Of all the difficulties of living on the street, it’s the simple things that cause the most headaches simply because they’re so hard to do and take so much time. Showers, for example. Trying to stay clean is hard. There are no facilities for it outside cities and even in the cities the only way to get a shower is to sign yourself into a mission. I’ve had to do that periodically just to get a shower. I didn’t need the food (there were soup kitchens) or the bed (missions are often so disease-ridden, so full of drunks and druggies looking for a fight, that they’re more trouble than they’re worth and I avoid them when I can) but there was no other way to get a bath.

In the old days, the Walt Whitman days, even the Neal Cassidy days, travelers would simply jump in a river. Nowadays, that’s either impossible or a really bad idea healthwise. Our rivers aren’t as poison as they were 40 years ago before the environmental movement (and Democrats) forced states to clean them up but they’re not very clean still. Especially in the South where corporate Republicans still call the shots, they can be little more than open sewers.

Where they aren’t, there are houses – vacation or year round – lining virtually every shore, whether river, lake, or ocean, and it simply isn’t true any more that water is public property. With rare exceptions, it’s considered the property of the people who own the house right next to it, as if the property lines extended out into the water on either side. Homeless people have been arrested for trying to take a bath in a lake in front of somebody’s house. This might be alright if there was as much open, public shoreline as private but there isn’t. It is overwhelmingly considered private land and even the few public beaches have ordinances forbidding bathing. Maybe it makes sense from their POV but it doesn’t leave us many alternatives.

Still, the biggest headaches are the obvious ones. Or maybe not so obvious.

You can’t find soup kitchens outside the cities because they don’t exist outside the cities. The Federal and state governments have gotten themselves out of the business of dealing with the homeless in the last few years and pretty much left it to the churches and their volunteers. In the cities, some churches have responded, and I’ll get to those eventually and in great detail, but rural and suburban churches don’t think feeding, clothing, and housing the homeless are any business of theirs. It’s not on their agenda. What they will tell you if you ask is that “there is no homelessness here”, that if they see any homeless people they are invariably passing through on their way to the city.

Well, yes, because that’s where the food and showers and beds are. Whether they admit it or not, towns and small cities avoid dealing with the problem by making not the slightest attempt to deal with the problem in the first place. No, they have no homeless problem because they don’t have any soup kitchens and anybody who tried to live on the streets in their little towns would starve to death in pretty short order. I guess that’s one way to keep down the homeless population.

It’s true that in most cities today you will not starve. That is, you won’t if you know where to go and when to get there. Every city I’ve been in has had at least two or three places that regularly serve meals to the homeless, if by “regular” you mean one meal a day, Mon-Fri. Only one of the dozen or so cities I’ve visited in 5 states has a soup kitchen that runs three meals a day, seven days a week.

One.

I hated to leave it.

Of the others, the most common element is the timing. The one meal that is served is almost always lunch, and that will start “feeding” as we call it, any time between 11:00 am and noon. They stop between 12:30 and 1:00 pm. The times aren’t deliberately staggered but in most places you can eat at the earliest place and still have time to walk to another. As one guy said to me, “Between the two of them, I can usually manage one total meal.” A lot of people, do this – rush from meal to meal between 11am and 1pm, wolfing down the first to have time to get to the second, wolfing down the second to be finished before the kitchen closes up shop. Other guys eat the first meal and put the second in containers in order to have supper. Since no one serves breakfast (at least during the week), it’s a long wait between lunches.

If there is a place that serves supper, it most likely begins around 4:30 pm and lasts until 5:30 or 6. That means that four hours after you finish lunch – possibly two lunches – you have to be ready to eat again or go hungry the rest of the night. The hours chosen for these meals are clearly not for our benefit but for the volunteers who cook and serve them.

The weekends are a crap shoot, especially Saturdays. In Charleston, only one church feeds one meal – lunch – on Saturday. Otherwise, you’re on your own. In Savannah, there’s a guy who, all on his own, no churches or governments involved, feeds dozens of homeless in Franklin Park – hot dogs. At 9am. On Sundays, though, the churches go all out (natch). If you missed the only available meal on Sat, you can make it up and then some on Sun. You can (once again, you have to know where to go) move from one meal to another, all given by churches, all day long. I’ve known people eat as many as six meals on Sunday, hoping, I guess, that they would take them right through the one-a-day week.

