THE RIDE

C D

Copyright 1992

The Ride

Maybe I shouldn’t have been hitchhiking that night, but I did, and there’s no going back now. I was a hippie, a sometimes stoner, a street punk; young and broke. At night I slept in an empty apartment that I climbed up a fire escape to get into. One thing I wasn’t doing that night in late 1970 or early ‘71 was getting high. I was straight as an arrow that night and I’m very clear on what happened.

I had just turned eighteen. I’d been warned by well meaning friends not to hitchhike in certain parts of the city, but I was broke, not to mention homeless, so I got around the best way I could. That night I’d been hanging out in the Square, then a major hippie haven. It was my social life, I guess. My survival skills weren’t much—yet. I had grown up in a sheltered Catholic home. But there was trouble behind the scenes, and after graduating high school at age seventeen, I split for parts unknown.

Life on the streets was bad, but not bad enough to send me back home. Two gay guys I’d met told me there was an empty apartment in the building next to theirs. They showed me how I could access the vacant apartment by walking through the alley and climbing up the fire escape. The apartment had sky blue walls and a mattress on the hard wood floor. The lights were on and the shower worked. What more could a homeless flower child want?

This became my home for awhile, and I guarded its location. It was my shelter from the too friendly predators who offered a place to stay in exchange for instant intimacy. It was a safe place to unwind and regroup for the daily battle of living on the streets of a major metropolitan area.

Secondary to a roof over my head was food. I lived on junk food, scrounged from the leavings of fast food customers. Sometimes groups of us spread out and panhandled in the square: roving, ragged, child beggars.

Sometimes the money went for food, sometimes for a high. The steady diet of junk food took its toll. At age eighteen, I developed acne, something I’d never had during my middle class younger teens. To those moms who nag their teenagers about eating too much fast food: keep nagging, your concerns are valid.

By day, I carried my clothes around in an army back pack, just in case the empty apartment got rented while I was out. By night, I hung out in the square, connected with other lost souls, took trips to other places, and other states of mind. Buses were unknown to me, and I only occasionally rode the trains. When I needed to get away or get home, I hitchhiked. It was a common way to get around back then, and the world was very different. It was dangerous enough then; I wouldn’t recommend it at all today.

It was a mild night. I don’t remember if it was spring or summer. Nobody was around, and not much was happening on the street. It was peculiarly quiet, in fact. I decided to go home early, to my blue sky apartment.

I got a ride right away. The car was an older white sedan. The driver was a middle aged man, forty to fiftyish. Or maybe he just looked older because of his hair. His hair was the first thing I noticed about him, not that I really paid him that much mind. I had hitched dozens of rides before. This was routine stuff, I thought.

He was no hippie, but his hair was wild: all over the place. It was dark, maybe black, and streaked with a lot of white: Bride of Frankenstein hair. He was a white man with Don King hair. It was electric, charged—like the air that night. I was not paying attention. I thought he was a middle aged man who would give me a ride home, and I turned my attention to the street ahead to give him directions. He knew where my street was—he was driving that way—and he passed it.

“Hey, you passed my street,” I said.

That’s when he speeded up, and I noticed his eyes for the first time.

In the moment I looked into them, his eyes told me everything. They were black and bright, and--this is no judgment call, just an observation—they were truly crazy.

 Then I saw the knife shining in the darkness. It was probably a hunting knife. The blade must have been six inches long. The fear settled into me like a long winter cold. Time raced, and it stood still. Absurdly, I reasoned he would stop for a red light. I scanned the street for a red light, but ahead of us in the nearly empty street, like a string of carnival lights against the black sky, stretched a long line of green lights. I put my hand on the door handle, and he spoke with desperation in his voice:

“You can’t jump out. You can’t.” His arm reached across the front seat, holding the knife in front of my neck. “Get down!” he ordered.

Stalling for time, I tried to show cooperation. I slouched a little in my seat, keeping my hand on the door handle, while searching the blackness ahead for red lights. There were none. He drove faster, heading out of the city.

“Get down,” he said again. I knew if I went to the end of this ride I would not get out alive. I lifted the door handle. The door flew open, and I hurled myself through it. I rolled in the street a few times, before I landed in a roadside ditch. A Volkswagen van driving in the other direction slammed on its brakes, and stopped in the middle of the street. The driver asked if I was all right. I think I said yes.

