The twin boys were born 23 minutes apart. And together they faced the many troubles that life threw at them. A family racked by heroin addiction. A childhood of bruises and broken bones.
Anthony and Frank Nowotnik struck out on their own at age 13 — the streets were safer than staying with their family, they say — and they’ve been homeless ever since. Now, at age 42, the only thing they have is each other.
And so, in November, when social workers told Anthony that they had found a room for him at the Lakeview YMCA, he responded with a question: What about my brother?
Frank was on a waiting list, social workers explained, and he would have to spend a bit longer living on the street. That was enough to make up Anthony’s mind. He said he would stay outside too.
All through a snowy December, as temperatures dipped into the single digits, the twins have lived under a bridge at California Avenue and the Kennedy Expressway, counting the days until Jan. 7, when Frank’s room is scheduled to become available. Then they will both move inside, together.
“Wouldn’t you do the same thing?” Anthony says.
Frank nods his head.
“That’s brother love,” Frank explains.
Home is a stretch of concrete where pigeons roost and traffic zooms past. A shopping cart holds their possessions, including extra blankets, a red basketball, a black sneaker and a battery-powered hot plate. Two yellow brooms, for clearing away trash, rest against the adjacent chain-link fence. And under a pile of a dozen well-worn, mismatched blankets, sit Frank and Anthony.
With a dark mustache, stubble across his chin and several missing teeth, Anthony is the outgoing one — the one who knows how to drive a car and who likes to dress in collared shirts, even though now, he says with a grin, he dresses “hobo style.”
Frank is quieter. He has a full beard and a thinner frame. He’s the one who does the cooking on their hot plate, the one who once loved to draw and paint and who, on clear nights, now keeps an eye on the stars, trying to spot the International Space Station passing overhead.
Anthony’s right eye droops from getting kicked in the head. Frank’s nose is crooked from being broken.
“Staying together is how we survived,” Frank says.
“Why should we be separated?” Anthony says.
Born in Chicago, the Nowotnik twins were the oldest children in a family that included seven halfsiblings. Their mother loved her boyfriends more than she loved her twin boys, they say. “She told us that we were a mistake,” Anthony says.
Anthony remembers being punished by having his hand pressed onto a hot burner on the stove.
Frank remembers being whipped with an electric cord.
In the beginning, they escaped by sleeping on the roof of a nearby building. Eventually they pitched a tent in the bushes next to the train tracks. They stole food from grocery stores and stopped going to school; neither learned to write.
Over the years, they moved around “like gypsies,” Frank says, and were rarely apart. When they were teenagers, a church arranged for them to live with a parishioner. They stayed with their grandmother for a time.
In their teens and 20s, they fell in with a gang and earned their membership with their fists. Tall and strong, they worked as enforcers, coming down on anyone who stepped out of line. “I was immune to pain. I had so much of it in life, I didn’t feel anything,” Anthony says.
They’ve been arrested dozens of times, for drinking, resisting arrest, trespassing, theft. And both served time in prison in the early 1990s for aggravated battery.
Back on the streets, they knew the tricks of survival. In the winter, don’t sleep in your shoes because they’ll absorb the cold. Stick to the North Side; it’s safer for the homeless. If you’re getting beaten, relax and let your body give with each punch.
Then, in August, Anthony was hit by a car that careered down the sidewalk where the men were sleeping. Frank remembers Anthony screaming and holding his bloody head. Frank ran to a nearby restaurant and yelled for someone to call an ambulance.
Months later, social workers from Heartland Health Outreach, a nonprofit that works with the homeless, came looking for Anthony at the nursing home where he spent three months recovering from head injuries. They explained that a room had become available for him through a program that seeks to house the city’s most vulnerable homeless.
But Anthony was concerned about his brother, whom he hadn’t seen in about a week. “He said, ‘How’s my brother?'” recalled Chris Robinson, 55, an outreach supervisor at Heartland. “One of the first things he wanted to do was to find his brother.”
Anthony was happy for the room, but he didn’t understand why Frank couldn’t join him at the YMCA. He tried sleeping there. “I felt like I was alone, looking at four plain walls. And my brother was out there,” he remembers.
Soon, Anthony was out there, too, sleeping under the California Avenue bridge with Frank.
“Those are good guys,” Robinson says. “I see them as bound together. They were probably inseparable from early childhood, and to this day they’re still inseparable.”
They were hesitant to make the transition indoors, but the accident was a “kick in the pants,” Frank says. Now, Frank and Anthony say they’re ready for four walls and a roof, heat and an indoor bathroom. Both are alcoholics who suffer from bipolar disorder. Once they’re inside, social workers say, the men will have caseworkers to connect them with regular medical and mental health care.
“I want to feel like a human being,” Anthony says.
“I want a key,” Frank says. “I’ve never had my own key before.”
They’re hoping the YMCA will be a stepping stone and that they’ll eventually move into an apartment. In the meantime, they pass the days with Dimitri vodka and handrolled Top tobacco cigarettes.
Frank still urges Anthony to move inside without him. Anthony tells him to be quiet.
“Some people say I’m crazy. Some people say I’m loyal. I just say he’s my brother,” Anthony says.
“I love him,” Frank says.
The two men huddle under the blankets, their breath freezing in the December air. They’ll remain outside for 11 more days.
