Rachel and Her Children (24 page)

“Fifteen-seven’s got no rights.”

The guard transmits the values of a decade that has
brutalized him too. He doesn’t even say the woman’s name. For him, as for New York, she’s been reduced to something that can be abstracted and computerized—a disobedient but expensive number.

I have not been in the Martinique for several months. The circumstances that brought me here today are rather special. Mrs. Allesandro knows I live alone and am unmarried and do not have children. She invited me to join her family for Thanksgiving dinner. I have been anticipating this for several days. As I learn later, she has gone to a great deal of trouble. It isn’t easy to prepare a good Thanksgiving dinner on a hot plate. But a woman who’s survived for over seventy years has had a lot of time to figure out some ways to make the best of hopeless situations. The guards have simply managed to destroy her happiness a little.

By the time they send the message up it’s after four. The food is cold. The kids are hungry. While she warms the dinner, I go with her son to tell the woman in room 1507 that her mother’s in the hospital and that her sister’s waiting for her in the lobby.

O
n some nights, after a visit to the Martinique, I have returned to a hotel and steamed myself in a hot shower. Part of the reason is sheer physical exhaustion after walking up long flights of stairs, sitting cross-legged for several hours on a floor within a room in which there are no chairs, remaining sometimes until 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. in order to untangle complicated stories and to be quite sure I have the details right.

But another reason, which I feel some hesitation to confess, is the recognition of so much pathology, so much infection and contagious illness in the homeless population. The little girl that I call Raisin likes to put her fingers on my mouth to win herself a chance to talk. When she’s in a thoughtful mood, she puts her fingers in her own mouth and she rests her head against my chest. When I get up to leave she holds her arms around my legs. It is impossible to wish to keep her at a distance. I feel ashamed
when, later the same night, I scrub myself with a determination I associate with doctors in a Third World clinic.

So, in an undeniable and awful sense, even the children do become untouchables. Michael Ignatieff reflects on the responsibilities that bind us to the outcasts of a social order: “What are our obligations to those strangers at our gates? Take one step outside our zone of safety…. There they are, hands outstretched….” He is too generous to note that even our most natural inclinations may be thwarted by a practical consideration like the fear of illness.

The nightmare of the powerless, he writes, “is that one day they will make their claim and the powerful will demand a reason, one day the look of entreaty will be met with the unknowing stare of force.” That nightmare exists already in our nation. We do demand a reason for the claims made by the homeless families of our cities, and the reasons that they give do not always convince us. Ignatieff cites King Lear upon the heath: “O, reason not the need! … Allow not nature more than nature needs, man’s life is cheap as beasts.” We will return to this because it runs precisely counter to a currently held view that “basic needs”—food, roof, or burial ditch—are all the poor have any right to ask and all they may expect. It may be enough for now to note that, in the cases we have just observed, even nature’s minimal needs have not been met.

I think of a mother in the Allerton Hotel, twelve blocks from the Martinique, who is forced to choose, when she goes shopping, between food or diapers for her children. Documentation gathered by David Beseda of the Coalition for the Homeless identifies the substitution of newspapers for diapers by the mothers of small children who must spend all of their allocated funds for concentrated formula and food for other children. Ignatieff’s nightmare is made real each day within Manhattan’s zone of danger. Once we escape that zone, the wish to wash
ourselves—to scrub away the filth—may be more than a health precaution.

Richard Lazarus, an educated, thirty-six-year-old Vietnam veteran I met two days after Thanksgiving in the subway underneath Grand Central Station, tells me he had never been without a job until the recent summer. In July he underwent the loss of job, children, and wife, all in a single stroke. As in almost all these situations, it was the simultaneous occurrence of a number of emergencies, any one of which he might sustain alone but not all at the same time, that suddenly removed him from his home.

