The one thing the Rev. Billy Ray Thomas really wants is teeth.

He sees them as a badge of respect, the one thing standing between him and his future as a successful minister and self-taught pianist. The empty space is a window to his past, a reminder that he hasn’t always worn a sharply tailored suit and shiny dress shoes.

Sunlight strikes the top of Thomas’ shiny head and streams past the lenses of his purple-tinted sunglasses. Only the clean-up crew remains at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church after another Sunday afternoon soup kitchen, and with his ever-changing congregation departed, Thomas finally has decided to take a seat at the end of a long folding table and talk about his life.

“Two years ago, I was sleeping under cars, bathing in the library and eating out of trash cans at Panera, Dunkin Donuts and Buffalo Joe’s,” he says. “I didn’t like the streets, the alcohol, the drugs, the characters.”

A couple of months after his release from prison in October 1996, Thomas was sleeping near the steps of the First United Methodist Church on Hinman Avenue, two blocks from the Northwestern University campus, when the cold, rainy night became too much to bear.

He left the church, walked to McDonald’s and sat down. Tired and dejected, he wasn’t expecting the hot cup of coffee that suddenly appeared in front of him, the gift of a stranger.

“His gesture was the greatest gesture in the world,” Thomas says. That cup of coffee made him decide that he wouldn’t go back to the streets.

Five years later, that goal has become a reality. Thomas lives on Oak Street and spends his days traveling to local soup kitchens to share his story and music with those struggling with drug and alcohol addictions, homelessness and family fragmentation.

“As I became a victorious person in this endeavor, I wanted to give back,” says Thomas, who grew up in Evanston and spent most of his childhood in orphanages and foster care before being incarcerated for burglary at age 19. “I use my connections to the homeless to track those who are falling through the cracks.”

Thomas says his journey to find his purpose in life took strength and courage, as well as compassion and help from people in Evanston. He is the caretaker of his building, which is owned by Sidney Zwick, an entrepreneur and the editor of the Evanston Beacon.

“I met him three years ago sleeping behind the stairwell of the building I used to have an art gallery in,” Zwick says. “I told him, ‘If you can work, I can pay you.'”

Shortly after Thomas started to work with him, Zwick discovered that the then-homeless man was a self-taught pianist.

In the two years before he met Zwick, Thomas taught himself to play the piano, composing songs in the soup kitchens’ fellowship halls. He couldn’t read music but loved to play — and others in the kitchens loved to listen.

Impressed with what he heard, Zwick took a recording of Thomas’ playing to Bernard

Dobroski, the dean of the School of Music. The dean worked with Marcia Bosits, the director of piano pedagogy in the School of Music, to arrange for Thomas to take group piano lessons and work with a graduate student piano tutor last Winter and Spring quarters.

“The school has been an open door to me,” Thomas says. Last March, he released a six-track album Infancy and plans to work on a second album for December. Recorded with the help of a Music student at the First United Methodist Church, Infancy was sold at four local stores.

Ordained as a minister last May, Thomas views his musical talent as a gift from God and uses it as a way to reach out to others.

“They’re trapped in the cycle of drugs and alcohol. They themselves want to come out of it, but they don’t have the strength,” Thomas says. Making music is his way of sharing his own strength with the homeless people he meets.

But Thomas knows his make-shift congregation needs more than spirituality to survive. When he’s not preaching and making music at the five local soup kitchens, he’s on the streets, distributing coats, hats, sleeping bags, blankets, bicycles and whatever else he has previously gathered from garbage bins to Evanston’s homeless.

“Because I have a direct connection with others on the street here, I am able to anticipate their needs and listen to their requests,” he says.

As much as the bad parts of life and human nature stay with him, Thomas never forgets the good. Instead, he remembers the cup of coffee, passing along generosity and compassion with music, ministry, conversation and his gap-toothed, charismatic smile.

“When I’m depressed, I love helping people,” Thomas says. “It doesn’t make sense to gain the world and lose your soul.” nyou