about him. I know some deep
stuff about Jim Jones.

I went to live to with Touché family up in Ukiah on Row B—I’ll
never forget the address. We traveled to Philadelphia, we went to
old Mexico, we went to L.A. Got in a riot in L.A. cuz they wanted
to take Jim Jones for some odd reason. We didn’t want him to go,
so we had it out with the police until he called us off. The mother
church was in San Francisco, I mean, the headquarters. The mother
church was in Ukiah. I came home after I was cleaning up in the
church and found some confidential papers. I looked at them and
seen that he had some cyanide.

Everything was hush-hush. Meetings were at night, late at night.
You would get punished by him or anybody else if you said any­
thing wrong. If you got in trouble in school, when church time

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came on Wednesday nights, they had a speaker who would call
you up there, and they would chastise you in the back. Me, I wasn’t
going to be chastised, so they kicked me out. But I had planned all
this to let my mother know, “Don’t go with this man. He’s gonna
murder everybody in the church.” She said, “Man, he’s not gonna
do that.” I said, “In less than two weeks.”

All this time, I’m steady growing older and older. Then the whole
Jim Jones cult community moved to Guyana, which is where it hap­
pened. They had all these delegates coming in, all these high-rolling
people. I wasn’t there so I don’t know what really actually happened
when all those people died. The only thing I can say is that I helped
load onto a U-Haul truck 25 55-gallon drums of cyanide. Later, the
church caught on fire in San Francisco. It was on Gary

I came home and moved in with my father after he remarried. He
had a heart attack in his sleep.

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Later I went to prison for a long time. Then I got out of prison. I
didn’t have anything when I got out after 18 years, and I still don’t
have anything. I have no family.

The streets are cold; the streets are cold towards you when you’re
homeless. You have some good people; you have some bad people.
I’m by myself. Sometimes wishing I was somewhere else. Where
that somewhere else is, I don’t know, just somewhere. Maybe an­
other planet. I don’t know. I tried to commit suicide because I was
all alone—nothing to live for.

Eventually, I got married in 2010. In 2015, I moved back home.
Got a divorce in Texas. Then I started traveling. After four years, I
came back to San Francisco and got an apartment. Was doing pret­
ty good, and then I found out that I have prostate cancer, stage 4.
Blood clots in my legs after that. Lost my ex-wife. I lost the will to

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keep up. It took me four years to get an apartment…took me nine
months to lose it. I just didn’t care.

Now, I’m in Charlotte. I’m traveling again, this time under different
circumstances. Yeah, I’m still sick. I have prostate cancer. I have a
blood clot on my lung, but I like to travel—Florida, Reno, Vegas,
San Francisco. Now I find myself in Charlotte. I came down here
looking for a wife. Well, I don’t think it might be in the cards for
me. It’s lonely out here. You don’t got nobody to turn to.

Right now I’m just running—running from cancer. But I don’t have
no certain expiration date, so I’m just running. I can’t beat it. I can
keep running, but eventually it’s gonna catch me.

I’m pushing forward. I’m giving what I have to offer, and it’s all
because of God that I’m doing this. You laugh, you smile, but really,
when you’re all alone, you cry. You are portraying, or try to portray,

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a happy person because you just can’t keep going around crying.
It’s not gonna get any better unless you make it better. So, if there’s
something you like to do or want to do, that’s what you have to do
to make you feel better.

I have to make it better. I don’t want to be a victim. You’re at the
bottom when you’re out there. There’s no place to turn but up. You’re
at the lowest point. It’s the lowest I’ve ever been. Man, the next
lowest place is be dying. But then I’ll be raised. But when you’re in
this physical realm, you just have to deal with the cards that you’re
dealt. You have to deal with it.

This is a hard place to be right now.

I don’t regret my life; everything I’ve done was for survival. But at
the same time, I feel like I’ve missed something.

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