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.

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.