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.