Seductions of the Lower Strata
Packer, George
Spring brings out robins, crocuses, and the homeless. On a May afternoon I was sitting on the bank of the Charles River in Boston, angling for the first tentative pleasures of sun and birds, when...
...As far as shelters go this is one of the more civilized...
...Once you'd spent a night, you were "presigned" and had rights to a bed for two weeks, as long as you kept the rules and arrived by ten o'clock...
...The woman gathered her bags and followed them out, thanking me for the meal...
...Soups and stews were collected in buckets from local restaurants, and guests sat at four metal tables in the dining room and ate pasta and bread and canned vegetables off paper plates while students induced them to chat—about the state lottery, Scientology, the snow...
...he cried, hitting his forehead...
...At first none of the losers spoke: a stocky man in a ski cap who'd just come out of prison for burglarizing one of the university clubs, an old woman in a black wig with four plastic bags, and a Portuguese who said he was a carpenter...
...Frisked for drugs and knives, smelled for booze, the guest was assigned a mattress with sheet, blanket, pillow, and towel on the linoleum floor of a large room where the church choir rehearsed during the day...
...Once you're out it's hard to get back in—it's easier to sink on down...
...So I didn't sign nothing or take no tests...
...The shelter had twenty-five mattresses...
...Paul...
...As if he were giving the boring details of a nine-to-five job, he explained how he'd ended up here...
...Ray Burger, already sunburned, was spending his days taking advantage of the new welfare system that nearly everyone on the outs uses at one time or another: collecting cans and bottles for the deposit...
...It's not a bad place...
...Only the Portuguese carpenter didn't eat...
...Most guests went without...
...I stay clear of them...
...I don't like living like a head of cattle...
...Most nights at the airport...
...But the Chicano announced he had a place to stay with friends and gave his number to Jim the vet, who could hardly believe his luck...
...Now he was past forty, knew no one would be eager to employ him, and wasn't sure he could work anymore...
...You can see I talk too much...
...In a city where over the past fifteen years rents went up six times faster than welfare allowances, and where three-quarters of those eligible for subsidized housing could find none, the shelter chose them...
...Finally the man in the parka swallowed the last of his prey and gave me a suspicious look from under the furred hood...
...Or I go to the Cape...
...Once a month there was an "amnesty," when the slate was wiped clean and everyone went back into a general lottery...
...I HAD MET RAY BURGER the winter before, at a homeless shelter in the basement of a Lutheran church where he was one of the "guests" (even after a year the first word that comes to mind is "inmates...
...I can't get more than four or five hours a night...
...The government wasn't well-loved here...
...to paradise, a hot meal and a mattress in the basement...
...He interrupted me...
...I'm a bit of a dark sheep in the family...
...At lights-off, eleven o'clock, the open door of this room gave off an overwhelming stench...
...He smiled like a boy putting the best face on a fight with a bully...
...Whenever the number of guests exceeded this (every night of the winter), a lottery was put in use...
...I'm going to lie in the sun in goddamn Hawaii...
...There were quarrels and insults every night, but they had more to do with shower rights than civil rights...
...So I took early retirement...
...Then the cops had to be called...
...It was easy to label individual guests, but as a group they defied stereotype...
...You all are cheating me...
...By now he was laughing—not naturally, but in staccato bursts...
...He rambled on, oscillating 247 between his body's decay and the small things that left room for hope, like the bars in the Combat Zone that let you stay until 3 a.m...
...On bad nights ten people drew for one bed...
...You're as bad as the other places— man, to stay in one place I gotta act like I'm drunk, another like I'm crazy, here I gotta have a diploma or something...
...He finally got on a night train back East without ever finding the friend...
...If you came in at three minutes past, you were out in the cold, "unpresigned...
...You folks treat the homeless like they're shit, just bags you can toss out...
...I ain't staying here," he said...
...Hell," he laughed, "by now I can do it easy...
...So I could get outta here...
...I tried to explain the rules but got lost in the maze...
...Then you could go to the V.A.," I suggested...
...The men who didn't sleep fully clothed stood over their mattresses stripping off the usual five or six layers, and the women behind the blackboards did the same, exuding hidden odors like an old bandage unwrapped from a wound...
