The view from the top of the world.

Allen was the one that introduced me to the top floor of the parking deck that overlooks Moore Square transit station. He and I spent Christmas Eve downtown, and the eighth floor was one of our stops.

Before that, my highest vantage point was the sixth floor of the parking deck by the convention center. This was like seeing the world with a new set of eyes.

The unobstructed view of Raleigh's tree-lined streets never stopped thrilling me, inspiring me to climb higher. I wanted to scale the outside of the 584 foot PNC Tower and breathe in the rarified air.

The grey foreboding sky felt as if it was only inches outside of my straining reach. Eventually the rain that had been threatening all afternoon came to fruition. The fat drops chased us from the rooftop, down into the streets below.

Photos from the streets of Raleigh

In the shadows of giants, pt. 2

Everywhere I turn, there are people resting in the shadows of giants. In some parts of Raleigh, those giants are the looming crystal towers and condominiums. Not far away, the giants are those guardians of legislature in the Capital Building. Built in Greek Revival style, it sits surrounded by lawns dotted with memorial statues to the dead of several wars.

Also peppering the pristine lawns are a few homeless figures. The paradox is amazing to me: society's most powerless separated from its most powerful by an expanse of lawn.

Penthouse suites, Joel Osteen, and a fresh pair of kicks.

I went back to the spot under the overpass where people apparently find lodging against inclement weather. Kindred and I dubbed it The Homeless Penthouse Suite. You have to duck precariously low to get under the first beam, but it's remarkably peaceful under there...once you learn to tune out the cars hurtling down South Wilmington Street a few feet above your head.

One of my finds was a fairly pristine copy of a Joel Osteen book, Become a Better You. The irony was not lost on me. It occurred to me that if the book was any good, it wouldn't be in the "front room" of an overpass penthouse suite. But then, neither would its reader.

Back at the shelter, I watched a new guy lovingly cleaning his Chuck Taylors. They clearly weren't new, but he wiped them with affection and care. Noticing the attention of another resident, he shrugged, almost to himself. "I got to take care of them. These shits the only I really got." To me they were just a fresh pair of kicks. To him, they were a reason to take pride in his appearance.

Bus rides, neckties and funerals

This guy was on the bus struggling with his tie. So I offered to tie it for him. He was on his way to the funeral of a good friend and wanted to look good.

Joan and The Captain

My pride made it hard for me to reach out for help. In no aspect of my life was this as pronounced as in my dealings with my parents. As far as I knew, Joan and The Captain (as I affectionately called them when they were out of earshot) were completely unaware of my residential challenges. When I spoke with Joan on the phone, I made it a point to emphasize the positive points: I've got a job! My boss says I'm great! Things are really coming together!, I trilled. I tried my best to distract her from the train wreck my life had become.

My parents were high school sweethearts, raised in a time when marriage was forever. They've been through a laundry list of problems: The Captain's frequent and long deployments when he was in the Army; financial struggles as they tried to make it on my mom's career as an English teacher and my dad's military career; all the miscarriages.

Both before and after my birth, they experienced several miscarriages. I recall once coming home from an outing with The Captain, only to have Joan meet us at the door with the statement, "The doctor said it's like I was never even pregnant." It didn't occur to me until much later how devastating that moment, like the others, must have been.

When I did grasp the full extent of their losses, I felt a tremendous amount of guilt. Of all the pregnancies, I'm the one who came to term? I imagined them cursing their luck. It didn't help that my life seemed to consist of a series of false starts and screwups. I went to college and dropped out my sophomore year. I joined the military, only to get kicked out to for being gay after two years. They stuck with me through repeated incarcerations, employment terminations, even a couple of boyfriends. Never once did they express what I'm sure was their profound disappointment in me.

Even knowing how much they loved and supported me, I still couldn't bring myself to tell them their only child was living in a shelter. I couldn't bear to be their screwup kid one more time. I decided early in my homeless adventures that I wouldn't tell Joan and The Captain about my circumstances until I'd improved them. The only thing they could do for me was worry, and they'd done enough of that on my behalf already. So I decided to do it on my own. You got yourself into this on your own, I thought, you can get yourself out of it alone.

