Dwayne Carter’s introduction to Real Change started with a case of mistaken identity. He was standing in front of the Millionair Club, disappointed that he hadn’t gotten a job, when a vendor mistook him for a guy named Joe. Once he’d cleared up the confusion, he asked the vendor, “‘What you doing with the papers?’ That’s when it [Real Change] was in Belltown. I went down and signed up.” That was 1995; Dwayne’s first vendor number was something like 362. “I been doing it ever since.”
Dwayne never meant to end up in Seattle. He was headed to Alaska to work on a fishing boat. “Taking a shot in the dark … a leap of faith.” He’d lived in San Francisco 13 years, doing door-to-door sales and delivery for a biweekly paper: “Soft news and business advertisement. Then they folded up and became the Burlingame Coke factory.”
Dwayne has a lot of family in his hometown of Kansas City, Missouri, though he hasn’t seen them in a long time. The Army brought him out to California, after a stint in Hawaii. “It was beautiful. You got mountains, you got lakes, you got oceans, you got millions and millions of people.” So he decided to stay there. He wishes he’d just stayed in the Army. “I would have done 30, 40 years. But I was barely 18 years old and when you’re that age, you can’t see what life has in store for you.”
For a long time now, life has offered Real Change. “Usually in the afternoon I go down to the ferry on First and Marion to catch the crowd coming off work. That’s my favorite little place to be. I just tell them, ‘Real Change, what it’s about!’ A lot of them, I don’t have to do a spiel, because the paper sells itself.”
After rush hour, Dwayne likes to grab something to eat and then head up to the Seattle Public Library. “I’m a reading buff. Right now my thing is historical; I’m reading a novel about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. That’s about 2,000 pages.” He finds the Civil War fascinating. “It really captures my attention. It really changed this country.” He’s studied the role of his home state of Missouri in the war. “It was one of those open territories, where they could have went either way. Missouri’s a weird state. Because if you’re from the South, it’s the North and just the opposite if you’re from the North.”
Dwayne doesn’t know how much longer he’ll be a vendor. “I just like to thank the people who help Real Change and help me personally. I probably will be doing it for a while, until I really can find something stable. And finding something stable that you can depend on is really hard. I really see finally getting an apartment, probably some kind of full-time employment and going back to living a life, instead of homelessness.”