The first time I saw Eliot Pierce was several months before I actually set out to find him, and at once his appearance stirred me. He had the sunbaked skin and gaunt face of a man abandoned at sea, the clothes he wore had no doubt once belonged to someone bigger than he, and his hair was long and deranged, protruding from beneath his baseball cap, and when he lifted the hat to scratch his head he revealed a receded hairline that was many years old and absolutely heartrending. He was flying a sign on the Sahara exit of northbound I-15, and his look was so destitute that I didn’t even need to read the sign to give into the temptation of sparing him the change in my pocket.
“God bless you,” he said.
He didn’t mean it, I would later learn from his own mouth, after I found him this summer.
“It’s just something I say because I can see that people expect it,” he says. “I’m not spiritual, per se, in that sense.”
I ask: “Does it ever bother you, asking people for money like that?”
“Oh man, it does!” he says—and then, collecting himself: “In my heart of hearts, I’d rather be hammering nails.”
Eliot Pierce is not his real name. He asked me to make one up on account of the pervading fear he’s harbored for 20 years that his family will find him. Pierce turns 47 next Thursday, and I first became aware of his miraculous feat of coming back from the dead while on the city’s pelagic streets last April, trying to reel in another large story. A group of homeless folks had congregated near the railroad tracks in Naked City, a mile or so behind the Strip but a world away from its coruscating brilliance. There were three of them, and they were each immersed in one another’s hyperbolic tales and wild prophecies, and then, in the middle of that happy séance, they all turned silent and still, just like that. It was as if they’d seen a ghost. In a way, they had.
“F--k off,” one said, more out of shock than the group’s unrepentant street slang. “I thought you was dead.”
At the time I didn’t realize the enormous human substance of that statement. I only knew that I recognized the man who had slipped into the circle and taken the group aback as the same one to whom I’d given change on the Sahara turnoff months earlier. It wasn’t until later, while talking to Sidewalk, one of the homeless men there that day, that I learned Eliot Pierce, a month earlier, had been hit by a car exceeding 40 mph and was presumed dead by all who knew him.
Except for his family, that is. And that’s only because Pierce has managed to elude them, and their spontaneous and intermittent searches for him, since he arrived in Las Vegas 13 years ago with a little less than nothing to his name but a will to survive at any cost. So long as he didn’t have to spend another moment with that family.
In this part of Naked City, men and women share the same plight, the same day-to-day realities, the same pernicious habits, the same needles, the same interminable rap sheets, the same war wounds, the same bonfires in the winter and bivouacs in the summer, the same incredible yet wholly unverifiable stories, the same way of making money—that is, flying a sign—and on the day Eliot Pierce got hit by a sports utility vehicle, they shared the same belief that he was dead.
“Graveyard dead,” says Ben, who himself has been hit by a car while crossing the street. “Everyone thought he was a goner.”
It sure seemed that way. Pierce, who through good times and bad weighs in at 128 pounds—at a height of 5’ 8”—stood no chance against the SUV. It slammed him to the pavement, on Western Avenue at the Scotland Road intersection, where he lay bloody, broken and unconscious until the fire department showed up. That was March 23, and for the next four weeks everyone attributed his absence from the streets to yet another death in this part of town.
Then Pierce returned. Although his walk was labored, and his face was a bit more gaunt, and his undergraduate’s beard had more gray streaks, Pierce looked as if nothing had happened. Nothing at all.
In this way his reappearance shocked not only the group of homeless men I saw but the entire neighborhood, as well. It was indeed like he had come back from the dead. And because his irises were as alive and celestial as ever, he gave one the feeling of being watched from the other side. It was unreal.
God almighty, I said. This is amazing.
I resolved to catch up to this street phantom, to ask a question only he could answer, and that was:
Why?
I wanted to know not just why it was that he had survived the accident, but also why he would resist dying when given such an opportune chance, only to return to the streets, which many homeless men I spoke to said is worse than death.