The people in the van were long haired hippie types. I knew instinctively I could trust them. I’ve always distinguished between two kinds of “hippies:” the health food eating, working for positive social change types who had jobs and places to live, and the drug addicted, wandering, burnout street people types. The people in the van, I surmised, were the first type. They brought me safely to my “home.”

I didn’t go up to my apartment that night. Somehow I just couldn’t be alone. Instead, I went to the next building and knocked on the door of my two gay friends, who were already sleeping. They welcomed me into their tiny one-room apartment, made tea, listened to my story, looked at my scrapes, and then one of them shared his narrow twin bed with me. Through the night he held me, like a mother holds a child. In this world you don’t have a fighting chance unless you have a mother or somebody who loves you.

Weeks or months later, I saw a newspaper article. They were calling it the “Hitchhike Murders,” or something like that. I didn’t go to the police with what I knew. I must have been too far gone, too absorbed by my own problems. I guess I thought then that they wouldn’t believe me anyway.

You probably wonder why, after all these years, I’d write this story. Actually, I’ve written it dozens of times in my head, and I’ve told it scores of times to others—women and men and kids—to warn them. It’s because he might still be out there, never caught, that I write this, and because I wonder how many others before me and after me, went on this ride and never came back.

This is a true story.

If there are any lessons here it’s these:

1. Listen to your inner voice and always trust your instincts.

2. The driver had no gun-- that I saw, and he would have killed me.

-end

Happy Labor Day

Granddaughter asked, "What is irony?"

This is irony:

In the laundry room, waiting for the load of clothes to finish swirling, I flip through the magazines. One bold cover blurb catches my eye: "Lose 10 pounds in 30 days." Recently, I've done that, but don't think it took 30 days. More like two weeks. My secret is simple--Gatorade 'n' water. No money = no food.

The machine stops spinning, and I crouch in front of it, scooping clothes into the basket.

I stand. The basket of wet clothes is heavy, and I'm lightheaded.

Here's another irony. A tweet, by a homeless New Yorker calling him (her?)self  I.M.Kafka, reminding Mayor Bloomberg about HOMELESS PEOPLE WHO WORK.

I.M.Kafka is not alone. He is legion. We should never forget and never forgive that people work and yet can't afford a place to live. Expect us.

Poverty is not idle.

This labor day is laundry day. I have $1. Enough to wash most of the dirty clothes, etc-- not enough to dry them.

I like clotheslines, but I rent an apartment and I have no clothesline in the back yard. I have a place to live, and know how fortunate I am.

I stand on a chair and screw a metal hook into the wall of my apartment, adjacent to the window. Around this hook I loop one end of a piece of clothesline rope, and tie a knot.

Pulling the rope across the room, I wrap the other end around a hook in the opposite wall, and knot it. This wall is hollow and can't support the weight of the wet clothes, so the hook slides out of the wall and the laundry tumbles to the floor. I take the clothes off the line and  return them to the basket. Now I stand on a table to wrap the end of the rope around the vertical blind bracket over the window, tie a knot and it's up again.

I re-hang the wet clothes, open the blinds all the way to let the sun shine in. Sunlight is a disinfectant, which is why more of it should illuminate government and industry.

Jeans I hang on a plastic chair in front of the window. For what doesn't fit on the clothesline, I have a folding clothes drying rack.

Now there is $1 left. That will wash the clothes next week. The week after  that, the dirty laundry will pile up. Small things get washed in the sink.

Then the monthly check--the one I WORKED for-- will come, and sheets and towels and jeans will get washed again. Sometimes a month is five weeks.

You have to be very organized and creative to live as a poor person, and even more so to live as a homeless one.

I'm used to this. When I worked, I sold my Cd's to buy gas to get to work. I pawned my rings to buy gas so I could get to work. F**K You, Oil Companies.

I borrowed money to buy food, when I worked. I worked all night, and slept all day to recover from the job. Like all things unsustainable, eventually it all came crashing down.

Today-- Labor Day, a woman called NPR's Talk of the Nation to tell America about her job cleaning motel rooms for $3.25 a room. She has three degrees, used to teach art. Teaching art is not highly valued in today's America. Neither is making useful things that people need. Or writing stories.

Before journalism school, I cleaned motel rooms. I know that the fastest workers can clean (thoroughly) three rooms an hour, and that is what was expected of us in those days, for minimum wage. Twenty minutes to vacuum, dust, wipe up spills, change linens, scrub toilets, tubs , sinks, walls, empty garbage cans, make up beds...But not everyone is a fast worker, and if you are paid $3.25 per room and can only manage two rooms per hour, then that is less than the federal minimum wage. Is this legal?

