Across the Great Divide

Shelter Report: The Full-time Job of Being Nobody.

David is regularly first in the shower at the Day Center on Wednesdays, but today he comes in a little later.

"You're late," I say. Consistent behavior — especially first thing in the morning — is not all that usual around the place, and I want to let him know I notice.

Sometimes noticing is all it takes to open the floodgates.

He'd been having stomach trouble, he says, and he begins to tell me about its cause. For three weeks, he's been expecting a certified letter concerning his father's estate, which was probated years ago in Florida. David has tried for years to resolve whether he has some kind of bequest coming from his father or grandmother.

"I'm getting worked up again now just thinking about it," he says. "A little money would change my life. I could get a roof over my head, get my teeth fixed" (he has about three teeth visible) "and start teaching skiing again."

He's been getting the runaround because the Florida court has a private administrator that processes  payments and collects fees. The letter has supposedly been sent, but David didn't get it and is not getting any help tracking it down.

The court says, talk to the contractor, and the contractor says, talk to the court.

After weeks of the runaround, he's become completely stressed out.

I don't know what the real situation is with a possible inheritance, but his difficulties dealing with it are real. He lives in shelter, doesn't have a telephone, collects his mail at the day center and misses the $7.50 he paid to get the document sent. He's nobody to the Florida court, the payment processing service, his father's former lawyer and his estranged family.

Being nobody can be a full-time job.

An elderly woman slumps in, heavily layered for the cold. I do a veiled doubletake because she has pronounced grey whiskers on both sides of her chin. Not just a few stragglers, but solid, Paul-Krugman-worthy patches. She finds a chair against the wall and sits staring straight ahead. She exchanges words with no one, doesn't even take coffee.

The place is busy, noisier than usual. Tempers flash as elbows jostle coffee cups and harsh words traded at camp last night are re-examined in daylight. The woman is asleep now, bent over, face in her lap.

Sometime later, I notice she's gone.

With Lee, I don't know which came first — the drinking, the missing fingertip or the amputation of his right arm just below the elbow — but now it doesn't matter. He's here, blotting a tiny cut under his lip that won't stop bleeding. The paper towel he's pulled from a roll on the wall is stippled with red b-b-sized dots.

"I hate these damn cuts," he says.

I go looking for a styptic pencil but the best I can do are a couple alcohol swabs. I start to hand him the packets and realize it will be difficult for him to tear one open and extract the pad, so I do it for him.

One of the volunteers walks past us. Her eyes widen and later she tells me about the overpowering whiff she got from his coat.

Working here must have affected my sense of smell, because I didn't notice any odor.

Working here has affected all my senses. Mostly, for the better.

 

 

Shelter Report: Homeless by Degrees.

I spotted Francois walking down Monument Road as I headed for the Day Center this morning. Usually, I bike in, but for various reasons I had to drive. He wasn't someone I knew or I'd have offered him a ride, because I had a hunch we were bound for the same place.

It's a commentary on America, I suppose, that when we see someone walking and carrying something other than rubberized hand weights, we assume they're homeless. In this case, however, it was true. He showed up later to do his laundry.

He'd ended up here by accident, heading back to East Texas after visiting his mother in Portland as she gradually disappeared in a fog of Alzheimers. Driving at night south of Grand Junction, he hit a large buck that left his car driveable — unfortunately driveable enough that he fried the transmission. $3500 in damage, he said. Money he didn't have.

He described to me the fix he planned to attempt. "I have a degree in shade tree mechanics," he said.

Charley doesn't have a degree, but that hasn't stopped him from checking the box on job applications that says he has a high school diploma.

"I don't sound stupid," he said, so it's easy to pass himself off as a high school graduate, and it's not as if they check resumes on fishing boats and road crews. But some conversations with his brother got him thinking: "It's deceitful."