Ad astra per aspera

Photo credit: Alfred Perry

A return to the land of the employed

For the first three weeks I was at the shelter, I didn’t have a job. The feeling that I would never again be gainfully employed consumed my thoughts. Every day it ate away at my natural optimism like a cancer. And then, in one week, it was like the dam broke and everything started to change at once. I had three interviews scheduled at the end of the week: two on a Thursday, and another on Saturday. The interview Saturday was at News of the World Café, a restaurant located inside the NC Museum of Natural Sciences downtown. After responding to a Craigslist ad with my cover letter and resume, I got a call back from one of the managers, Sam, asking to schedule an interview on Saturday at four.

The day of the interview, I dressed carefully in khaki pants, a pale pink long-sleeved button down shirt, and navy blue sweater vest. I looked like “prep” personified, but I hoped to also look highly employable. I found out later that Sam had scheduled the interview so late because Saturdays are the busiest in the museum, and therefore in the café. By the time I got there, the craziness had died down, but I could still sense the dissipating energy all restaurants have immediately following a rush of business.

Sam was an enthusiastic white man with bright blue eyes, brownish-red hair, and a friendly smile. He was a few years younger than me, and slight in frame.  I would soon find out, however, that what he lacked in physical stature, he more than made up for in sheer enthusiasm. He greeted me like an old friend with a knuckle-crushing handshake and the interview began.  We sat at one of the silver tables in the café and went over my work history, my strengths, and my personal goals. He seemed genuinely interested in hearing about my background, and we chatted easily for twenty minutes. Finally, he gathered the pages of my resume together with my application and promised to pass along my name to the general manager for a follow-up interview.

Walking out of the café into the fading sunlight of the evening, I couldn’t help but think I’d rather nailed the interview. I was left with a positive impression of the staff working there, and thought that Sam had been left with a similar impression of me. The only thing left to do was wait and hope that the general manager, Lily, would call me back soon for the follow-up interview.

Two days later, while walking back to the shelter with Kindred, I noticed a voicemail notification on my cell phone. I hadn’t heard the phone actually ring, but that wasn’t uncommon. It was a low-tech “Obama Phone” and I wasn’t yet used to its synthesizer-style ringtone or gentle vibration. I was used to my old smartphone that was loud enough to wake the dead and vibrated like it was trying to chew its way out of my back pocket.

Listening to the message, I came to a complete stop in the middle of the sidewalk. I stopped so suddenly, that Kindred didn’t notice right away and took three or four steps without me before glancing back quizzically.

“Hey buddy! This is Sam Howard from News of the World Café. I spoke to my manager, Lily about you and she’s excited about sitting down with you. I was hoping you could come by sometime tomorrow afternoon, just give me a call back when you get this so we can set something up. My cell number is 919….”

When I got through to Sam, we agreed that I’d come by the next afternoon for a sit-down with Lily. Oddly, I wasn’t as nervous for this interview as I’d been for the first one. I figured if all she had to go on was what Sam had told her, he must have told her some pretty nice things about me. Plenty of people in Raleigh had relevant experience, but she was making time to talk to me. Realizing that boosted my self-esteem, and by the next day I felt ready.

This time I wore khakis and a blue and white gingham long-sleeved button down. Once again I looked like I’d crawled out of a J. Crew catalogue, but after having seen the denim-clad, heavily tattooed barista working at the café, I felt like my fashion sense was the least of my concerns.  My interview with Lily, a perky 30-something with sunny blonde hair, was remarkably like my interview with Sam. We chatted like friends, and I tried to let my personality shine without rambling on. After only ten minutes she nodded silently to herself, as if meeting me had confirmed something she’d suspected from her conversations with Sam. She concluded the interview by saying, “Well, I have three more interviews to go, but I’d call you a strong candidate for the position. I like how you express yourself, and I like the idea of you interacting with guests on our behalf. You should be hearing from us by the end of the week.”

After feeling so down about myself for so long, I was scared to be optimistic but I couldn’t help myself. As I strutted past the giant globe outside the museum, I sang to myself, “They liiike me…they liiike me….they really really liiiiike me!” Two days later, I got the call from another manager, Jeff, inviting me to join the staff of News of the World Café as an attendant/cashier.