“Always, up until last summer, I have found a job that paid at least $300. Now I couldn’t find a job that paid $200. When I found an opening at a department store they said that I was overqualified. If someone had asked me a year ago who are the homeless, I would not have known what to reply. Now I know the answer. They are people like myself. I went to Catholic elementary school. I had my secondary education in a private military school. I joined the service and was sent to Thailand as an airman.” He has a trade. It’s known as “inventory data processing.” He had held a single job in data processing for seven years until last summer when the company shut down, without a warning, and moved out of state.

“When the company left I could find nothing. I looked everywhere. I got one job for two months in the summer. Part-time, as a security guard in one of the hotels for homeless families.”

When I ask which one it was, he says the Martinique. “I clocked the floors for fire check. From the top floor to the lobby I swore to myself: rat infested, roach infested, drug infested, filth infested, garbage everywhere, and little children playing in the stairs. Innocent people, women,
children, boxed in by their misery. Most people are permitted to make more than one mistake. Not when you’re poor.”

In September he was sick. “I was guarding homeless people and I didn’t have a home. I slept in Washington Square and Central Park.” He’s living now in a run-down hotel operated in conjunction with the Third Street Shelter on the Bowery. “When you come in at night the guards wear gloves. They check you with a metal detector. They’re afraid to touch me.”

While we talk we watch an old man nearby who is standing flat and motionless against the wall, surrounded by two dozen bright-red shopping bags from Macy’s. Every so often, someone stops to put a coin into his hand. I notice the care with which the people drop their coins, in order that their hands do not touch his. When I pass that spot some hours later he will still be there. I’ll do the same. I’ll look at his hand—the fingers worn and swollen and the nails curled in like claws—and I will drop a quarter and extract my hand and move off quickly.

After standing with Lazarus for two hours before a hot-dog stand, I ask him if he’d like to leave the station to sit down with me and get a decent meal. He’s awkward about accepting this. When I press him, he explains he had only one subway token and has no more money. If he leaves the station he will need a dollar to get back inside. He agrees to leave when I assure him I can spare a dollar. Outside on Forty-second Street, we’re facing the Grand Hyatt. He looks at it with fear.

“The first thing that you see when you come out of there is power.”

At a delicatessen next to the Grand Hyatt he explains about the subway tokens. Each morning at the shelter you get in a line in order to receive two subway tokens. This is to enable you to look for jobs; the job search is required.
But, in order to get the tokens, you have got to prove that you already have a job appointment. “It’s a long line. By the time you get the tokens you have missed the job appointment. You wait in line for everything. I get the feeling that the point is not to find a job but to teach us something about who we are. Getting us in line is the idea.”

In the restaurant he orders a chicken sandwich and, although he’s nervous and his hands are shaking, he eats fast; he’s almost done before I’ve put a paper napkin in my lap. He apologizes but he tells me that this is the first thing he has had to eat since 8:00 a.m. It’s now about 8:30 in the evening.

“Before I got into this place I was sleeping in the parks. When it got colder I would sleep all night in an X-rated movie or the subway or the Port Authority. I’d spend most of my time just walking. I would try to bathe each day in public toilets. I’d wash my clothes and lay them outside in the sun to dry. I didn’t want to feel like a pariah that nobody would get near. I used to talk with people like yourself so that I would not begin to feel cut off. I invested all my strength in fighting off depression. I was scared that I would fall apart.

“During this time I tried to reunite with my old lady. For me, the loss of work and loss of wife had left me rocking. Then the welfare regulations hit me. I began to feel that I would be reduced to trash. You’re never prepared for this. It’s like there isn’t any bottom. It’s not like cracks in a safety net. It’s like a black hole sucking you inside. Half the people that I know are suffering from chest infections and sleep deprivation. The lack of sleep leaves you debilitated, shaky. You exaggerate your fears. If a psychiatrist came along he’d say that I was crazy. But I was an ordinary man. There was nothing wrong with me. I lost my wife. I lost my kids. I lost my home. Now would you say that I was crazy if I told you I was feeling sad?

“I was a pretty stable man. Now I tremble when I meet somebody in the ordinary world. I’m trembling right now. One reason that I didn’t want to leave the subway was that I feel safer underground. When you asked if I would come outside and get something to eat, my first thought was that you would see me shaking if we sat down for a meal and you’d think I was an alcoholic.

