Rules of the Road 1: Food

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.

 

Larry

I meet Larry by the tennis courts in Forsythe Park, which has become for me, like many of the other street people, a kind of home base. We usually start there in the morning and finish up there at night before we go off to our various points of rest. It’s central to three of the soup kitchens, close to the churches that give away clothes, not far from the furthest southern point that the Free bus goes, and only a few blocks from the big library on Bull Street. It’s also one of the few places we don’t get thrown out of until after 11pm.

Larry is tall, very thin, in his late 60’s. He sports a white, closely-trimmed beard below a beaky nose and vague eyes that wander a lot. He never looks straight at you but always over your shoulder or off to some distant horizon at the side. His joints seem so loose that he reminds me of one of those wooden dancing men on sticks, arms flapping at a different pace and in a different direction from his knees, feet and shoulders going their individual ways. He barely seems connected at all when he moves, as if he’s been put together with rubber bands that are fraying, glue that is loosening, and the stitches up his sides are coming apart. I half expect to see a hand or a foot fall off like a bicycle wheel when the hub nut drops away.

It is night. I am over by the tennis courts because there are arc lights there bright enough to read by and I have my book propped in my lap, a thriller by Sandra Brown called Unspeakable despite the fact that nothing in it is. There are several benches lined up in a row here, for the benefit of players’ fans, I suppose. I am at the bench on one end of this row, Larry is at the bench on the other, hunched in a tight ball over a sheaf of papers. It seems impossible that a man that tall could turn himself into such a tiny clutch of flesh withouit something inside splintering, but he does it. When he stands, he unfolds like a crumpled piece of paper being straightened, first this part then that spreading, finding its old form. I realize I have seen him at the library, sitting at a table pouring over his papers. I had no idea looking at him then how tall he was.

He ambles in my direction, carrying his bag as if he barely remembers having one. I think he’s going to ask me for a cigarette and decide I’ll give him one. I only have a few left and no more cash but he looks like he could use it. His eyes are hooded and sad, his mouth droops, and he moves as if there was a weight on his shoulders that he’s been carrying for a long time and it tires him just thinking about it. But it turns out he doesn’t ask that. He doesn’t even smoke. He is what I used to call in the Pioneer Valley an “earthy-crunchy”, a vegetarian/environmentalist/progressive who eats tofu and keeps a compost pile in his kitchen when he doesn’t have the room in the yard.

He stops in front of me. I look up. And up. “Haven’t I seen you around?” he asks someone to my left.

I assume he’s talking to me since there’s no one else here. “Probably. At the library.”

He folds his arms across his chest, which is a bit of a production, like folding a complicated beach chair. “Are you new here?”

“Yeah, just a few days. I haven’t figured everything out yet.”

“Did you eat today?” This is often the first question one street person asks another, or at least the second, after “Have you got a spare cigarette?”

“Yeah, I did. Thanks. You?”

“Oh, I know where the food is. Have you figured that out?”

I tell him about Megan and her map.

“That’s good, that’s good.” He is looking across the street now. He has a deep voice as sad and tired as his eyes, and he speaks slowly and distinctly as if he thinks I may be deaf. He gestures toward the parking lot behind the courts. “That’s where they feed on Saturday afternoons. Did she tell you that?”

“No. She missed that one. Well,” I add, coming to Megan’s defense as if he was attacking her, which of course he isn’t, “she couldn’t tell me everything. She had to catch a bus.”

“Yuh.” When he says that, I know where he’s from.

“You’re from the mid-west, aren’t you? Minnesota?”

No, but not far off. He’s from Madison, Wisconsin. He seems surprised I’ve heard of it. I tell him I used to listen to a radio show from there. “Oh, Michael Feldman,” he says, and sits as if he has decided it’s OK because anybody who listens to Feldman can’t be all bad. He starts explaining about where the various feeds are that I haven’t heard about and carefully writes the day, time, and addresses on a piece of typing paper he takes from the bag that I now realize is a beat-up briefcase. As he writes, which takes a long time because he makes the letters so large and so carefully, he tells me a little about himself in a wistful, distant voice that could be describing someone else’s life.

He drove down to New Orleans in his panel truck after Katrina to help re-build. I ask what that was like but the answer is vague, indistinct. It has something to do with getting paid in food to stay with the tents and tables that a church group from Oregon uses to feed the refugees. He is to make sure vandals don’t steal everything, and he’s happy to do it because it’s a place to sleep and 3 squares a day.

He stays in New Orleans for a year, working on houses, but the money that’s supposed to be coming to help the poorer people re-build their homes never arrives and though there is a lot of work to do, there is no money to pay for equipment or materials. Eventually there is little he can do despite the wreck of the place and he finds himself trapped. He doesn’t have the money to stay or the money to leave. He has been living hand-to-mouth ever since, slowly working his way back north with the idea of going home. That was 2 years ago and Savannah is as far as he’s got.