The national minimum wage should've been $15 an hour by now, anyway.

Happy Labor Day to all who have jobs and all who are looking...wherever you live. You are not alone.

The Great One Returns to NY Daily News

I'll admit it. I'm a huge gushing fan of Jimmy Breslin, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who recently returned to the New York Daily News after a long time away at Newsday. In these times of dwindling newspaper circulation, if anything can save the News, it's Breslin.

Throughout the 1980's I read Breslin's thrice weekly columns religiously. I'll never forget the one he wrote on his portable typewriter, while sitting in a lawn chair on a New York City traffic island. He wrote in defense of a homeless man, whom then-mayor Ed Koch had ordered evicted from that same traffic island. In his column, Breslin dared Mayor Koch to kick him off that island.

He returns now with a Sunday column, written in his eloquently readable style, with an emphasis as always on the ordinary citizen's point of view.

For me personally, Jimmy Breslin was an inspiration and an example of what good reporting should be. Without knowing it, Breslin motivated me to choose journalism as my college major.

With the return of Jimmy Breslin, the Daily News seems to recognize that a return to its true roots as a "Voice of the People" is the only thing that will save the sinking ship of mainstream media.

As an editor of the now sunk Miami News once told a rookie journalism class: "The role of the media is the same as it's always been: to keep the government honest."

Here is the Breslin link :
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2011/08/07/2011-08-07_2breslin07m.html

The End

A year ago I started writing this blog. It took me places I never would've predicted. It introduced to me people I'll never forget, and will always treasure. Now it's at an end. I haven't run out of stories to write, or opinions to express. I'm tired. Not bored-- tired. I'm moving on to something else. Maybe it will be another blog, maybe not.

I didn't start this project with a specific theme in mind. I'm a writer, and I wanted to write, and since I had no editor or publisher looking over my shoulder, I was free to write about whatever or whomever... I chose my subjects; they weren't chosen for me.

If there's a theme that ties all these posts together it's this: all the people I've written about are off the beaten path. "Eccentric" they might be called, as someone in a homeless shelter said-- "if they were rich." But since they're all poor and/or working class, they get other labels: rebels, misfits, bums, mentally ill...

Someday, in a more enlightened future, the people I wrote about here--the homeless, the street artists, the disabled, the impassioned activists, the cutting edge health care visionaries--will be regarded in a more favorable way, with compassion and empathy, instead of ridicule and dismissal. Someday, these times we're living in will be looked back upon as a time of darkness and ignorance, when children lived in poverty, squalor, and violence, and former soldiers returned "home" to homelessness and medical neglect, and people died because they couldn't afford decent medical care, and the government we elected to govern democratically instead beat us over the head with their exclusive (as opposed to inclusive) religious beliefs, and sold our country and our countrymen out to corporate interests.

For those who read this blog, and liked it, I'm glad you enjoyed. For those who didn't, well-- why didn't you speak up?

Peace Out.

Draw Bad Cards (props to Bob Marley)

In a six month period in New York City I immersed myself in a new world, a world of the urban homeless. What better place to research the roots of homelessness than in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country?

It's a great sacrifice people make for the privilege of living in the city known as the "Capital of the World." With a population of 8 million, NYC draws talented artists, writers, performers and gifted people from every part of the world. Some stay, finding the trade offs worth it. Others don't.

To live here is to struggle. People go to great creative lengths to devise shelter. Some sleep in renovated bread trucks. Some sleep in the subway stations, or in parks. Some pay $800 or more a month for a room, with a shared bathroom and kitchen, if there is a kitchen at all. Some long term shelter dwellers pay rent on storage units where they keep their stuff.

In Manhattan, $1,200 for a one bedroom apartment is cheap rent, if you can find it. Would be renters pay real estate brokers a non refundable finder's fee equal to one month's rent for an apartment, and they're happy to do it. That's in addition to the standard first month's rent, last month's rent, and security deposit.