Above all, it required patience to catch up with him. There was hardly a good time to meet. He was sent to jail twice for flying his sign, he slept more than 18 hours a day on account of the pain from the accident still throbbing in his bones, he prioritized beer and, as is the case with many transients, he did not keep himself well abreast of time.
“I’ll tell you why that is,” Sidewalk said, while trying to help me find Pierce one day. “For us, time just turns in circles.”
In Pierce’s case, that was true. So he sent a message to me through a mutual friend: “Tell him not to wait on me,” he said. “I don’t want to stand him up. That wouldn’t be right.”
When I did end up meeting Pierce, he was sober, articulate, in good spirits and glad to be alive. It was an infernal summer afternoon, and we went to the Palace Station’s sports book to look at the pretty girls who served us drinks while we watched the pretty horses on television. Without preface we delved deep into a discussion about boxing, and so before I could even remember why it was I had wanted to find him so badly, we were deep in memories, anecdotes and erudition, as if we had been old sparring partners reunited after all these years.
Boxing was the thing that brought him to Las Vegas in the first place, says Pierce, a lifelong junior lightweight who got into sports and excelled at them, despite his size, because of the aggression he soaked up in his childhood home.
He didn’t have a permanent residence when he came to Southern Nevada in 1994, spending nights between friends’ garages and abandoned cars, but he always found time to train, and like a good boxer he began every morning with roadwork. Jogging up and down the city streets.
He jogged to stay in shape. He jogged because the motion and sweat helped him exorcise memories of his family, who he says must have worked hard to hold such violent enmity toward him because “hating people ain’t an easy thing to do.” He jogged on account of his restlessness. And he jogged, Pierce says, to stave off the arthritis he inherited from his grandmother, who he says curled back into a small fetus while she was in her 50s.
Pierce’s eyes well up red and watery when he remembers his grandmother. As a kid, Pierce had always been at her side, devoted, aiding in any way possible, he says. “Every day,” Pierce says, unconcerned about his tears, “she would say she wanted nothing more than to die. She said the pain was unbearable, and she didn’t want to burden anyone else anymore.”
Now Pierce does his roadwork by walking, not jogging. In fact, he says, that’s probably what he was doing—walking the streets, staying in shape, exorcising the bad memories, alleviating his restlessness, thinking about his grandmother, staving off the arthritis whose onset he could already feel (and hence the walking, not jogging)—when he got hit by the car.
The problem is, he can’t remember anything from that day. Nothing at all. Not even when, together, we returned to the site, on Western Avenue and Scotland Road.
According to the fire department, it was right around 6 o’clock in the evening. Pierce was crossing the street where there were no crosswalks, and cars were coming around the bend from the south and straight on from the north. The speed limit is 45, and cars usually do that and more.
The police, who would issue Pierce a misdemeanor citation while he was unconscious on the street, state that Pierce was at fault. Having responded to the scene, Metro officer J. James says Pierce “failed to yield to traffic, causing a collision when he ran into oncoming traffic.”
A witness to the accident says that Pierce tried to absorb the impact on his left side, and went flying through the air as much as 30 feet.
The car, coming to a stop, just missed hitting him a second time.
When Pierce finally came to, he was in immense pain and on a hospital bed at UMC.
In all, he suffered six broken bones, including his neck and leg, nerve damage in his left hip, lacerations requiring 20 stitches on his face and body, and, what the medical records do not show, immeasurable pain throughout.
The hospital administered him morphine, he says, and it helped. He says that they also gave him a beer with every meal, because he is an alcoholic. (The hospital states that it does not give beer to anybody.) Six days after operating on Pierce, doctors sent him, with a neck brace, leg cast, crutches and some pain medicine to make life tolerable, to detox, where Pierce would lose those pills for good.
On his way back to Naked City, four weeks after the accident, police stopped him for jaywalking. Pierce, who’s been arrested more than 60 times by Metro, had several warrants out for his arrest. So they took him in.
“Everybody thought I was dead,” Pierce says. “It wasn’t the first time I was supposed to die.”