“I’ve had a bad cold for two weeks. When you’re sick there’s no way to get better. You cannot sleep in at the shelter. You have
got
to go outside and show that you are looking for a job. I had asthma as a kid. It was gone for twenty years. Now it’s back. I’m always swallowing for air. Before I got into the shelter, I did not have Medicaid or welfare. If you don’t have an address it’s very hard. I scrambled to get into the computer.

“Asthma’s common at the shelter. There’s a lot of dust. That may be why. Edema [swollen feet]—you get it from sitting up so much and walking all day long. If you’re very hungry and you want a meal you can get it at St. Francis. You can get a sandwich at Grand Central every night at ten o’clock. So if you want to keep from starving you are always on the move. If you have no subway tokens then you jump the stile. So you’re always breaking rules and so you start to have this sense of premonition: ‘Sooner or later I’ll be caught.’ You live in constant fear.

“The welfare workers are imperious and punctual. No matter how desperate you are, they’re short of time. I ask them: ‘Will my records go upstairs?’ They snap at me: ‘Can’t you see that we’re about to close?’ All I asked them was a simple question.

“A year ago I never thought that somebody like me would end up in a shelter. Nothing you’ve ever undergone prepares you. You walk into the place—the smell of sweat and urine hits you like a wall. Unwashed bodies and the look of absolute despair on many, many faces there would
make you think you were in Dante’s Hell. Abandon hope. I read a lot. I’m not a lazy man.

“I slept with my clothes on the first night that I was there. I was given a cot but they were out of sheets. I lay awake. I heard men crying in their sleep. They’re sound asleep and they are
crying
. What you fear is that you will be here forever. You do not know if it’s ever going to end. You think to yourself: It is a dream and I will wake. Sometimes I think: It’s an experiment. They are watching you to find out how much you can take. Someone will come someday and say: ‘Okay, this guy has suffered long enough. Now we’ll take him back into our world.’ Then you wake up and get in line …

“Listen to me: I’ve always worked. I need to work! I’m not a lazy man.” His voice rises and the people at the other tables stare. “If I thought that I could never work again I’d want to die.”

He explains to me that you can work inside the shelter for a token salary. For twenty hours’ work they pay $12.50. He has done this. “Even sixty cents an hour makes you feel that you are not completely dead. It may be slave labor but it gets you certain privileges, like being first in line for meals. I’m one of the residents they like because I follow all the rules. Those rules are very important. If you make a single error you are out. More than that, you lose your benefits. You put your welfare card in the machine.
‘NO BENEFITS. YOUR CASE IS CLOSED.’
You’re dead. It’s thirty days before your case can be reopened.

“When I’m very scared I go into the public library to read. You have to stay awake. They throw you out the minute that you close your eyes. When I was at rockbottom I went to a priest. It was the first time I had asked to be confessed in twenty years. Alone in that big beautiful church, it occurred to me that the Creator had been teaching me a lesson that I’d never learned. ‘I’ve given you a
couple of gifts. Now share them with your brothers.’ I would ask if there could be a God. Then I’d say: ‘We have free will. God did not do this to me.’ That’s all. That’s my theology.

“My only relatives alive in New York City are my father and my children and my wife. My father’s in the Hebrew Home for the Aged. He’s eighty-three. He’s had several strokes. So I can’t tell him what has happened. When I go there I put on the cleanest clothes I have. He asks about the children and I tell him everything is fine.

“The worst thing I have ever undergone was when I lost my wife. She was my guidance system. If I can ever get a job I’ll save up money for a while. I’ll stay in the shelter so that I can save enough to put down money for a home.”

I ask him if he can save money.

“Not officially. You do it off the books.”

He tells me his wife is doubled up for now in somebody’s apartment with his children. At ten o’clock he says he has to get back to the shelter. “Curfew’s at eleven. If you miss it, then you sleep outside.” I ask for his address. He writes it out: Kenton Hotel, 8 East Third Street. Bed number 135.