What’s Wrong With This Picture?

He met Hollywood Heinz Schlotter, the man in the slightly rumpled suit who was Street Zine's vendor of the month for October and November, earning him a stack of free papers. He has cartoons he gives away with every paper, trying to entice a few more people into a purchase. Hollywood wants a job, but not this one. He's been just about everything--painter, chef, graphic artist, bartender--a true "jack-of-all-trades," as he says. He lost his last gig after 9-11, so he's stuck with Street Zine and little else. But he'll do his best to make that go. "I ain't got time to get drunk," Hollywood says. "I have to work."

These are the people who make Samples' photographs so fascinating, because they're not too far removed from being your neighbor, your brother, your best friend. These are the people who have made Samples basically give his life over to Hero to Zero. He came back to work at Prestige Ford in March 2002, but lately, he's found it hard to spend much time there, even though there are bills to be paid. To make his rent this month, he even had to pawn his camera. (Central Dallas Ministries just cut him a check for a new one.)

The project has taken on new dimensions as he partners with more organizations, such as A Friend Indeed Foundation, which raises money for the homeless as well as educating the public about the situation. (Founder Brad Relander is just learning about it himself. The 24-year-old hadn't even seen a homeless person until he moved to Dallas from a small town up north.) But the concept remains simple: By selling the photographs, Samples collects money to help the people in them. Enough to buy blankets, coats, a room for the night--whatever they need, whatever he can afford. By letting people see them, he heightens awareness of a problem that's big and getting bigger. Puts it into enough faces until someone is forced to pay attention. And maybe, by showing these people what they look like in the photos, he can spur some sort of activity in them, a drive to get better, to get clean, to get off the streets.

"At first it's glamorous, man," Samples says. "They're on the news. They're in the paper. Amongst their friends, they're famous. But for what?" He lets the question hang in the air for a moment. "I've had different comments from different people, like, 'I haven't had a photograph taken of me in 15 years.' And, 'This is something I can send home to my granddaughter and let her know I'm OK.' And later on, 'I don't wanna send this to my granddaughter.' Or, 'Wow, thanks!' And later on, 'That picture is effed up. I don't want it.'"

It happened with Ephram. Samples found him downtown, shirtless and drunk. He wasn't making much sense--in English or Spanish. He was spinning around, high and getting higher. Samples set up his camera and began shooting.

A handful of the photos he took that day made their way into the Hero to Zero show. Samples took some of them back to where he'd met Ephram before so he could give them to him. He does that with every photo he takes.

"He said, 'That's not me,'" Samples says. "And we argued. And then his friend finally came over to him and said, 'That is you.' Then he was, like, overly apologetic. He wanted to make sure I knew he was sorry. And he left with that photograph."

After trying for a month to track down Ephram again, he finally found him. Sitting right next to him at church. "And he speaks good English," Samples says, laughing.

"I think when you meet someone like Hal, you realize there is a system, the system can work, and I think Hal is the proof of the system's accomplishments and ability to be successful," says Herschel Weisfeld, the former homeless task force member who spends his days now as a cultural affairs commissioner for the city. "And what it also shows by his example is that it also takes the desire to want to change, because he obviously had that desire to change."

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There are no random occurrences, no bit players in Hal Samples' story. Everyone has a place, a purpose. The guy who walks into Prestige Ford might just be the biological father who left Samples' mother when he was 6 months old, never to be seen again. This happened in December 1992. Samples (his birth name is Harold Alfred Lindstrom IV) and his uncle Donny interviewed him for a job, before letting him know who they were.

Similar instances have happened so often to him--he also unwittingly flirted with one of his half-sisters at the same dealership--that it's not as bizarre as you might think. Not to Samples, anyway. He's come to expect it. He calls them "God moments."

Like the following one, the one where Samples' life seemed to come full circle and he forever cemented in his mind that helping the homeless was his calling.

When Samples was 15, his mother, Mary, decided she had finally had enough of her husband (Samples' adopted father). He'd knocked her around for the last time. She and Hal left Mesquite and took refuge at the home of her best friend, Barbara, on the other side of Lake Ray Hubbard.