Abruptly he asks if I need any money. “I can always use money,” I say.

He pulls a crumpled manilla envelope out of his pocket. There are a few bills in it, maybe ten. They all look like ones. He counts out four of them and holds them out to me. I’m not so sure. “You know, I’m OK for now. I ate today.” Actually, I’m broke but there are only a few bills and he’s offering me almost half of what he’s got. I’d take a dollar or two, probably, but not half.

“Go ahead. Take it. I have more in the truck.”

“You sure?”

“Sure. Hey, we’re all in this together.”

The next day I run into him again and ask him how he’s doing. He tells me he’s on the way to a friend’s house to borrow money.

 Philly – The Pack

It is a long, uncomfortable night. By dawn I am as stiff as a board. Everything aches, my eyes itch, and I have smoked way too many cigarettes so my throat feels like a dusty road assaulted by wagonloads of rocks. But at least I did not freeze to death on the street. I’m learning to be thankful for small favors.

Basically I am now marking the time until I can get my pack back. 7am. The last hour before 7 lasts several days, it seems to me. Finally it arrives and I go to the baggage counter but a woman there tells me I have to go outside the building and around the corner so I can enter through the outside door. I think that’s absurd with the counter right there and the baggage room immediately behind and an inside door behind that, a door that is slightly open making a crack through which I can see people…doing what? Why, moving baggage around. But I sigh, say nothing, and go outside into the cold.

The sun is up, sort of, and it is warmer than it was last night, sort of, but the wind still whips down those streets like a teenager in a hot car. I slide around the corner of the building. It is 7:03am. The door is run by electric eye, like the doors in supermarkets, and it’s supposed to open as I approach it. It doesn’t. I try to trip the eye several times. The door won’t budge. I peer inside. There is another counter but no one is behind it. Are they open or closed? Apparently somebody is late opening up. I go back inside the terminal to wait.

At 7:30 I go out again. The door still won’t open and there is still no one behind the counter. Did I read the sign wrong? No, it says the hours are 7am to 7pm. So where the hell is everybody?

I go back around the corner and into the terminal. I wait another half hour. At 8am I try again. The door still won’t open but this time there is someone behind the counter. He waves me in. I signal that the door won’t open by pointing to it and shrugging. His face scrunches. He doesn’t understand. He comes to the door.

“IT WON’T OPEN!” I yell through the glass.

He looks concerned for a moment then seems to have an awakening. He nods to himself and crosses to the door frame where he pushes a button or pulls a switch or something. Now the door opens. “Somebody forgot to turn the electric eye on,” he says apologetically.

I glare. “I’ve been trying to get in for an hour.”

“Sorry about that. How can I help you?”

I tell him. He disappears into the other room – the one I could see through the door inside the terminal – for a good ten minutes. When he comes back, he is dragging my bag. “That’s it.”

“Nine dollars,” he says, and stamps the ticket “Paid”.

“No, three,” I protest. “They told me I’d get six dollars back.”

“Only if you picked the bag up by eight am. It’s after eight.” Smugly pointing to the clock.

“Because I couldn’t get in here before that, remember? The goddamn door was locked.”

“Yeah,” he shakes his head, “that was a shame.”

He looks at me. I look into his eyes. He is flat, braced, unmoving and unmovable. I’d need a lawyer, a court order, and a dozen cops to get that six bucks away from him. I consider getting them. Or at least his supervisor. Probably I should, but fights over money always make me feel grubby, as if I’d been rolling around in slop. It’s only six bucks. I let it go, which is what he’s counting on of course.

One of many mistakes I will make over the next few months.

 

Happy Birthday, Bum

Yesterday was my 60th birthday. Happy birthday, bum.

I am sitting in Forsythe Park when it hits me that today is my birthday. I am 60. I’m drinking a 50 cent “senior” coffee from Burger King, which seems appropriate, and relaxing on a bench in front of the ugliest fountain I have ever seen. Plaster Pans spit water through their flutes, inelegant plaster geese shoot streams of water from their beaks, and the whole is presided over by a plaster statue of a woman in flowing robes lounging atop a very tall pedestal in the center. She is neither beautiful nor ugly, a classic example of Middle American kitch, formless, anonymous, boring. She wears no expression worth the name.

Nevertheless, tourists are lining up to have their pictures taken in front of this monstrosity as if it were somehow worthy of inclusion in their book of memories. Well, maybe it is. Maybe their book of memories is so bland, so empty of cultural or personal meaning that a picture in front of a monstrosity is better than nothing. But I suspect it is simply that they think the fountain beautiful, that they harbor the same stunted, morose, stultifyingly inane sense of beauty as the sculptor himself.

I read on a plaque that in 1988 hundreds of thousands of dollars were subscribed by the wealthier families of Savannah to “restore” this fountain to its original condition. I shudder. Had I been asked to donate at the time, I would have said, “What? For that? Let it crumble. Better yet, I’ll donate if you promise to rip it out and start fresh. Hire a sculptor with some talent. As it is, that thing would be at home in a trailer park or a Lillian Vernon catalog.”