...You might suppose that the homeless are different from you and me, but the answer that came after a winter among them was, "Yes, they have less money...
...That would be the logical thing to do...
...I did tell the doc I was feeling suicidal— which I was...
...In his slightly pained formality you could hear the voice of a desk clerk at a two-star hotel...
...An unemployed construction worker just out of jail for drunk driving had found his apartment ransacked, leaving him nothing but the clothes on his back...
...But I let the chance go...
...But my legs, they're getting sore from being cramped up in that chair, and what with the cleaning people and the damned P.A...
...Most were articulate and self-conscious about their situation, but self-consciousness didn't seem to help...
...Three months before we'd carried on an intelligent conversation about his prospects...
...The shelter came at the end of poverty and mistakes that entailed more mistakes, each compounded by the bad luck that haunts you when your income hovers around $10,000...
...I know I can't last on these streets...
...One night he lowered himself onto the top step of the entryway and began speaking, in a local working-class accent, to no one in particular...
...One shower was available, but it was always blocked up, half-flooding the hall...
...On a May afternoon I was sitting on the bank of the Charles River in Boston, angling for the first tentative pleasures of sun and birds, when I noticed a large man lugging a plastic bag amid the reeds...
...They're quite good, have you ever tried one...
...I was paying $230 a month for a place but Social Security brings in only $300 and I just hated seeing so much of it soaked up by rent...
...The temperature had dropped close to zero, and when a student came upstairs to call off the names of the presigned, six men and two women were left standing in the entryway...
...She had not said where she was going, and didn't seem concerned...
...An Irishman and a black played Ping-Pong for money after dinner...
...A disabled vet named Jim was nearer the center of homeless experience...
...Russian officers on the Mongolian border sleep outside without sleeping bags, did you know that...
...the thought of the room on Dana Street cheered him up more...
...Life in Boston in the mid-1980s on a low income is a high-wire act—with no safety net...
...He kept apart from the bag-ladies and dry drunks around us, and he apologized for the state of his clothes...
...Lowering his voice, he said, "I think I may be dying...
...The lower strata," he said, "it gets seductive...
...But one gets used to everything...
...His large capable hands and a handsome face gave the impression of a family man, a provider...
...A skilled craftsman, he couldn't believe what was happening to him...
...After two weeks the "presigned" had to reenter the lottery, which meant waiting the added hour till ten o'clock, when the number of "unpresigned" beds was known, and drawing numbers for them...
...Wherever I can...
...A soldier back from Germany was waiting for his first army check and had dropped out of culinary school when his money ran out...
...Even before I recognized the face and the balding head of curly hair from the shelter where I'd worked all winter, his walk—heavy, meandering, head bent—labeled him homeless...
...They drew for three beds...
...They don't bother you at Eastern...
...Why'd you let them in and not me...
...A little man was sitting on my brain saying, 'You've got some money—now get the water.' " A common lot threw people together who might otherwise have avoided or hated each other...
...Now I have to spend all my energy finding dough for food and a place to sleep...
...an eviction notice was served...
...The welfare woman and the surveyor didn't "choose" the shelter...
...Three years ago he'd been a mover...
...A GUEST'S LIFE at the shelter revolved around these two-week and one-month cycles, lulling stretches of security broken by random chance...
...Once that began, it was harder to resist the seductions of the lower strata...
...for minimum-wage day labor, a few handicapped, a few crazy...
...Even this was uncertain for some of them until ten...
...His face gave him away: red with sunburn and belligerent confusion, it was searching for some248 thing in the gutter...
...Department of health and Human Services (HHS) could have pointed out how each of the guests brought his fate on him or herself...
...His thick black hair was streaked gray...
...back rent piled up...
...and suddenly she found herself on the street...
...You know, some people here aren't normal...
...That wasn't a bad place, it took care of a lot...
...There was no small talk...
...during winter and gave out free Coca-Cola...
...Looks like I'll be out again next winter...
...A scrupulous watchdog from the U.S...
...He looked furtively at the people in the entryway and lowered his voice...
...For Joe Corcoran homelessness may have brought a temporary mystical release, but most found themselves turning as sour as forgotten milk...
...I think it's fucked up...
...Noticing I was listening, he addressed me...