There is a message behind the schedule and homeless people pick it up immediately. All these godly do-gooders must be aware that even people without a place to live have to eat every day but they don’t bother to do anything about it except on the one day a week they think God’s watching. The conclusion we all come to, no matter how thankful we are that they do anything at all, is that their altruism is pretty self-centered. They’re doing it for their greater glory, not because it’s needed and it’s the right thing to do. It’s still the right thing to do on Tuesday but they’re going to the dry cleaners.

The other message we get loud and clear, no matter how pleasant or respectful are the cooks and servers and cleaners doing the work, is that the sponsoring institution is ashamed of us – our poverty, our weaknesses, our need. How do we know? Because the doors to soup kitchens, with very rare exceptions, are always back doors. Even at the Salvation Army, which brags about how much it does for us, the entrances for the feedings are always in the alley in back of the building. We are not to hang around in front where people might see us, or even come in through the front door. Back, back, back, you dogs. Back to the kennels. In some cases these entrances are actually hidden – impossible to find without explicit directions. You get the feeling that if they could figure out a way to feed you underground where nobody would even guess you were there, they’d bury you.

You try not to take this sort of thing personally but it isn’t easy.

FLASHBACK: Yardley – December

My pack safely on my back, I hit the streets. It’s barely after 8:00 am and nothing much is open yet, not even in a major city like Philly. Since I’m going to be taking a train out to Yardley to visit with my friend Stella for a day or two, I head over to the train station. Logical.

Penn Station in Philly is enormous, as big or bigger than it is in NYC. There are restaurants and shops on different levels and half the people in the place aren’t catching trains. They’re there to eat or buy. The interior looks recently re-done to make it look more like a mall. There are wood floors and curved walls. On one side are the waiting areas for the long-distance trains, on the other the waiting area for the locals. They are long, cavernous, and, at that hour, filling up rapidly with commuters on their way to work. In the mall area, nothing much was open and walking through it is like walking through a late 20th century ghost town.

I go outside to have a cigarette, secreting myself in a deeply recessed doorway to get out of the biting wind – a wind that never stops whipping at me the whole time I’m there. A tall man with a short beard and white hair walks by me on the sidewalk, then stops and backs up. He looks at my pack and says kindly, “There’s a mission right down the street if you need a bed for the night.”

I say Thank you but I was going to be taking a train soon to meet a friend I was going to stay with. He smiles as if he doesn’t believe me. “Well, Just in case, it’s right down there -” pointing “- a few blocks. You can’t miss it.”

When he leaves I wondered just how obvious it is that I’m homeless. Why not a traveler? a modern-day troubador? Last night Nate thought I didn’t look homeless enough. Today I look homeless enough to get invited to a shelter. Whose perceptions count here?

After a few minutes I drag myself back inside to be out of the cold. There are two sets of steps down from the ground level to the mall level, and they are long sets. It dawns on me as I struggle down them that I didn’t get any sleep last night. My energy is rapidly running out, my eyes as scratchy as if the lids were made of sand fleas, my muscles shaking with fatigue. I am practically dragging the pack down the steps.

“I’m too old for this shit.”

Not the first time I’ve had that thought and by no means will it be the last.

I knock around until nearly 10:00 am when I notice that the commuters have emptied out and the local trains waiting area is all but deserted. I go over and dump the pack on a bench, first sit next to it and then lie on it, close my eyes. doze.

A hand shakes my shoulder. “Sir? Sir, wake up. You can’t sleep here, sir.” He’s young, black, impossibly good-looking, and polite. But firm. He’s wearing the uniform of a security guard. “Are you waiting for a train?”

“Yes. I’m going to Yardley this afternoon and I was traveling all last night. I didn’t get any sleep.”

“Well, you can’t sleep here.”

“Not very well. Especially when people keep waking you up.”

“You can’t sleep here.”

“You said that. What if I wasn’t asleep? What if I just closed my eyes to rest them?” Lack of sleep is making me cranky.

“That would look like sleeping.” he says, and I think he might be suppressing a smile but then again he might just be getting ready to bare his teeth.

“What if I read a book?”

“Is it good enough to keep you awake?” Now he’s definitely smiling.

I wave airily. “Better. I’ll stay awake.”

He leaves. I have amused him.

I figure I can call Stella at 2:00 pm. Or maybe even while she’s at lunch (does she do lunch? I have no idea), say, noon. Well, only two hours.

It’s going to be a long two hours.