To say that I was happy about the job offer would be a massive understatement. It was like a weight had been lifted not only from my shoulders, but from my spirit as well. Not only did I have the opportunity to make money again, I had taken the first step toward getting out of the shelter. No longer was my departure an “if”; it was a “when.” I was on my way, and my heart was glad about it indeed. 

In the shadows of giants

Since the shelter kicks people out every day at 8am, if residents don’t have a job they have to get creative when it comes to where they can spend time all day. Simply riding the bus all day isn’t an option—I once saw a homeless guy get kicked off a bus after having been on for an hour. Even the most tolerant of fast food restaurants will eventually need the space for paying customers, so that’s out too. Many homeless head to the Cameron Village Regional Library. It’s climate controlled and has couches, tables and nooks designed specifically for spending large amounts of time. CVRL is the largest of the area libraries, and has the most facilities for day lounging.

Located at the end of a long row of posh upscale shops, the Cameron Village Regional Library is a two-story structure with a wall of glass windows lining the front. Throughout the library, there are tables with electrical outlets and usb ports  for people who bring their own devices. Upstairs in the computer lab, there are about 30 pc’s for public use, and this is where most of the shelter residents hang out. If a computer is available, you can reserve it for an hour at a time. Once your hour is up, if no one else has it reserved, you can extend your time for another five minutes. You can keep extending your time as long as there are no upcoming reservations.

From what I could tell, the library was the first choice of homeless people looking for a place to hang out. A few people liked to stay at the shelter all day, but that wasn’t a very appealing choice. For one thing, unless it was a holiday or a weekend, the staff didn’t provide lunch. So unless you bought something out of the vending machine, eventually you’d have the leave the shelter to eat anyway. And with nothing to do other than watch tv and sleep, it got boring as hell after a while.

Those who wanted to get out of the shelter for the day but lacked bus fare to get to the library would usually just hang out downtown. Personally, I loved downtown Raleigh. The streets were busy and diverse, and I could easily spend hours people-watching. The only problem is that there were certain things most homeless people were seeking in a hangout spot, and those things were sorely lacking downtown. They are:

A place to sit down for uninterrupted periods of time. When you don’t have a place of your own, you tend to stay on the move and the need to just sit down and not be bothered would arise. Even the computers at the express library downtown were on high counters with no seats. I honestly think it was set up like that to prevent people from whiling away the day there.

Electricity. For those of us with tablets, phones, or other electronic devices, the areas surrounding electrical outlets were prime real estate. It was even more serious when that electronic device was your sole connection to family and far-flung friends. For me, my tablet (which I named Tallulah) was my lifeline to sanity. Writing and posting on my blog and Facebook page kept me sane, and without the juice to run it, I’d have lost my shit.

Free wifi. See #2.

Public bathrooms. As with seating, electricity, and wifi, restrooms downtown are either employees-only or reserved for paying customers. I can’t really blame the businesses—I’ve seen what people can do to public or all-access bathrooms and I wouldn’t want to have to clean up after that either. But when the closest public bathroom was in the McDonald’s three blocks from the heart of downtown Raleigh, it could make a simple potty break very complicated.

For those reasons and others, a lot of homeless tended to just hang out at the bus station or in Moore Square Park across from the bus station. During summer months, it was common to see groups of homeless denizens clustered around benches and low stone walls, sharing brown paper-wrapped cans of Icehouse or passing Newports back and forth. At the bus station, the patrolling cops were pretty vigilant about enforcing the statutes: no smoking (at all), no alcohol, no rowdy behavior, etc. They would do laps around the station, rousting sleeping figures and generally keeping what order they could. I never saw them actually arrest anyone, but I think that had more to do with the fact that people knew they wouldn’t hesitate to do it and chose not to give the officers a reason to pull out the handcuffs.

Across Blount Street in Moore Square Park there was a little more leeway granted. While drinking in public was still technically illegal, as long as nobody’s behavior got out of hand and they weren’t too obvious about it, the cops would generally look the other way. The same could be said for people sleeping in the park in warmer weather.