Here, on the street you can find all kinds of designer leather bags, shoes, clothes, and accessories for sale for pennies on the dollar. It's the necessities of life that are expensive. Housing is number one. It's scarce and it's costly. Necessity number two is food. Food here is expensive: restaurant food, grocery store food. A jar of peanut butter that costs $1.69 at WalMart is $3 here. Bottled water, 64 cents at WalMart versus more than $1 in New York grocery stores. New York pizza is possibly the best in the world. If you have to live on street food, pizza is the way to go, at $2-$4 a slice. Health food grocery/delis like Whole Foods are just too pricey to seriously consider. There are many supermarkets with take out buffets, but take out adds up. If you don't have a desk/office you work out of, you eat your lunch in the park, whatever the weather. A lot of freelancers carry their laptops around the city, connecting to the internet in a library branch to type their stories, do their work. A surprisingly high number of jobs involve working outside: street vendors, canvassers for political and charitable organizations, leafleteers, doormen, street cleaners, subway maintenance workers, messengers. Better to cook at home if you can, and brown bag your lunch.

The question of how and why people become homeless has haunted me since I became homeless in 2001 after I was sacked from my job for health reasons. It was a low wage job, and I was living paycheck to paycheck, so there was nothing to cushion the fall. I hit the ground almost immediately, and like hourly employees everywhere I had no golden parachute, just two week's vacation pay and an unemployment check. During this time, a lot of people gave me a place to sleep and shower, which kept me off the street at night. Some for a small rent, some for free.

In August, with my latest lease at an end and my apartment building up for sale, I went to NYC, the Big Apple, the high rent leader, to see what I could learn; and I did learn.

In the shelter and in the drop in center, on the street, and in the parks, I talked to homeless people. Older people, young people, white people, people of color, men and women. Some used drugs, or lived in the bottle. Some did not. Some were forced out by new landlords who jacked up the rents, some were chased out by abusive spouses, or thrown out by parents. One women, whose longtime trucker boyfriend died suddenly from a heart attack, was locked out of the apartment they'd shared by his relatives who grabbed everything, including all her personal belongings. A year later, still mourning the loss of a man she obviously loved deeply, she continues to struggle to rebuild her life.

Nobody in the shelters wanted to be there. Some, who stayed outside said they preferred the street to shelter life. Dawn stayed outside because her dog Tabitha was not allowed in any shelter, and she wouldn't abandon the nine-year old Boxer to the pound and probable death.

If there's any common thread here that explains the cause of homelessness it's this: the long term homeless, for whatever reason, have no family or close ties willing or able to help them. Whether that's because their family members are so mired in their own problems they have nothing left to give, or because family just doesn't care. In the matter of familial relations, the long term homeless very often drew bad cards.

There was a time when section 8 subsidized rent was available, after a period of waiting, for virtually any low income person or family, young or senior, working or disabled. That all began to change with the Reagan Revolution. At the same time, in the early 1980's rents started to explode in New York City. The rest of the country followed New York's lead. With the changes begun by Reagan and continued by George W. Bush, no longer could those without strong family ties or close friends look to their government for help.

In contrast, a CEO who mismanages a company badly enough to be canned, is cut loose with a million plus compensation package. I guess that's what people mean when they say the private sector pays better. It sure does--if you're a CEO.

For the rest of you working stiffs, and disabled poor: if you make wrong moves, if you draw bad cards, you lose.

Gimme Shelter

In her worst imaginings, Nancy B never foresaw she would be homeless at age 74. This mentally sharp, take-no-bull New Yorker says she cried when she had to go into this New York women's shelter, because she did not want to come here.

At an age when she should be, she is retired and trying to survive on Social Security. She has worked all her life at jobs ranging from factory work to waitressing, and now has health problems: emphysema, heart problems, arthritis, seizures.

A new owner bought the apartment house she'd been living in for years. This new landlord wanted the building for personal use, and when Nancy's lease ran out, she was pushed out--literally into the street. She's a native New Yorker, but she cannot afford the soaring rents anymore, so here she is-- in a Queens women's assessment shelter for 21 days. After 21 days, if you have not found permanent shelter, out you go. For now, she relies on her Catholic faith.

For senior citizen housing, she has been told the waiting list is five years. She doesn't need housing in five years, she says. She needs it today. Words fail me at this point, except to say this: the war on poverty begun in the 1960's has mutated into a twisted war on the poor-- the elderly poor, the working poor. Poor people of color and the so called (not my words) "poor white trash."
Without a doubt, we are a country at war. Not only against Iraq, but against our own people. The ones whose labor kept and continues to keep this economy running.

To the titans of Wall Street: "You're welcome."