...the thin camaraderie between students and guests fell apart, and twenty-year-olds sent adults twice their age to bed early...
...Even then they'd only made it to a sort of purgatory, an entryway at the top of the basement stairs...
...I have a bowl of cereal in the morning— that and supper here are my only meals...
...But he hadn't completely lost his grip on the respectable world...
...Not long after I saw him on the riverbank, Ray Burger sank under, as he might have put it in a lucid moment...
...Bang, bang, something isn't right here...
...I should have looked for work when the shelter was still open...
...So the shelter managed to reflect the society the guests had left: it set up a hierarchy of insiders and outsiders, enforced it by rules and incentives, and periodically levelled them all with sheer luck...
...I was a hotel clerk, not going anywhere...
...I can see you're an educated fellow...
...Middle-aged alcoholic men, out-of-state drifters, bag-ladies, runaway teenagers, vets, young jobless blacks, ex-gradstudents, ex-cons, the evicted, the laid off, a few men who woke up at four a.m...
...The alcoholics in particular came up with point-blank self-appraisals that made you flinch: "I worked for a few days, started drinking with the dough, and next thing I knew it was two weeks later and I was out in St...
...They wanted me to stay three nights but after that they were gonna kick me out and I didn't want to lose my bed here...
...The smile was knowing and inert...
...BUT IF ANYONE COULD HAVE caught the attention of the HHS bureaucrat and ended up as a White House anecdote, it was Joe Corcoran...
...Over the winter at least twenty people had to be permanently "barred...
...Staring first at the scrap of paper with its losing number, he crouched beside me to whisper a plea...
...she didn't limit her expenses...
...That night Hawaii seemed a long way off...
...I drink, I can't work no more...
...It didn't help them to see that their days were wasted in boredom, petty obsessions about money, food, and weather, and the idle slouching through streets that was the unmistakable sign of disgrace...
...Someone wandering in off the street one night could easily conclude that the rules were designed to cheat him...
...He shrugged...
...Last month I was in the V.A...
...Plates came up, the old woman smilingly buttered a slice of bread, the man in the parka chewed quickly and glanced around like a hyena expecting predators to challenge him for his food...
...When it's warmer I sleep by the train tracks—I've got a spot where I hide my sleeping bag and other things...
...He dragged his burly frame around on a pair of metal crutches...
...He made me go over the directions three or four times, and eventually I drew a detailed map of the subway, as if he were being sent out behind enemy lines...
...There wasn't much lucidity in the man I saw leaning against a lamppost, hands in his overcoat pockets despite the heat, kicking the gutter...
...As the Chicano went out the door, the hard-luckers got a gust of the arctic air that awaited them...
...I went over to greet him, and asked where he was staying now that the shelter was closed...
...I did finish carpentry, and if you can do finish you can do rough, you know...
...I wanted to ask how it had happened so quickly, but my sympathy would have meant about as much as a cop telling him to move along...
...There they crowded on the steps or leaned against the wall for another hour—getting edgier 245 as the door opened every few minutes amid curses to let in a blast of air and a new guest—before descending at nine p.m...
...A Namibian dissident had dropped out of the university and, rumor had it, was risking deportation...
...Twelve bucks an hour...
...The ex-con decided to go along...
...a halfcrazy poet, son of wealthy parents, brought an exhausted bag-lady her plate...
...There were not many pure victims among them...
...In spite of the shelter's rules and hierarchies, homelessness was an effective leveller...
...Two men quarrelled over a mattress one had claimed from the night before, and fell to shoving each other...
...The night I met him he looked like an Irish hiker: about sixty, with white hair and three days of whiskers, wearing oversized khakis and boots...
...The pathetic thing was that he did not look like a bum...
...He'd been in Vietnam, and in the past two years his body had been falling apart: his legs had weakened, he was losing sensation in his feet and hands...
...I went partly to be of use, and partly to learn something about the "homeless problem," to find out about the people who were in the headlines every winter as the shelters overflowed, and became public nuisances once they closed in the spring...
...If I can save enough from my checks till October," he said, "I'm going out to Hawaii...
...Before the lottery losers were turned out into 5-degree cold, calls were placed to other city shelters, but by ten o'clock a free bed was as rare as an affordable apartment...
