Homeless for only a couple hours, Mark Horvath finally found refuge on a park bench around 3 a.m.
Ten minutes later, the sprinklers turned on.
That was in 1995.
For years after that night, Horvath felt invisible. But lately, he has been feeling a little less invisible and a little more heard.
Horvath’s been on the road visiting cities throughout North America, talking to homeless people from coast to coast and documenting their stories on Twitter and his website invisiblepeople.tv.
He was in Fredericton on Sept. 5 and 6. Timothy Ross, the coordinator of Fredericton’s Community Action Group on Homelessness, was Fredericton’s liaison for Horvath during the two days he was here.
“We’ve got to start looking at solutions, not the problem,” Ross said.
“There are way more people who are essentially homeless in Fredericton than the numbers show.”
Ross said people who are jumping from couch to couch or living in crowded housing are also in need of stable homes.
And that’s what Horvath wants to bring to light.
He sat down with The Aquinian to tell his story, and how he’s got to where he is today.
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Born in upstate New York on March 13, 1961, Mark Horvath started dealing pot when he was 14 years old.
“I remember it exactly,” he said. “I went to a junior-senior high school where all the grades were combined into one building. In the seventh grade, I walked outside to find my spider bike up in the trees in parts and all the seniors were laughing at me.”
Horvath said he needed to make a name for himself in the school, so that seniors would stop picking on him.
“I ended up becoming the drug dealer for that school.”
At the same time, Horvath started playing the drums professionally. This led him to a life filled with music, drugs and trouble.
Fast-forward 12 years, Horvath found himself in Los Angeles with a dream of “making it big” and becoming sober.
“My solution to getting sober was to move to L.A. and go to school for musicians, cause that made a lot of sense,” he said. “I did what you call a ‘geographic’ to change myself.”
At 26, Horvath hadn’t been sober in years. His favourite drug was “whatever you had.”
“I was a garbage head, I did everything,” he said. “I’ll be real with you, it was a lot of fun.”
Horvath managed to stay sober in L.A. for six months.
But then things changed.
He became a house drummer in a country band, drumming for 10 hours a week and drinking beer for 40.
“I applied to a TV company and they hired me and two weeks later they hired me as traffic supervisor,” he said. “They kept promoting me until I ran a good part of a large television syndicator – all while I was still wasted on drugs.”
A glimpse of Horvath’s righteous mentality was exposed when he quit the station in protest of a Latino employee being fired for no reason other than being Latino.
But with no income and an expensive addiction, Horvath’s parents put him in a facility called Narconon.
Narconon is a residential program for substance abusers. Horvath explained that the program is based on a Scientology foundation, with the belief that the drugs are stored in the body’s fatty tissues, causing the continuous cravings.
The program tries to flush out the toxins through an extensive routine that includes exercise, vitamins and spending time in a sauna.
“They forgot that there is a whole lot of emotional problems that you can’t sweat out,” Horvath said.
Horvath alleges that during his stay at Narconon, he became too curious about the program and started to second-guess the system. That’s when they “put him on the streets” and Horvath was homeless for the first time.
“I didn’t know how to survive,” he said, when he spoke about that first night. “I walked probably 11 miles, my feet were so sore, back up to North Hollywood (from Olympic Boulevard) to where I felt safe. I would go to park to park to park, and realize there were gang members here or there. I just wanted a place to sleep.”
“There’s no Homelessness for Dummies,” Horvath said.
After several months on the streets, Horvath landed at the L.A. Dream Center, a church that gives people of different backgrounds what they need to get back on their feet.
A whirlwind of events soon followed for the self-proclaimed loud mouth. He started a Christian rock band, worked at the Dream Center and soon became the executive producer of the Dream Center’s TV show.
“But the economy was just starting to go bad, so I got caught into this really bad catch 22,” he said.
Shortly after, he lost his job and ended up on food stamps again.
“It was so dark, because I had no income whatsoever and I’m scared of being homeless again. I’m back in L.A. and I can taste homelessness.”
Horvath’s life quickly took another turn. He saw a coffee table book in an office titled Finding Grace. It was filled with black and white pictures of homeless people.
“I can do this with video,” he said. “I grabbed my camera and went out to start interviewing people.”
The selling point on the web was that Horvath’s videos were completely raw.
He couldn’t afford editing equipment.
“It was magic. I told their story.”
Ever since starting the website, Horvath has been completely financially supported by the people who want him to continue to tell these people’s stories. Various sponsors and businesses have supported his road trips and video equipment.
He also got some support from the Pepsi Refresh Project to begin a website, wearevisible.com, to empower homeless people through social media literacy.
Horvath has essentially become a catalyst. Many of the people he has identified on Twitter and his website have gotten help from others, whether it was with housing, scholarships or clothing.
Through it all, Horvath is still technically homeless himself. He’s “on leave” from working at a homeless shelter in L.A., where he’s got a three month contract. “I have a great resume and I’ve got this $10 an hour job working for three months that I know I am going to get fired from,” he said. “But it’s working with homeless people [and that matters].”
His only regret?
“What I did to my parents, what I put them through.”
After leaving Fredericton, Horvath continued his cross-Canada tour to Halifax and then went to St. John’s. Through it all, he has been tweeting and capturing Canada’s homeless problem on camera.
You can follow him on Twitter @hardlynormal or on his two websites wearevisible.com and invisiblepeople.tv.
