239: Lost in America
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So many of us, we wander through this country, we wander through our lives, we wander in darkness, often we feel lost. Like Chris, he was doing pretty badly, living on the street, here to his shoulders. I called it the Unibomber Look. I was just living in the woods, just an open wooded area at the corner of a pond drive in Route 347. I'd first close on, usually, but I only could do the wash every so often when they were outside, so I smelled like the great outdoors, whether I liked that fact or not. And I very much knew I needed medical help. So Chris needed this medical help, but of course he had no money to pay for the medical help. He made it money, collecting cans and bottles on the street. Whenever he'd go to doctors or social services, he was so whacked out looking that they wouldn't even talk to him like a person, they wouldn't even look him in the eye. Hell of a thing, isn't it? Wanting eye contact, not getting it. But then if you're lucky, somebody puts up the lights. Welcome WBEZChicago. It's a American life distributed by Public Radio International, I'm Ira Glass. Our program today recorded on a live tour of five cities, Boston, Washington, DC, Portland, Oregon, Denver, and our hometown, Chicago. So Chris was stuck. He needed money to go to a doctor, and then he got this idea. He remembered how a couple years before that, he had wandered off the street into a shopping mall to get warm, and there, the state of New York had set up two laptop computers on a folding table. And to see the lady just look at me, not her head and smile when I walked up to the booth, like I was just one of anybody was great. So he sits down at the computers and on these two computers, you could look up your name and see whether the state was holding money for you that you did not know about. And there was all sorts of money, utility bill refunds, tax refunds, loss checks, owed to all sorts of people and institutions, lost money. They're not even lost since most people didn't even know it was missing. This is like money in purgatory. This is money in limbo. And thinking about all this, Chris will realize how he could pay for his doctors. He would look online, find money of theirs that they did not know about, money that the state was holding for them, and then he would present that to them. Well, I was hoping that I would suddenly get a couple of phone calls and a couple of checks, and people would say, "Oh, wow, thanks for having done this." And then I was hoping that these doctors would just even talk to me in a civil manner and then work my way up from there. Now, the Christian like that I have to tell you about Chris Sewell at this point in the story is, Chris is great at finding other people's money in these databases on the internet. And when he looked for money for the doctors at his local university hospital, not only did he find hundreds, hundreds of unclaimed Blue Cross Blue Shield checks, reimbursements, lost trust fund checks. He also found 100 checks that were owed to the hospital itself. It was a huge victory. But when he went to the hospital to tell the doctors there that there was this money out there for him, he always got the same reaction. There was a total, it was a total wall of silence, except for the people who were telling me to buzz off. I actually went out and I printed out the claim forms and I had a cover letter for it and tried in my own humble fashion to appear professional. I went to the Salvation Army, bought myself a blue pen striped suit, even with my long hair and my beard and went around and hand delivered all of them and had that work. That was the one that didn't work, I didn't get responses. But there was no conversation as soon as I talked, security people would just appear out of the woodwork. He tried letters, he tried emailing. Everybody just thought it was a scam. Eventually he got doctors to help him out through other means and then he turned this talent elsewhere. He used it wherever and whenever he could. When his local public TV station was during the pledge drive, he couldn't actually give money of course but he looked online and found a thousand dollars so there's call them up. It's setting up this interview for our radio show. He was talking to one of our producers on the phone, Joey Snyder, and while he's on the phone with her he found 400 bucks owed to WBEZ. The radio station where we work. And using nothing more than a normal internet connection, he found 610,940 dollars owed to the City of New York. So much money that the City
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