Moore Square Park always struck me as a rather extreme paradox. A block away glittering apartment buildings, soar into the Raleigh skyline, home to some of the area’s most affluent residents. Moore Square squats in the shadows of these crystalline giants, giving meagre shelter to some of its poorest. The contradiction is glaring.

"My pride fell with my fortunes" - Shakespeare

One day at work I was talking to a coworker when he mentioned having seen me walking with two friends downtown. I didn't have a car, and I lived and worked downtown, so seeing me walking downtown wasn't all that extraordinary. But when he mentioned we were walking past Oak City Outreach, I understood what he meant and got a little nervous. The day before, Kindred and I had run into Calm Down Phil, and together  we'd walked to OCO to see about getting some free toiletries and snacks. Apparently we were deep in conversation and I didn't see my coworker when we passed him.

Being spotted like that made me nervous because I was trying to keep my residential status as low key as possible. While there's no particular shame in being "residentially challenged," there's no pride in it either. I've noticed that people tend to identify new members of a social group by the most easily identifiable trait. It was bad enough that half my friends knew me as "the gay one," I didn't want to be known among my new work friends as "the gay homeless one." I don't think I'd have been able to bear it.

Throughout my journeys in homelessness, I struggled mightily with my pride. When a photographer from the local paper appeared at the shelter to take pictures of the volunteers serving the homeless, I kept my head so low that I nearly got gravy on my nose. I once declined to join Kindred in line at the soup kitchen because my best friend was in town for the weekend, and I knew she was staying at a hotel a few blocks away. The thought of her driving past and seeing me in line robbed me of my appetite and produced a fit of anxiety that sent me scurrying back to the shelter for a lunch of peanut butter crackers and soda from the vending machine.

Deep down, I knew I'd have to set aside my pride in order to ask for the help I needed. Metaphors about squeaky wheels being greased reminded me that if I didn't share my misery with those closest to me, I'd be doomed to spend the rest of my life mired in it. But I just couldn't bear to admit to the people I loved how much of a trainwreck my life had become.

A little motivation

First night in the shelter

For about six months, I’d been living with my friend Charlene, but the property manager at her apartment complex found out I was there and threatened to evict her for breaking her lease if I didn’t leave within 24 hours. With nowhere else to go, I made my way to the men’s shelter on South Wilmington Street in downtown Raleigh. My first night there was kind of a blur. I was pretty relieved to have a roof over my head at all, but eventually the reality of my situation began to sink in and I found myself becoming overwhelmed.

Even though I’d only packed a fraction of my actual possessions, I still had a duffel bag full to overflowing with clothes, and three plastic supermarket grocery bags full of shit (for lack of a better term). Surveying my pile of belongings, the caseworker doing my intake paperwork murmured “I don’t think you’re going to have enough space for all that. I’d advise you to lock up the important or valuable things and keep a close eye on the rest—things can get stolen pretty easily around here.” I’d been lucky enough to get a bed, which meant I got a medium sized drawer under my bunk and a small wall locker. In my haste to vacate Charlene’s apartment, I’d never considered that I might have more items than the storage space allotted to me could accommodate.

The caseworker, a diminutive New York Jew named David, promised to keep an eye on my things while I walked the two miles to the closest store that sold locks. When I returned, I was afraid that someone would have sold them for crack but they were still there, meagre and pitiful looking, but untouched. I crammed what clothes and shoes I could into the lockable spaces and put my tablet and loose papers in my bookbag, which I vowed to keep within arm’s reach at all times. Somehow I knew that the tablet would be a connection to the life I’d known and was determined to never be without it.

I’d arrived at the shelter just in time for dinner. My first meal as a homeless man consisted of baked chicken coated in greasy ketchupy barbecue sauce, soggy boiled potatoes, limp green beans and a square of yellow cake that had clearly seen fresher days. The shock over my sudden change in circumstances had dimmed my appetite, but I knew I should eat all I could. The only thing worse than going to bed as a homeless man would be going to bed as a hungry homeless man.

After dinner the TV room was cleared so the Chore Team could come in and clean up after us. They swept, mopped and made room for the overflow guys who didn't have an actual bunk and would be sleeping on mats on the floor. On White Flag nights when the temperature dropped below 32, the entire cafeteria would be filled with mats, as many as 70 men sleeping on thin green mats. But when temps were "warm" enough, we'd be allowed back into the cafeteria to watch TV until lights-out at 11.

