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By John C. Ensslin
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer
Time flies when you're living in a brick drain pipe.
Jeffrey John Hubert kicks back in Bob Cote's office at the Step 13 homeless shelter. He silently recalls the time he's called the streets of Denver home.
"About five years," Hubert says.
"Jeff, I've got a picture of you up on the wall that was taken in 1984," Cote counters. "I don't know how long you've been out there before then."
Cote, who was once homeless himself, has kept in touch with Hubert over the past 15 years. Cote has a picture of himself and eight homeless men from around the mid-1980s.
Looking at the photo, he realizes something. All the other guys are dead.
But Hubert is a survivor. On warm days, he sometimes spreads his sleeping bag on a wooden platform under a river bridge near Park Avenue West.
He recently moved to a concrete tunnel near the railroad tracks after police chased him out of a turn-of-the-century brick drainage pipe along the South Platte River where he had lived for several years.
He stays even though someone is preying on Denver's homeless. Drinking is one of his reasons for being homeless.
"I can't get out of the bottle because I don't want to."
"Jeff, time is flying," said Cote, who has tried for years to talk Hubert off the streets.
"As long as I can find a place to sleep and the law don't bother me, I'll be OK," he replies.
Besides, Hubert adds, he has a job cleaning out bathrooms for the railroad once a week. This surfaces as a point of pride when he talks about the time that a group of teen-agers threw a volley of rocks at him.
"Get out of here, you bum!" one of them shouted.
"Hey," Hubert shot back, "I'm only a part-time bum."
November 28, 1999