That is true, as well. In Pierce’s mind, at least. Pierce tells me about the 150-plus street fights in which he’s participated, and that only through his training as a boxer has he lived to tell about his scraps with men twice his size. “You would have to live on the streets to know why all the fighting,” he says with a sigh. “It’s just the way of life for everyone living on the streets.”
He tells me about the first time he thought he was going to die. It was in Montana, and he was 6 years old and his brother was 7, and one day they were taking to some of the big Midwest weeds that have proven themselves invulnerable to human hands alone. Thus, the country boys used big, sharp tools. Like an ax.
Without reason, Pierce felt a weird presentiment while working, and when he looked up he saw his brother—the same blood brother, according to Pierce, who would send three .22 bullets whizzing past Pierce’s ears while the boys were duck-hunting, and claim they had ricocheted off the duck’s pond; who would impregnate Pierce’s wife just months after she married Pierce; who would fire his new .30-30 rifle point blank while Pierce was checking it out and barely miss him with a mortal bullet—that same blood brother was standing over him with the ax, and he swung it down onto Pierce’s skull, and Pierce bled and bled and bled, and now he has the freaky scar to remind him of it when he takes off his hat.
He tells me about the time, at 15, he thought his stepfather had killed him. Pierce had gone to a kegger, because in rural Montana there’s not much else for a 15-year-old boy to do on a Saturday night, and he drove. A cop pulled him over. Took him back to the station, where Pierce’s stepfather, a big German man who’d played college football and who coached Pierce throughout his football career, picked him up in his truck. On the way home they hit a red at their town’s only streetlight. The car idled. Then from the corner of his eye Pierce saw his stepfather draw up a hammer, and before he could put up a word or finger in defense he felt the cold, hard round end of the metal tool hit him square in the forehead. Pierce did not pass out, he says: He saw colored wheels. It was a more local and severe pain than he had ever known, than he ever would know. “It hurt even more than the ax,” he says. “And even more than the car. And even more than life on these streets.”
Pierce left his family in his 20s, he says, and he hasn’t looked back, no matter the cost. Even if it means life alone with only shit to eat, because nothing would be worse than reliving that hell on Earth.
“Somebody should draw a line as to what a human can go through,” Pierce says.
I buy him beers because I admire his toughness, and without money or social services at his disposal he has no means to acquire medicine to remedy the myriad pains from the past 41 years, and that ain’t right. It’s the reason he does crack cocaine, like many of his peers. “I don’t like to talk about the drugs, per se, because people don’t like to hear about that shit,” he says, with the same internal conflict in his tone as when he speaks of fighting. “But I’m proud of myself that I don’t have to do it every day. I can do it when I want, when the pain is just too much.”
Of course, only so much of Pierce’s story is verifiable. High-school records show he did in fact live in Montana; football stats, that he excelled in sports; criminal record, that he is a mass recidivist; medical records, that his body has been damaged. But how else does one explain the toughness required to survive a collision with an SUV going 40 mph?
Even when he tried to kill himself, Pierce’s body endured. He has tried it twice, both times with whiskey and pills.
“I guess I didn’t really want to die,” he says. “Maybe it was something else. Because I know in my heart that if I really want to do it, I will get it done.
“But I’m in it for the long haul now. I know it ain’t gonna be pretty, but I’m the toughest son of a bitch I know.”
Before leaving me, Pierce asked if it wouldn’t be too much to request that, in the event that a story was written about him, I mentioned that he would be more than happy to do part-time work for jobs that require a man to use his hands. Like apartment maintenance. Or like hammering nails. “I could do it,” he says, “for as long as the pain in my body will allow me, which I think is about four to five hours a day. Maybe more if someone pushes me. Who knows. Can you ask them to contact you if they’re interested?”
I told him I would. And then I watched him walk out into the decaying sunlight, more apparition-like than ever, and I thought about his answer to my question “Why?,” and I realized it was the perfect brain-teaser for his story:
“I got to thinkin’ about it,” he had said, “and I think I survive these things just to see why it was I survived.”
Joshua Longobardy is a Weekly staff writer.