I imagine I would not have been admired by Savannah folk for my taste.

I move on. It is early morning. The park is full of people (it is Saturday). The are bicycle-riders, dog-walkers, hand-in-hand strolling couples, frisbee-flyers, Japanese picture-takers, and a German husband and wife arguing over…something. She is dressed in a tight stretch blouse that doesn’t hide much (which is OK because she doesn’t have much of anything to hide anyway), lime green Capri pants, and sandals. She rolls her eyes at her husband’s opinions the way every woman ever born did, glares skeptically at him across the top of her sunglasses, and follows him with a sigh. He is as fat as you’d expect, with close-cropped white hair and brown tie shoes polished to a high shine. They could not be more out of place in this park on this morning than if he were wearing a tuxedo with a polka dot cummerbund.

It’s odd, this feeling I get that I am half tourist/wanderer, traveling to see the sights, and half homeless bum, lounging when I should be frantically working, or at least looking for work. The pack on my back screams “homeless man”, though only a few short years ago I would have been taken for a traveler, on the road, discovering (or re-discovering) the America of my dreams and nightmares. Now it is assumed I am busily avoiding work and am living off a govt check, as if there is such a check, as if it would be large enough to live on even if it existed.

There are many out here who do get checks, usually SSI disability checks. Usually they deserve them, sometimes they’ve scammed them. Mostly their checks are so inadequate they have to live on the street anyway because they don’t get enough to afford an apartment, no matter how small. If they manage to find one their tiny check will cover, there’s nothing of it left after the rent is paid and they must depend on food stamps and soup kitchens to get enough to eat. The myth that everyone on welfare is living the high life may be pervasive in some conservative quarters but there’s more substance to the story of the tooth fairy.

Last night I spent in a mission because there were supposed to be heavy t-storms accompanied by serious lightning. I don’t think it happened but I wouldn’t know. I was locked up on the second story of a near windowless concrete blockhouse trying to sleep on a top bunk in heat so intense I would have preferred to be out in the frying noonday sun. There was a fan blowing at the other end of the room but whatever air it was moving stopped moving long before it got to me.

If this is the high life, give me the low.

Philly - Nate

It is a long night. I wander the streets but Philly seems to have closed down even though it is barely 8pm. If there is action, it is somewhere I can’t find it. Even the mall down the street closes at 9.

The wind is bitter cold. I am wearing two shirts, a heavy, hooded sweatshirt, and a thick winter coat and still I’m freezing. I see homeless guys on every street, some of them stretched out in doorways, sleeping. They’re usually wearing sneakers and thin coats though everyone seems to have a wool knit cap pulled down over their ears. The lucky ones have gloves.

The ones who are awake center on me like rats on a dumpster – as a source of food (or cigarettes) – moving on me with a cheerful smile and an outstretched hand. Sometimes, depending on an immediate reading, I give them some change or a smoke. Sometimes I give them nothing. They are unfailingly polite whatever my response. One of the ones I turn down goes out of his way to tell me not to blame myself, it’s not my fault if I’m broke. Many assure me that better days are coming. “They have to.” Almost all the men are black.

As I return to the bus station a tall, wide black man approaches me with a plastic bag. It is full of DVD’s he wants to sell me. He opens his pitch with, “Sir, I’m homeless and I’m hoping you can help me out by buying one of these DVD’s. They’re all brand-new, not second-hand. See? The plastic wrapping’s still on them -”

I interrupt to tell him he’s wasting his time. “I’m homeless, too.”

He looks me up and down, disbelief written all over him. “You look awful good for a homeless guy,” he says.

“I just got homeless a couple weeks ago. These are what’s left of my good clothes.”

“Oh.” His demeanor changes. He smiles and his eyes wrinkle in sympathy. “Sorry. Lose your job?”

“Yup, and where I come from I couldn’t get another, at least not one that would pay the rent.”

“I’m Nate,” he says, then hesitates. “You got any money?”

I think, Here it comes. The pitch, the hit. “Some,” I say carefully. “Not much.”

“Enough for a room?”

“No, not near that much.”

He shakes his head. “That’s too bad. You a newbie, you don’t belong on streets like this. You sure you got no place to stay?”

“No.”

“Better stay inside the bus station, it be damn cold tonight. You freeze out here. Just keep movin’ so the bulls don’t roust you. You still got your ticket?”

“Yeah.”

“Show it to ‘em if they hassle you and they’ll back right down.” He sees my expression at the thought of spending the night in the bus station dodging security. “It’s your best shot. You don’t wanna be out here. Not tonight.” I must look truly depressed. He smiles again. “You beat it, you ain’t gonna be out here forever. Better days are coming.”

He’s a nice man but I’ll believe it when I see it.