His miracle: help from other "bums"

How far could you fall?

Farther than you might think, says the story of the life of Richard LeMieux. LeMieux was a sportswriter in Ohio, then later a businessman in Kitsap County. He raised money for the Washington State Republican Party. From scratch he built a publishing company called The Source, and its success granted him "the dream life."

He lived in a 5,600-square-foot beach home in Indianola, south of Kingston. He had two hot tubs. Three boats. A volleyball court. A 1960 Cougar convertible. A $250,000 salary. A wife and family, complete with grandkids.

They held luaus on the beach. He wore $250 tan Mephisto loafers. He was known as a fun guy with a martini.

"I had been the brightest star," he realizes one day. "So I had fallen the farthest."

LeMieux had those thoughts as he gazed balefully around the Salvation Army soup kitchen in Bremerton. He was comparing himself to folks in a room jammed with what he described as "the drug-crazed, the schizos, the bipolars, the drunks."

He was in shock. He was in the company of "bums" — what he used to call the ratty men he'd seen darting behind trash bins and squatting in the woods behind the Bremerton Fred Meyer.

Now he was one of them.

He had been living in his van for six months. Only on that day, the day after Christmas 2002, the day after he had tried and failed to commit suicide on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, did it dawn on Richard LeMieux how far he'd fallen.

"Life is surreal," he said the other day when I had lunch with him in Seattle. "See, in my mind, I wasn't homeless. I wasn't a bum. I was just camping."

LeMieux's extraordinary story of a well-off businessman's descent into homelessness will be published as a book this fall. It's called "Breakfast at Sally's" — that's what Bremerton's down-and-out call the Salvation Army's food hall.

LeMieux began writing the book in local parks and in the back of his Oldsmobile Silhouette van, where he lived for two years with his dog Willow.

LeMieux, now 65, ended up homeless due to two primary forces — the Internet and depression. In the late 1990s, his publishing business collapsed as his clients migrated to the Web.

He panicked. He had no safety net. He remembers ripping the phone cords from the wall, as if that would help him escape his creditors. He didn't know it then, but his mind was starting to shut down.

"Emotionally, financially, rationally — I was done," he says. "I lost everything. My house, my wife, my family, my life. It's all gone. None of it is me anymore."

The Kitsap County sheriff evicted him in July 2002. First, he lived in his van at the state park campground. Then, broke, he began hitting the mobile homeless circuit, parking at churches, behind the Suquamish casino, in industrial areas.

A year passed before he finally got a psychiatric evaluation. He carries it as a reminder of how far he's come. Severe memory loss, it says. Unable to adapt to changing contexts. Isolated, anxious. Can't maintain relationships.

He says it's why his family and friends turned him away when he came for help. They scarcely recognized him anymore.

Today, LeMieux lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Bremerton. He makes the rent, barely, from his Social Security check. His dream now is that his book will land him on Oprah's couch.

What saved him? In the book, he spends a lot of time driving around in his van, looking for a big miracle. He meets some despair, dysfunction and abuse. But he also finds "unconditional love and kindness beyond compare" — much of it from his fellow bums.

There's "C," for instance, a "slovenly, half-blind, marijuana-smoking, drug-dealing, rum-drinking angel-in-training." C, homeless himself, empties his wallet to feed a starving LeMieux, a gift so selfless that LeMieux says it resparked his interest in living.

C also reads to him from the books of Joseph Campbell, reminding LeMieux of his own passion for storytelling.

"It was little things like that, small kindnesses, that I lived on," LeMieux says. "I have a list of 300 people who I owe my life."

His miracle was disguised as 300 little things.

Around Seattle, it's easy to look from afar onto the world LeMieux writes about. People panhandling on corners. Living in cars. The drug-crazed, the schizos, the bipolars, the drunks.

Most of us probably figure they've always been down. That they're losers. Bums.

But how far did they fall?

Maybe farther than we think.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.