Clotheslines

In the women's bathroom at the YMCA, a conversation ensued between a Y mate and me. She said it was a pretty good place, as cheap hotels go, but she hated spending $50 a night because she is "cheap." Not cheap, I corrected her: "thrifty." There's nothing wrong with being thrifty, I asserted. My mother taught me about thrift. My mother did wondrous things with her small secretary's salary. She lived modestly but well. She told me once she bought everything she wanted, just by waiting for things to go on sale. She was fortunate to have found inexpensive housing that didn't significantly increase over the years. Thus, she was able to save money and live well.

I agreed with my Y mate that I too hate wasting money, wasting resources.
She complimented my jeans. I bought them at WalMart for less than $20. What irritates me is the fact that I can't hang them on a clothesline to dry. Now homeless, moving around, I have no choice but to dry all my clothes in a clothes dryer. The clothes dryer adds another $1 or $1.25 to every washload, but worse than that, it makes my clothes wear out much faster than they would if I let them air dry on a clothesline. I still have jeans I bought in 1992. They're in decent condition because for all those years I never put them in a dryer. Now, I have no backyard clothesline, no kitchen and no bathroom to rig up an indoor clothesline--and no choice but to dry my clothes in a dryer. Which means I have to buy new clothes that much sooner. A waste of money. Like moving around from place to place is a waste of money, not to mention energy.

For every small cup of coffee I buy on the street to feed my caffeine addiction (OK, I admit it; I am a caffeine addict) I think about the bag of freshly ground Columbian coffee beans that costs $3.49 at super WalMart and brews a two week supply of coffee. Waste. Instead of washing a mug and reusing it, buying coffee in the street, or in restaurants puts more styrofoam and more plastic into landfills. More waste.

"It's expensive to be poor," a lawyer said to me.

For a guy who is far from poor, who will probably never be poor, and--not sure about this-- maybe never has been poor, the lawyer had it right when he said it's expensive to be poor. It's even more expensive to be poor and homeless without a clothesline.

Heartbreak Hotel

As of last weekend, she was still out there. I'm talking about Dawn, the homeless young--very young --woman who was sitting on the sidewalk with her dog.

This time she had her head down; hidden, the way that some homeless persons greet the streets some days. Sometimes we all need some alone time, some damn privacy, a place to hide for awhile, sheltered from life's stormy weather. And just how do you get that if your "home" is a public street? You put your head down.

I did not bother her, or try to engage her in a conversation this time. I put a couple dollars into the paper coffee cup near her feet. I did this with reverence, as one might place an offering in a church collection tray. The dog, Tabitha, watched warily from under the jumble of blankets and clothing. I wondered if Dawn had gotten her sleeping bag and back pack yet. I descended into the subway station, as always holding back tears--of anger as much as sadness. Anger--why? Because I feel so powerless? Because my dollar or my loose change is only a drop in the vast desert of human misery? Or is it because I've been there, homeless-- and I haven't forgotten what it felt like.

Then today, there was another one. This one sitting on subway stairs at 42nd Street. So soft spoken I hardly heard what she said, but I didn't need to. Sitting there in the cold, alone, she was asking for help; the only help that seems to matter. The universal language: money. I gave her a dollar. Asked her how she got out there. She said her father threw her out. She said she was trying to get some money to feed her baby. I told her about the UHO people. They are homeless and formerly homeless who have organized, set up tables in various parts of the city, with huge tip jars. There they stand all day, in all kinds of weather, doing outreach, accepting donations for the homeless, dispensing information about services and shelters. I told the young woman to go to one of these people and tell them her situation. If anyone could help, I thought, they could.

Later, when I returned to this subway station, she was gone. To a better place, I can only hope.

Dawn

Sitting on the sidewalk near the Union Square subway station and the Whole Foods store was Dawn. Twenty-something, with reddish blonde hair and silver facial piercings, she sat with her dog tucked between her legs. Her dog's name is Tabitha. She is a large affable brown and white boxer who rose to sniff the stranger who stopped to talk with Dawn, in an obvious show of protectiveness.

Like most of the homeless who take up a space on the sidewalks of New York, Dawn had a hand lettered cardboard sign. It was more extensive than most, and the writer of this sign is obviously educated and articulate. It explains: the shelters will not take her dog, so she is living out on the street rather than abandoning her Tabitha.