...WHATEVER CONSPIRED WITH POVERTY tO turn someone out on the streets and down into the shelter— sickness, alcohol, debt, failure, age, bad luck—was close enough to the path of normal life that anyone who saw and heard would squirm...
...This rather complicated system favored the regulars, the ones who knew a bed could be secured with half a day at laundry detail and who tossed out the words "presigned" and "amnesty" as easily as spitballs...
...Everyone would all get dinner from the basement before being turned out...
...I've been on the streets since 1983, I ain't afraid...
...The church donated its basement to a local university between November and April, and relentlessly cheerful college students staffed it every night...
...Most of the people who ended up in the shelter had taken one false step...
...The kitchen was off-limits to guests...
...Or a hard drinker lost his job as a surveyor, was finally given the boot by his wife, went in for laboring, and couldn't scrape together a deposit for a furnished room on $24 a day pay...
...But the obvious fact of lacking a roof made it hard to be dishonest...
...Apologizing, he begged me to do something...
...At the shelter Joe Corcoran was eccentric...
...It was a "dry" shelter, about middling as far as city shelters went—not as nice as the United Way house up the road with its bedspreads and television room, no substitute at all for a furnished room or low-rent apartment, but better than the cavernous stockhouse that passed for an emergency shelter near downtown...
...By seven o'clock the guests were collecting at the locked back door, but they had to stamp and bob in the cold for an hour before a student came up to let them in...
...You lose old patterns of thought, old worries—time, money...
...The lottery system is a good idea—makes them fend for themselves a little...
...The one here is the worst anywhere...
...Between seasonal attitudes of cold pity and warm revulsion, not much room was left to know anything of the people involved...
...He smiled, and launched into a story about taking the train out to Vegas to meet a friend, wandering around the gaming tables and making, then losing, money, falling asleep in hotel lobbies and being roused and told to leave...
...He said he was tired of this life, it was hard and above all boring, the hours wasted in the library or waiting for people to finish their soft drinks...
...But the baritone voice was dissolving into a tremble...
...Eventually he confided his real plan...
...Tugging at his baggy khakis, he murmured, "It's a comedown...
...Joe Corcoran reminded me of a sadhu, one of the old Hindu men who reach an age when worldly responsibility ceases and, abandoning family and possessions, roam the land as beggars, pray, and wait for death...
...Others spun endless lies, like the lame Willie Nelson lookalike who'd fished with Hemingway at Key West, stormed Iwo Jima, taken part in the Bay of Pigs, even done a spell in Castro's jails...
...I think it sucks," the ex-con said suddenly...
...I get three hundred a month but I'm almost through it after twenty days...
...It seemed the proper thing for me to go out onto the streets...
...The shouts and scraping chairs below sounded positively homey...
...Men and women were partitioned by rolling blackboards that had musical scales scrawled across them...
...Sometimes I spend the whole day in the public library reading James Bond novels...
...Fifteen minutes of ritual spraying with Lysol in the morning sweetened the smell but didn't disperse it...
...No, I don't want your subway money...
...This was the natural course of life— "the proper thing...
...They looked each other over, opened the door, and disappeared in the frozen night...
...Some, like him, wouldn't say a word about their circumstances...
...Once every few weeks the mood at dinner, usually somber or almost manically cheerful, turned violent...
...A young man, slight and undernourished-looking under the hood of his parka, was waiting for food but had refused to enter the lottery...
...My wife told me that's it, to go...
...On my advice he agreed to take the subway out to the airport and sleep at the Eastern terminal...
...But I've got a friend who might be able to get me a room cheap on Dana Street...
...Otherwise you get these people who just stay here night after night and don't want to leave...
...A woman's welfare check was cut...
...Narrowing his eyes, he spoke of passing through time zones on the train and losing his sense of time and realizing it was unimportant...
...So I watched from a distance, until sympathy began to seem like voyeurism and I went away...
...Down here in the "lower strata" conventional prejudice seemed 246 absurd...
...It didn't bother him...
...And he went out...
...A Chicano boy, an old Irishwoman, and Ray Burger won...
...Have you looked at the want ads...
...Others tantalized themselves with the great apartment that was about to come through, the lawsuit against a landlord that would net a million...
Vol. 34 • April 1987 • No. 2
