I was sorting through an old pile of papers today, and I came across this article that I wrote when I was a graduate student at San Francisco State University. I had taken a course in homelessness which consisted of a string of fieldwork assignments, most of them involving some form of community outreach or volunteer work. The first few assignments, though, were aimed at giving students a taste of what it's actually like to be homeless. The first week of class, I went to eat at a soup kitchen, and wrote up this little paper afterwards.
A bit nostalgic for me to read it again, but I think, with poverty on the rise and the criminalization of poverty rising along with it, it's even more relevant today than it was five years ago when I wrote it.
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"GLIDE"
7 A.M. My alarm clock sounded, waking me from a rather disturbing nightmare (the details of which I'll omit here). I showered, dressed and made a point of not shaving, not so much out of a desire to fit in as out of a desire not to stand out. At 7:30 I arrived at the BART station at 16th St. and Mission, feeling somewhat uneasy. All around me were people in suits, presumably on their morning commute to work, their world in stark contrast to mine. While for most of them their greatest concern was getting to work on time to start a full day of activity, my only goal was to arrive at 330 Ellis St. in time to eat breakfast, and after that, well ... who knows?
On the walk from the subway station, I saw men and women casually strolling with coffee cups in their hands and small paper bags with pastries in them. What a luxury, I thought, to be able to quickly choose one's breakfast and eat it on the way to work. As if the meal in and of itself were merely an afterthought in a day filled with other larger concerns. I arrived at Glide Memorial Church at about 8:10 and took my place in line, about 3/4 of the way down the block from the entrance to the building. Most of the people around me were quiet and gave off an air of tiredness which, early as it was, I knew I could not relate to as I had arisen that morning from a warm, soft bed in my own home. The man behind me, an African American who appeared to be in his mid-forties or so, was cursing loudly and violently to himself. Most of the things he was saying were unintelligible to me, but I distinctly was able to discern him angrily mumbling the words "think you can rape me? think you can rape ME?!" mixed in with a jumble of other expletives. A few of the others both in front of me and behind, laughed uneasily at his ranting, but most just ignored him. A couple of people perusing the sports page of the San Francisco Examiner started talking about how they thought the 49'ers would do in the upcoming season. A young man dressed in a yellow windbreaker with the word "GLIDE" emblazoned on the back worked his way up the line, handing out meal tickets. Small pink strips of paper with numbers printed on them, my number was B47. As he approached the man behind me, he urged him to calm down. "I know you usually come here most mornings," he said "but you're gonna have to chill if you're gonna eat today. You can't go downstairs like this." "I'm cool," he replied. "MY food. Ain't nobody gonna mess with MY food." "Good," the man with the tickets said, "that's what I want to hear." I spied a donut shop on the corner opposite the church and again considered what a luxury it would be to be able to walk in, choose what I would like to eat, pay, and leave quietly with no lines around the block, no tickets, and no uncertainty as to what awaited me "downstairs."
The social theorist Erving Goffman wrote in the 1950's of what he called "total institutions." Characterized by such places as hospitals, jails, and military barracks, "total institutions" were places where every aspect of the behavior of an individual was carefully orchestrated by the system, whether the individual was aware of it or not. I couldn't help but think of this as I queued up, ticket in hand, just waiting for something as simple as the chance to eat a meal.
The line started to move, and we entered the building, climbing down a narrow flight of stairs into an area that reminded me of a high-school locker room, only without the lockers. Concrete floors, grey-painted brick walls, and florescent lights greeted us as once again, the line stopped and we were forced to wait patiently for our chance to be served. An Asian woman wearing coke-bottle glasses emerged from a women's restroom in the hallway with an industrial-sized roll of toilet paper tucked under her arm, looking like a bright white tire. She proceeded to stuff it into a backpack which she had slung over the handles of a wheelchair occupied by a young man, apparently her companion. Someone in the line chastized her for stealing, and others began to laugh. The woman ignored the commentary, zipped up the backpack, and pushed her wheelchair-ridden friend onto an elevator. A man and a woman in front of me, obviously very hungry, started to talk about food. "If there's bacon, I'll trade you my bacon for some of your cereal," the man said. The woman, hesitating for a second, said "well, OK I guess." She then turned abruptly to me and demanded "are you eatin' your cereal?" "What?" I asked, at first unsure what she meant. "I SAID, are you eatin' your cereal?" I shrugged, uncertain what to say beyond "I guess so." The woman then proceeded to pull a green apple from her coat pocket. "I'll trade you a apple for your cereal." I shrugged and shook my head, and she then produced an orange from a different pocket. "How about a orange?" she demanded. "No thanks," I said. "Come on, it's only COLD cereal," she complained. Dumbfounded, all I could say was "but I LIKE col cereal." She turned her back on me in a huff, obviously irked by my uncooperativeness.
At last, the moment arrived when we entered the dining room, and after surrendering my ticket to another young man wearing the "GLIDE" windbreaker, I was presented with a blue plastic tray laden with a small styrofoam cup, a rock-hard bagel, two strips of bacon, a styrofoam bowl filled with honey nut cheerios, three packets of sugar and a small plastic baggie containing a paper napkin and a small "spork." I took my seat at the corner of a table in the middle of the room covered with a blue and white checkered table cloth and immediately noticed that the table had several stacks of bagels standing on it. I guessed I wasn't the only one who's teeth weren't strong enough to meet the challenge. I asked the man sitting next to me to pass the pitcher of milk (powdered of course) and he handed it to me wordlessly, hardly looking up from his meal. I glanced around the table, trying to make eye contact with people but everyone seemed preoccupied, their eyes firmly fixed on the trays in front of them and their backs hunched over in an effort to lessen the distance the spoonfuls of cheerios had to go from the bowls to their mouths. I decided to concentrate on my own meal and I realized I was doing the same thing. The sporks really were too small to be able to travel more than a few inches without spilling their contents, apparently.
Just as I was finishing eating, a volunteer worker wearing a hair-net and cellophane gloves walked up and placed a pitcher of coffee on the table. "Thank you" I said and poured myself a cup. during this time about half of the people at my table had already finished eating and had been replaced by others, who also proceeded to eat quietly and earnestly in exactly the same manner. It was eerie to me how silent the dining room seemed, virtually the only audible conversations taking place were between the volunteers. Coffee in hand, I bussed my now empty tray (having left my bagel with its companions in a stack on the table-top) in one of the bins provided at the back of the dining room and climbed the flight of stairs to exit the building.
As I walked down the street, I reflected on the experience. I had just spent nearly two full hours to obtain a simple meal that, had I been at home, would have taken a matter of minutes for me to prepare and eat. Homelessness is much more than just the absence of a room of your own, I realized. It is the lack of ALL of the small conveniences which we who are not homeless take for granted. The lack of a bed in which to sleep, the lack of a shower in which to wash, the lack of a cupboard in which to store food, the lack of a table at which to eat it, the list goes on and on. What may seem like the most basic needs become trials when one is homeless. Even the act of eating the food placed before us seems an ordeal, the necessary focus of one's attention for an entire morning, and an obstacle which must be surmounted if one is to continue living.
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Reading this again, five years on, it makes me realize that we can talk all we want about the ups and downs of the economy, whether the stock market is up or down, whether the stimulus has had any effect, etc., etc.,, but there is no denying that for many of us, we've been in a depression all along, and there's nothing to signal to them that that is likely to change anytime soon. For the truly poverty-stricken in America, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
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