The Untold Story of @HardlyNormal
Note: Recently, I met up with @HardlyNormal, aka Mark Horvath, founder of Invisiblepeople.tv, a man for whom I have developed a deep level of respect. Mark doesn’t just talk, he acts. When people hurt, he helps. When children starve, he feeds, he clothes. Now, Mark would be the first to tell you that this mission is not about him, but I felt that revealing his rough past under a bright light through a profile-piece would be the best way to, as Mark would say, open blind eyes to the epidemic of homelessness.
Thank you to Mark Horvath for his time, meeting me at the Hollywood and Highlands Center. Also, many thanks to Ann-Marie Welsh (@padschicago), William Marc Salsberry, and Pastor Matthew Barnett (@matthewbarnett) for lending their voices to this piece. May they be heard by all who read it.
For publications interested in running this article, please Contact Me. All photos were taken by Wm. Marc Salsberry.
With that, here is…
“The Untold Story of @HardlyNormal”
He stands on the matte black stage of the Kodak Theater in Hollywood, Calif., surrounded by fans and followers seated in padded, red seats, a guest and lauded speaker. It’s Oct. 27. The event: a Twitter conference called 140 Characters, is casual in nature and stands in sharp contrast to the Academy Awards. Dressed in blue jeans and a cream-colored collared shirt with black pin-stripes, this 6-foot, gray-haired, green-eyed man loaded with charisma stands straight and seems well-fitted to the building where celebrities like Jack Nicolson and Will Smith pass out gold-plated statues each year.
But this theater, next to famous landmarks like Grauman’s Chinese Theater and the “Hollywood Walk of Fame,” is not that unfamiliar to the man on the stage. More than 14 years ago, Mark Horvath called the loud, dirty street of Hollywood Boulevard home.
According to the 2009 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Report released by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, homelessness in the LA area has decreased nearly 40 percent since 2007, but many in LA, at least 43,000, still call the rough, busy streets of LA home. Horvath doesn’t believe the report.
Horvath knows a thing or two about statistics. Before losing his job a decade-and-a-half ago, Horvath was a high-up executive who ran logistics for a television syndication company in Los Angeles, earning nearly a six-figure income while overseeing shows like “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy.”
He had moved to LA in 1987 to start a music career with a dream of playing at The Whiskey A Go-Go, a bar on Sunset Boulevard famous for hosting rock-and-roll legends such as Led Zeppelin and the Doors, but that didn’t pan out.
“Ironically,” says Horvath, “I wouldn’t play at The Whiskey until I was actually homeless.”
Horvath found himself homeless because of what he calls, “20 years of bad decisions,” but he left his job at the syndication company because they wanted him to randomly fire someone for simply being Hispanic. Horvath says he hates racism and was unwilling to compromise.
“I really cared for my people,” says Horvath.
When he refused to fire someone based on race, Horvath’s boss fired a Hispanic employee for him. That night, Horvath wrote a 20-page resignation letter documenting felonies he committed for the company, and slid copies of the letter under every office door.
Sarcastically, Horvath says, “All of a sudden I found myself unemployed.”
Once homeless, Horvath lived the life of a loner with only an iguana and a drum to call friends. To survive on the streets, Horvath would stroll up and down Hollywood Boulevard tapping his drum, Phil, while making small bucks selling pictures of his iguana, Dog. This earned him the nickname, “The Iguana Man of Hollywood.” During winter, Dog and Horvath spent some cold nights together. Horvath would protect Dog, who as an iguana cannot survive even California’s mild winters, by hiding him under his shirt for warmth.
No longer living on the streets, Horvath, armed with an iPhone and its data connection, is using social media and his organization, Invisiblepeople.tv, to open blind eyes to LA’s burgeoning homeless population. Horvath recently went on a road trip across the United States to encourage discussion about homelessness through video and social media. He even snagged a sponsorship from Ford Motor Co., and was loaned two different vehicles from the corporation for the journey. That’s how he met Ann-Marie Welsh.
On the Kodak Theater stage, a slender woman with shoulder-length brown hair and a red-and-white, long-sleeved shirt stands next to Horvath; she is a homeless woman he met on a sunny, summer day last August in Chicago.
“I’d like to say that I found Ann-Marie in Chicago, but the truth is that she found me via Twitter,” Horvath says on his Twitter account, @hardlynormal.