Dawn is from San Francisco originally, and has traveled around the country in the grand tradition of such folks as Woody Guthrie. She doesn't mind letting you know that she's a "tagger," which to me translates into someone with an artistic bent. She also enjoys skateboarding. She was in the San Francisco junior symphony as a kid--played flute and piccolo--and she made it to second chair, with first being the best. Not too shabby.

So how did she get here, to the Big Apple? She was separated from her traveling companion when her friend was deported back to Montreal-- through no fault of her own, Dawn assures you. They had been staying in Detroit, and Dawn just couldn't deal with the climate and /or culture there.

In New York we have recently enjoyed a long stretch of mild weather, which is predicted to end very soon. Dawn said her immediate needs are a sleeping bag, and a backpack. She is in Union Square often, she said. If you can help, look for her and Tabitha in front of the subway station near Whole Foods.

Class of 2006

Something I learned in sociology 101 surprised me. It's not race or ethnicity or religious differences that pose the greatest social mobility barriers. It's economic class. I learned this back in the late eighties in a sociology course that I had to take to graduate-- but unlike some other required classes-- I found it fascinating.

On Comedy Central, a comic named Ron White reiterated this the other night. His routine was about his marriage to the daughter of very rich parents--parents he didn't like much. I have no way to know whether Mr.White's account of his marriage to the rich girl is fictional or not. But he ended his monologue by saying the marriage is now over. And one thing he learned from it was this: You can't marry outside your class.

This highly successful comedian went on to describe himself as the offspring of a hard working man who never made much money. And he added, the fact that his Dad was working class "don't make you better than me." He said the rich view working class people as suitable for carrying the rich folks' "piss buckets." For those of us who don't accept that version of things, well, the rich simply have no use for us.

The question of class is as old as Karl Marx, and maybe as dead. Are we really limited by the constraints of the class we're born into--or are those limits artificial? How do you explain the success of Oprah? Of Senator John Edwards? The apparent failure of Florida Governor Jeb Bush' addiction plagued daughter--aberrations? Maybe.

Your socio-economic class is where you are right now-- not where you have to stay. I want to believe that, and I have to believe that. If I don't, what's the point of striving, of learning?

Here in NYC, there are posters of a shivering Statue of Liberty in the subway stations, calling on New Yorkers to donate their unwanted coats to the annual Coat Drive for homeless folks. Unlike people with homes, the homeless can't put their winter coats away in the closet for the summer, because they have no closets. So whatever warm jackets or coats they're wearing this year, get tossed in the trash at winter's end.

So anyway, on this one Lady Liberty poster down in a Brooklyn sub station, somebody added some graffiti. In black marker they'd scrawled: "Time to bring the sickle down on the trickle down." If that doesn't sound Marxist, I don't know what does...have some class consciousness with your coffee this morning.

The train ride brought me to beautiful Main Street, Flushing in Queens, and I say that with sarcasm, because when I ascended the subway steps to the street, I was met with a bustling neighborhood of unprecedented austerity. I thought I was in some upstate factory shuttered post industrial wasteland, but no---this is still NYC.

Everywhere are huge, boxy, dark brick buildings. The people, small and mostly thin, hurry in the streets; industrious, unfailingly polite. Something feels out of whack here, and not just because the riot of street signs are virtually all in Korean, with a few English subtitles, and there are endless restaurants, cosmetic shops, and laundries, but no gyms-- except the equally austere YMCA-- no nightclubs, no cutting edge clothing boutiques, no graffiti, and no street vendors, musicians, or artists. This neighborhood reminds me of pictures I've seen of communist countries during the Cold War. Vast stretches of dreary sameness, cheerless, uniform...

It's like a centrally planned economy--oh my!

When we reach extremes, the usual path to normalcy is first we swing back to the other exteme, then we drift to the center, and settle down in the middle path. Brothers and sisters, we have reached an extreme. We have people in wheelchairs living on the streets. We have tiny old women with obvious physical disabilities begging in the subway stations. We have babies and their impoverished mothers living--and sometimes dying in homeless shelters. We have politicians (with gay relatives and/or a personal attraction to minors of the same sex) ranting against gay marriage and refusing to raise an unliveable minimum wage. (But no problem voting to raise their own pay) We have the pro-communist/planned economy/backlash graffiti defacing Lady Liberty. The Lady is in distress, because the people are in distress.