So Charley went in at age 52 to see about getting his G.E.D. They told him he could take preliminary tests to see how he might score, but he said, "Just give me the tests." He took science and social studies and passed with lots of room to spare. Today, he was supposed to take the math test and wasn't so sure how he'd do.

He said someone had told him he could get a PhD using the computer at the library, and he imagined the G.E.D. would be a step in that direction, except he didn't have the six years he thought it would take. Not with working, too. But he got the idea he'd like a degree in paleontology because he'd once gathered dinosaur bones from a canyon in Montana.

"Once you find a fossil, you're hooked for life," he said. The place was now restricted, and he wanted to get a permit to go back in and excavate. For three years, he applied and for three years was turned down. Finally, he said, they sent him a letter that said, if you don't have a PhD, you'll never get a permit, so please stop bothering us.

A volunteer and I were talking about Turkey. We were shaking our heads at Rick Perry's perception the country was ruled by Islamic terrorists, and how little Americans knew about the rest of the world. Marty joined in the conversation when he heard me talking about seeing the remains of the ancient, powerful civilizations that had come and gone in Turkey.

As the son of an airline pilot, he'd lived in the middle east and traveled extensively. We talked about the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World  in Turkey, and when I was slow to dredge up the names, he provided them (the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus). He described the layers of civilization he could see living in Beirut going back 4000 years to the Phoenicians, and he laughed at the historical designation on the 200-year-old bar in Seattle he frequented as a student at the University of Washington.

Marty is one of the most articulate people I've met at the Day Center, but he's not the most highly educated. That honor goes to the owner of the "shopping cart limo" — the four carts parked out back and covered with carpet pad.

Shelter Report: Broken Angels.

Maybe it was the moon today. Or maybe it was the drugs.

Day Center guests check in at the front door before being admitted. They register on their first visit, and then on subsequent visits they declare the services they've come for. We keep track of how many people we serve each day, but I'm not certain anything happens with the other data we collect. I suspect asking the guests to articulate that they've come for coffee, mail and a shower mainly serves as a quick sobriety check.

But not an infallible one. People aren't supposed to be admitted if they're under the influence, but that's a subjective call, since some of our homeless guests are on legal medications that lift their moods or suppress their mania. Others show up with some level of alcohol, meth, heroin, cocaine, weed or another substance in their system.

No one created any trouble, but more people than usual were in an altered state today.

One conversation was about Ron Paul. Both of the discussants were for him, because he's for basic liberties (which the homeless might naturally support) and going back pre-Federal Reserve and not paying tribute to the Chinese (which don't seem to be front-burner issues if you're living in a tent).

One man was convinced nobody else was for Ron Paul, while the other was convinced his campaign was being sabotaged by claims that Paul was racist and anti-Semitic. Neither was clear on what Libertarian meant.

Another regular passed from semi-comatose to voluble in the span of his stay, landing in that meth-driven sweet spot that can seem as if the user is alert and on top things — at least until he starts talking about the illegality of carrying ice cream in your back pocket when you're in Utah.

He told me about trying to get arrested for shoplifting beer so he could spend some time in jail straightening himself out. "I was doing drugs and I needed to stop for awhile, so I could get back to remembering 1 plus 1 equals 2 and ABCD."

His buddy walked into the store and picked up a 12-pack of Old Milwaukee. "Geez, I said, at least steal something good in case we don't get caught, so he took a 12-pack of Budweiser."

The strategy didn't work, since the judge fined them instead of giving him and his accomplice jail time. He claimed the judge had the same name as a long-time president of the National Geographic Society — something I was unable to verify, but it seemed to hold some mystical significance.

Foiled in that attempt at semi-rehab, they went to a Pizza Hut, ordered pizza and beer, and did a dine and dash. This time, they got off without being arrested. There were no doubt other ways to get arrested in Utah without scoring free beer, but as far as I know, he didn't try walking around with ice cream in his back pocket.