Welsh heard, from where she can’t remember, about Horvath and couldn’t wait to meet him. To her, he was a celebrity. Through Twitter and phone-calls, she established a report with Horvath and met up with him to shoot a video about her struggle with homelessness. Mark had other plans; through his connections, he brought her to LA for a week to tell her story to the world at the conference.
At 140 Characters, after finishing a short interview about his background, an interviewer with a camera crew for a local new-media news organization pushes Horvath for his opinions on social media.
“You want more after that? Oh my gosh,” says Horvath, looking a bit irritated. He turns his head to someone off-camera, Welsh, and passes the microphone to her.
Two days before 140 Characters, Horvath, a Christian, spoke at another place he used to call home: the LA Dream Center, a Christian charity and church aimed at assisting poverty stricken men, women, and children. 14 years ago, Horvath came to the Dream Center, an off-white, 10-story building that, from the outside, might otherwise be confused with an old hotel. An alcoholic who was also addicted to meth, he was a wreck. Horvath began the Dream Center’s drug rehab program and enrolled in a local chapter for Alcoholic’s Anonymous.
Matthew Barnett, Pastor of the Dream Center and a friend of Horvath’s, recalls a moment when Horvath also wrestled with the phantom of nicotine addiction.
“I remember when Mark was supposed to play the drums for us and had overcome drugs but not smoking yet. He was shaking before church and said, ‘Pastor, can I just have a quick smoke before I play……I’m a total wreck,’” Barnett says.
Though drug-free, Horvath still faithfully attends the Dream Center every Thursday and is credited by Barnett as being one the charity’s first success stories. Horvath even married his wife at the Dream Center. Unfortunately, the marriage came to an end. His ex-wife, Horvath says, “wanted to party” and took off. Still, while he may be a Christian, Horvath half-jokingly says he subscribes to another religion too.
“If you were gonna ask me my denomination, it’s Dr. Bob and Bill W. AA is the coolest thing ever, point blank,” says Horvath.
According to the Alcoholic’s Anonymous Web site, Bill W. and Dr. Bob started the organization in the mid-1930s.
Since recovering from alcohol and drug abuse, Horvath has made a positive reputation for himself in the LA-tech community, receiving praise from those in the industry who have been in similar positions. William Marc Salsberry, a famous photographer in the world of LA-tech aims to make tech-geeks look like rock-stars. He wears a battle-torn face, shaggy gray hair, and a medium-sized beard. Salsberry, too, was once homeless, a trait of his life he shares in common with Horvath. Long after the homeless days of his youth, Salsberry met Horvath outside the Dream Center on a beautiful, sunny May morning to do a photo-shoot of people on skid row, an area in Downtown Los Angeles known for one of the nation’s largest homeless populations. That day, the Dream Center was working in conjunction with the Union Rescue Mission to provide meals for the homeless. Despite the scent of fresh, hot food in the air, skid row smells of human decay.
“When we met, he came up and gave me a big hug … that moment made real what I had thought before,” Salsberry says. “There are a lot of phonies out there, and Mark tries very hard to come across as not a phony. The truth is he [helps the homeless] because he sees the need there.
Salsberry, after landing at the Los Angeles International Airport, writes on Twitter with frustration, “landed at LAX remembering how many times I’ve picked people up from here and realizing no one has ever offered to pick me up from the airport.”
Horvath responds on Twitter, “honest-you need anything I’ll do my best. I know what you mean … [the] World needs more real people not focused on themselves.”
That response, Salsberry says, is an example of Horvath’s genuine nature.
“His response was ‘I could be there in 30 minutes’ and I believed him,” Salsberry says.
Though he was once homeless, Horvath now lives in an apartment off Hollywood Boulevard and works as a case manager at PATH Achieve, a non-profit in Glendale, Calif.
Horvath stands on the Kodak stage, doing what he does best, speaking his mind, making invisible people visible.
The audience, filled with citizen journalists, professional reporters, and vocal Twitterers, spreads Horvath’s words across the Internet via glowing cell phones and laptops.
Pictures of homeless people who live throughout the United States flash by on a screen behind Horvath as he briefly tells each of their individual tales before an audience of thousands, in the Kodak Theater and throughout the Twitterverse. This is his life’s work.
For more information on Mark Horvath and Invisiblepeople.tv, feel free to visit Hardlynormal.com and Invisiblepeople.tv.
All rights are reserved. No publishing, reproducing, altering, or distributing any portion of this article without the author’s express permission.
