Joel Hartman has a fancy room at the Omni Hotel at CNN Center, where he gets free meals and a fridge full of Cokes, but he still can’t pass a trash can without digging in.
“Chick-fil-A makes good lemonade,” he said, fishing a Styrofoam cup from a green city garbage receptacle on Marietta Street in downtown Atlanta. “I am thirsty.” He mixed it with another cup of Chick-fil-A tea, and kept walking.
Hartman, 36, has been homeless but is living comfortably for a time after famously rescuing a French woman’s wallet — credit cards and all — from a trash can at the corner of Marietta and Forsyth streets. He figured she was from out of town, so he went to several hotels until he found the one where she was staying, and turned it in.
He didn’t leave his identity, but Scott Stuckey, the general manager at the Omni, was so impressed when he learned about the good deed that he went into the streets to find Hartman with the help of security camera photos. Stuckey found him Friday, and gave him a $500 reward and a weeklong free stay at the hotel.
Hartman has become something of a celebrity. Guests shake his hand or hug him. Out on the street, other homeless people cheer him.
“They found ya!” yelled John Sim, who was sitting on a bench beside a large suitcase on rollers, clothes poking from the open zipper and a plastic grocery store bag sitting on top. “That was great what you did,” he said, adding, “I feel terrible about what happened to that lady.”
The French woman, Anne Drouart, was in town for a convention when someone took her bag as she walked to her car on Nov. 7, according to a police report.
Hartman has an “aw shucks” attitude. Any normal person would have returned the woman’s wallet, he said, and people wouldn’t have made a big deal about it.
He is bothered by the way people treat the homeless — as if they are somehow not fully human. He says hello to just about everyone he passes, and some ignore him. He offers cigarettes to other homeless people — he seems to know them all. And he demonstrated how he panhandles, asking a young man for money and scoring 63 cents.
Hartman would get rid of the pennies. He has considered them bad luck ever since he watched a special-needs boy choke to death on one back when he was in daycare. At 13, he said, he ran away from home in Charleston, S.C., after his father committed suicide. He found a measure of stability about a decade ago when he met a woman and moved to Waycross. She died though, in circumstances that he doesn’t want to share publicly. He nearly cried while describing what happened.
She kept his life together, he said. “Oh God, you have no idea.”
Stuckey, the hotel manager, said he’s gotten dozens of offers for help — from free lodging to jobs. He plans to talk them over with Hartman on Monday.
Hartman said he is interested, but warned that he has been unsuccessful at holding jobs. His arms fly in sudden, jerky motions, and when he sits, he crosses and uncrosses his legs constantly. He said he was diagnosed at age 7 with acute Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, but long ago refused the medication because it made him feel “obsessive.”
He’s tried a variety of jobs: building fire breaks in the forest, moving plants in a nursery, driving a forklift. But he lost each one of them.
“Every single time I’ll hope it’s different this time,” he said, his voice wavering again. He said it makes him emotional “because I feel like I’m useless most of the time. … That’s the main reason I’m homeless. I can’t hold a job.”
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