I've always had a hard time going straight to sleep when I lay down, so lights-out in the shelter meant laying in the dark listening to the other guys in the dorm snoring and farting. Hardly lullaby material. But that first night, I didn't heard them at all. My mind was reeling from the new reality I was facing: homelessness. I couldnt even bear to think the word, yet I could scarcely think of anything else. Eventually I drifted off, and (as these things tend to go) I felt better in the morning. Having survived my first night in the shelter, I awoke more determined than ever to find employment and get my life back on track.

Kindred Spirit

One of the first real friends I made in the shelter was Kindred. I spotted him sitting across the cafeteria from me one afternoon and I noticed that we seemed to be staring at each other. Later I found out that we both thought the other looked familiar but neither of us could figure out where we’d met. On my part, I always thought it was because he looked like a funny character from a popular sitcom, but he hated the resemblance so I tried not to bring it up too often.

He was ten years younger than me, with an old soul and cynicism that made him seem closer to my age. We were both Black, but with his pecan brown skin and soft curly hair, he had a look that suggested a diverse ancestry. In fact, his hair was the first thing I noticed about him—I was insanely jealous of his hair. It was afro length, and bunched in loose twists. I just knew that if I tried the same look I’d resemble a frayed, dirty cotton swab, but he pulled it off with style.

Normally a guy like Kindred (good-looking, smart, sarcastic as hell) would have been my “type” but a couple of things prevented that. For one thing he was straight. While he was comfortable with having gay friends, he was totally into women and made no bones about it. Also, I wasn’t trying to be part of a homeless shelter romance. I’m not sure what that would have looked like, but I wasn’t trying to go down that road. I’ve seen people (of all different orientations) engage in amour sans-abri (“homeless love”), but I wanted to fix my own life before affixing it to anyone else’s.  

We would hang out whenever we had free time, working on our respective writing projects. Jointly we came up with ideas for a graphic novel about a moon man and a perpetually stoned koala bear. In a way, the insane adventures of Milton The Moon Man and Kairo the Koala kept us sane. We’d share inside jokes about others in the shelter, exchanging knowing looks every time Calm Down Phil would bounce into the room. I think we both thought of ourselves as different from everyone else. Not necessarily better (at least not most of the time) just apart. We both readily admitted that we weren’t “about that life.” Kindred was one of the few people I could see myself socializing with once we’d left the shelter. In a lot of ways, he was my lifeline; he was my connection to the creative side of myself that I’d been afraid was dying in the shelter environment. 

Lunch at the soup kitchen

The first few days I spent in the shelter, I still had a few dollars on me. Since breakfast and dinner are provided daily by the shelter (with volunteers doing the serving), my only real expense was lunch every day. For a while, I had enough to indulge in McDonald’s value menu, but eventually my money ran out. For two days, I’d leave the shelter after breakfast, not knowing how I was going to feed myself until dinner that night. Those were two long, hungry days. One day on the bus I overheard two fellow residents talking about a church downtown that provided hot lunches for the down-and-out. I discreetly followed them off the bus and up the block towards the Church of the Good Shepherd.

I got in line as they queued up along the sidewalk, listening to the mingled voices of the crowd. There were a few familiar faces—guys from the shelter or people I’d previously seen around the downtown area. As the line grew longer, I battled with the feelings swirling inside me. “I don’t belong here” I kept thinking; “This place isn’t for people like me.” …”I’m not like these people.” The reality of my situation directly contradicted those ideas.  If I didn’t eat there, I didn’t have any reasonable way to feed myself for lunch. I did belong there; this place was for people just like me; I was just like everyone else in line: hungry, and struggling to make it.

The line snaked down the block, into a small fenced-in alley that led into the fellowship hall of the church. Eventually the line led into a hallway, then into the hall itself. It was a smallish room, with about 15 round tables positioned tightly around the room. Each table was ringed with seven folding metal chairs. As we entered the room we were greeted by a volunteer at the door handing out wet naps. My first thought was that the wet naps wouldn’t make a dent in the filth some of the diners bore. But I guess that was a more practical nod to hygiene than expecting all those people to troop off to an unseen bathroom and wash up. It was evident that many of them were accustomed to eating with dirty hands anyway, so maybe the wet naps were more of a token gesture than anything else.