Next to my station near the showers is a book shelf loaded with free books where the Ron Paul fan club was hanging out. One of the men had placed his jacket on top of it while he was showering. There's not much space for leaving personal articles or folding laundry, so people use whatever surface is available.

When he took down his coat, he accidentally pulled off a ceramic angel that he'd covered and forgotten about. It fell to the floor and shattered. The angel, which I'd barely noticed before, had some significance to the Day Center director, who glared at the man who broke it.

He took responsibility and cleaned up the pieces, provoking a discussion about personal accountability with the wife of Mr. Ice Cream Pockets. She was also amped up.

The day was full of these moments: People off-kilter and out-of-control, but still grounded in a weird sort of morality, showing concern for each other and disdain for society.

Broken angels.

 

Shelter Report: Iowa and the Day Center Caucus.

In the world inhabited by the Republican presidential candidates I listened to last night, there's no room for people who don't "take responsibility" and master the universe without any help from others — especially the government.

Should one of these candidates prevail, some magical combination of American self-reliance, God and the free market, defended by our young men in uniform, will take care of everything, and I'll have to find something else to do with my Wednesday mornings.

For now, though, the people I'm serving at the Day Center can use the help.

From the outside, our guests all belong to one simplistic class — the homeless —and you could find among them some people the Republicans would be quick to put on their End Welfare poster. But you'd also find a lot of them used to be our young men in uniform.

And you'd find Charley.

Charley comes in to the Day Center for a shower because the hot water in his trailer doesn't work. He's not technically homeless now, but he used to be. He's employed by a nearby company that provides traffic signs, safety barricades and flagmen for construction sites. He gets laid off when construction slows in the winter.

Today, he spent a lot of time on the phone. One of the calls was to Rhode Island where he is slowly paying off an old DUI fine that encumbers his drivers license. (The conviction goes back to 1987, he says.)
When he learned he only owes the court $115 more, he was so happy, he called his mother.

"I'm a different person now than I was then," he said.

He has a different life now, too. Here in Grand Junction, he lived in a shelter until he was able to save enough money to buy a car he couldn't drive. "I moved into my car. Then I bought a truck."

The truck sat until he could afford to buy a 27-foot trailer, which he towed to its present location. Then he parked the truck. "One step at a time," he said. "I can hardly wait to drive again. My boss says he'll make me a supervisor."

Once he finishes paying off the fine, the license restriction will be lifted, which means he'll be eligible for more work. So far, he's only been able to take flagging jobs reachable by bus, competing with other workers who have the same limitation. And of course, if the government doesn't do many road projects, he'll have less work, so you could say he's still dependent on the government.

When you start to look beyond the "responsibility" rap against the homeless and actually talk to them, you'll find people slowly working themselves back from addictions, struggling with mental illness, looking over their shoulders for abusers, trying to go back to school and stick this time, working their way through the parole and probation systems, and contending with physical disabilities.

Today, for example, I noted among our 63 guests:

• A man with his leg amputated at the knee
• A man carrying an oxygen tank and taking medications for his heart, lungs and kidneys
• A man whose right side is limp from a stroke
• A man with a dent the size of a soup can in his skull
• A man missing his right hand
• Many men and women misssing teeth
• A man with a plate in his head and facial scarring
• A veteran whose first nervous breakdown came in 1972
• A man whose sister claims he has brain damage
• A woman with a black eye
• A man with a black eye patch
• A woman who's deaf
• A woman who's morbidly obese
• A woman who's been sexually abused by family members.

I'm sure I don't know the half of it.

It's easy enough to generalize, to label people by their address or lack of one, by their dress or the look in their eyes. If you stand far enough away — in an Iowa Pizza Ranch, for example — you can look at the folks who filter through the Day Center and decide they're not worthy. You can wonder why they don't get some gumption and stand up on their own two feet (or foot, as the case may be). You can convince a crowd that keeping their tax dollars for themselves is best for everyone.

You can celebrate success and praise freedom and call yourself God's chosen.

But I don't think it's so.