Remember, she says: "Give me your tired, your poor...yearning to breathe free...send the homeless, the tempest-tossed to me." She doesn't say toss the homeless into the street and leave 'em there. I repeat, Lady Liberty is in distress, and we gotta find the Middle Way.

Food Not Drugs

There's a grassroots group that calls itself Food Not Bombs. www.foodnotbombs.net. Sort of a community of mostly young people with a social conscience bent. They go to places where homeless people hang out and serve food to the people, vegetarian food. They don't have any agenda, like religious proselytizing, or curing drug and/or alcohol addictions. A year or so ago they were serving food in a downtown park around these parts, ran into objections by the local politicians, and at least one of their members was arrested. For trespassing or not having permits--something like that. A lawyer came forward and offered some pro bono help, and things came out fine, but I haven't read a word about Food Not Bombs in the local news for some time. That doesn't mean they're not still feeding people, however. And it sure doesn't mean there are no more homeless, hungry people around here. Why I bring this up is because I was thinking about food issues. Especially as it relates to poverty.

When I was a kid, people used to talk about the elderly poor who had to eat cat food because it was all they could afford. The Federal Food Stamp Program supposedly changed that. It was actually advertised on TV many years ago. But things changed over the years. The "safety net" for the poor got hacked with a machete. Rents went up, food stamps programs got pushed off onto the states, and things now are tough all over. Even some folks working full time can't afford food. Not if they want to pay their electric bills.

In 2002 I was unemployed, homeless. Lived in my 14 year old car all day, went to homes of different people at night to get a shower and sleep. Over a period of about 16 months, I "lived" in eight different temp homes. When I went to stay with Thelma in home number four, I decided to apply for food stamps. It took a lot of urging by others to get me to do this. I was unemployed, homeless, living on $177 a week in unemployment benefits, but I really didn't believe the system was going to help me. I'd already been told that because I wasn't HIV positive or drug/alcohol addicted, I wasn't going to get help. There are a lot of people out there worse off than me, I was told by one hotline worker. Sad but true. But since Thelma, a Teamster embroiled in a labor dispute, was also unemployed, and she was giving me shelter in her house, it seemed to me the food stamps could help both of us. I had to try, at least.

I waited in a line at the county office to get an appointment. Then I waited in line to hand over the papers they wanted. Then I waited in line the day of my appointment. Food Stamp offices are depressing places, wherever they are. Dirty walls, dirty windows, scuffed floors. Colors either bland or garish, or a jarring mismatched combination of both. Hard plastic chairs, crying kids, adults either angry or defeated. Everything about these places beats down your self esteem. I can't imagine why anyone would put themselves in one, unless they really needed some help.

Finally it was my turn, and the social worker called me into her office. She was cheerful, almost friendly. After a lot of paper shuffling, and photocopying, she looked at me across her desk and said, completely serious, that I would be eligible for $10 a month in Food Stamps. Then she asked me, almost with a sneer, if I wanted her to go ahead and process my application. I said yes, of course, and left.

I never went back. Which, of course, is what she wanted.

It gets pretty old, living on bananas and dried fruit and trail mix. At the end of my time of homelessness, my stomach was extremely messed up. I had digestive problems I'd never even heard of, and four years later, I'm still not right. So many foods make me sick: nausea, pain, fullness from small amounts, labored breathing. It's unpredictable, no rhyme or reason to it. The only relief sometimes is to just quit eating for a couple days. Sometimes eating makes me so drowsy, I feel like I'm slipping into a coma after a meal. I eat no chips, no candy, nothing fried, no orange juice, no spaghetti sauce. I read ingredients obsessively. I am a vegan. I'm no fun to go out with to a restaurant. With all the unwelcome surprises that ambush me from food, I'm sure not taking any risks with drugs.

But they're just so easy to get. The currently prescribed medication for Hepatitis C is interferon and ribavirin, taken in combination, and injected. It's very expensive, because there's no generic yet. Some side effects are: psychiatric adverse effects, auto immune disease, thyroid problems, extreme fatigue, blood sugar problems. (According to Be In Charge, a program of the Schering Corporation) Response rate for someone with my genotype is about 50%. Even if cleared, the virus can come back because it mutates, and if it does, it's often with added force.

On the other hand, there are liver friendly foods--lots of them-- and they have no side effects. They're also a lot less expensive than the drugs. And you don't have to inject them. So why will the pharmaceutical companies give unemployed people free drugs, but if you're too poor to afford food, you're out of luck?