After being welcomed, we inched along the edge of the room until we reached the serving line. A smiling volunteer welcomed us again and handed each diner a tray and a single plastic fork wrapped in a napkin. The serving line was staffed by more smiling volunteers, each scooping a portion of their designated food onto a Styrofoam tray. The volunteers rarely asked if the diner wanted the food, they simply ladled it onto the tray and passed it along to the next volunteer. That makes sense, since there were signs by the door saying the staff wasn’t in a position to accommodate dietary requests. Religious, cultural, and medical diets weren’t observed. I guess the thinking was that there were too many people coming through the line to make each tray especially for each person, and if they were hungry enough they’d eat what was given to them. It didn’t matter to me—I was grateful to have something to eat and someplace to sit down and eat it.

The menu varied depending on the day and the group doing the cooking and serving. Sometimes it was chicken, other times hamburger patties, sometimes more than one meat. Sometimes the food would change over the course of the hour-long lunch, as they ran out of items and had to substitute with something else. Again, I was completely unbothered. I was more concerned with keeping the walls of my stomach from clapping with hunger.

One thing that surprised me was how good the food was. I don’t really know what I was expecting. I guess the phrase “soup kitchen” left me with images of Oliver Twist begging for another bowl of congealed slop. In reality, the food was damned tasty. Savory casseroles, hearty portions of beef, steaming pans of green beans—it was amazing to me. Though they couldn’t be concerned with dietary requests, they clearly took great pride in cooking delicious, filling food for us, and I was grateful.

After collecting our trays, we would pick a seat somewhere in the room and sit down to eat. Often, the pace of people coming into the hall exceeded the pace of the people getting up to leave. For the first thirty minutes or so, there would be adequate seating for everyone. After that, more and more people would be forced to wander around holding their trays, looking for an empty seat. It was a bit like the holding pattern of a busy airport, with planes circling the runway looking for a place to land.

The tables were decorated with vases of (relatively) fresh flowers, salt and pepper shakers, and napkin holders. The napkin holders were the kind that have plastic covers on the sides, meant to be used for advertising. Instead of ads for, say, Earl’s Auto Body Shop, there were hand-drawn signs on each of the holders. They varied from table to table, but each was a life-affirming message reminding us that we were loved. One of my favorites read, “You are precious in His sight.”

After eating our fill (I’m ashamed to say I could rarely finish all the food given to me), we dumped our trash and empty plates into a trashcan and handed the dirty trays through a window to a volunteer who loaded them into the dishwasher. Then we’d walk out of the fellowship hall, back out the hallway, through the alley and back into the sunlight of the street. There’s a certain comforting feeling when you’ve eaten your fill and have one less thing to worry about. I’d often find myself smiling and quietly thanking God for the good people at The Church of the Good Shepherd. As filling as the food was, it was the smiles and kind words that felt more nurturing. There was never a turned-up nose—even the teenagers that sometimes manned the drink table or circulated the room offering cookies looked like they wanted to be there. I don’t think I’ll ever be grateful to be homeless, but I’ll always be grateful for places and people like that—ready to make me feel welcome and remind me that there’s always room in God’s heart for all His children.

This is what "homeless" looks like

According to statistics from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), there are as many as 49,000 homeless veterans on the streets of America. As of November 8, 2015, that number included me.

To be honest, there’s no one reason that I’m now living in a men’s shelter. Bad decisions, brushes with the law, alcohol, and just plain bad luck have all contributed to my current circumstances. But more important than how I got here is how I’m going to turn things around. Faith in God, faith in myself, and a little help from my friends will all be crucial as I plan my ascent from homelessness. 

By sharing my story, I hope to accomplish two things. I want people to look past the “typical” story of the homeless and see the humanity that lies beneath it. Just as important, I want to be an example. I still have a long way to go, but I want to prove to others (and myself) that it’s never too late for redemption.