White Flag nights, or The Difference Between the Homeless and Bums

From November through March, inclement weather is marked with the phrase “White Flag.” White Flag is declared on any night (during winter months) when the temperature drops below 32 degrees. When temps are that low, anyone seeking shelter will be allowed in, no matter what. If all the bunks are taken, the tv room is re-purposed as a sleeping area and the mats are brought in. Sometimes as many as 65 mats will cover almost every spare inch of floor, leaving only enough room to walk between the mats without stepping on a sleeping resident.

I always thought the concept of White Flag was a little arbitrary. If 32 degrees is cold enough to kill a man in his sleep, is 33 really any warmer? Doesn’t 34 feel just as cold as 32? But at the same time, I understood the need to set some limits. In a place like the South Wilmington Street Center, maintaining rules was the only way to prevent absolute chaos.

Aside from disrupting the tv schedule, White Flag nights served as great people-watching and inspiration for social commentary for me. I would walk past the open doors to the tv room, look inside at the sea of humanity and just think, “There but for the grace of God…” White Flag nights also illustrated something that people who’ve never been homeless may not realize: there are classifications to homelessness. There are the newly/temporarily homeless. They’re the ones newscasters are talking about when they utter scary statistics like “X percentage of all Americans are one missed paycheck away from homelessness!” I counted myself among that number. When the temporarily homeless talk about moving out of the shelter, they use the word “when,” not “if.”

Another classification of homelessness is the bum. Bums are the ones people are thinking of when they deride panhandlers. They’re the ones who “sleep rough” under overpasses and in campsites in the woods. The general consensus is that bums have basically given up on doing any better for themselves. They are “about that life” and can’t imagine anything better. In the shelter, the worst thing you could be called was a bum. It was a way of referring to another as subhuman, savage, dirty. Most of the guys who came into the shelter on White Flag nights were described as bums by the rest of us. They were the guys who’d been barred (sometimes permanently) from the shelter for previous bad behavior, or for an inability to comply with the rules of The Program. Luckily for them, White Flag nights trumped being banned from the shelter.

The other notable characteristic of White Flag nights was the smell. That many unwashed guys in one poorly ventilated room can produce a stench of ungodly proportions. Other than the sight of that much humanity crammed into one room, it was the smell that took my breath away more than once. Some nights, the tv room smelled like a combination of feet, beer-sweat, and “sadness.” It’s the smell of the bums that will always stick with me. I learned the hard way to hold my breath when walking behind certain people. Once when Kindred and I were sitting in the tv room eating dinner, a bum walked past us and sat down about a foot away from us, on Kindred’s side of the table. Suddenly, Kindred swore and stood up abruptly. Continuing to curse, he stormed over to the trash can and dumped his (almost full) tray in the trashcan. When I asked him what was wrong, he glared at the newcomer and said he’d lost his appetite. Before I could ask what he meant, the smell hit me. If I’d had to wager a guess, I’d have said that the time since the bum’s last shower could be measured in weeks, not days.

The smell notwithstanding, White Flag nights always served as a stark reminder that it could always be worse. I got a glimpse of how the homeless sometimes live, and I knew for a fact that it wasn’t for me.

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.