(It’s snowing in New York right now and the wind is blowing. I don’t see any homeless people on the streets–not even my regulars–probably because they found a warmer place to be. I’ll post an interview from yesterday, instead.)
I met Mr. Eight on Broadway, in the Financial District. He was almost hidden, sitting against the wall of the building, under the shadow of the Freedom Tower at Ground Zero. I asked him his name twice, unsure if I heard it correctly. “Yes,” he said, “you can call me Mr. Eight,” as in the number.
He’s been out on the street for a year. He had had an office job, but he got laid off.
I asked him if ever stayed in shelters and he said emphatically, “No!” It’s bad in New York City, according to him. They make you take medical tests and fill out forms and jump through bureaucratic hoops.
“There’s miles and miles of smoke!” Mr. Eight said about the shelters in New York.
“Cigarette smoke?” I tried to clarify.
“Cigarettes, weed, crack. That’s just what they do,” Mr. Eight answered.
“It’s one step forward, one step forward”, he continued. “Why can’t everything be normal. Christ died on the cross a long time ago and yet we still suffer abuse and poverty and homelessness and things of that nature.”
When I asked him about the best thing that had happened to him in the last week, a big smile formed on his face and he said, “Someone bought me a Big Mac!” I just checked and a Big Mac meal is $5.99. Giving him that amount of money would not have given him a tenth the level of pleasure. But someone making the effort to go to McDonald’s, order the Big Mac and offer it to him was a level of consideration several orders of magnitude greater than he usually received. More often than not, he was invisible to the thousands of people who pass him daily–including to me.
“All these people passing you by and all the people who are going to read this, what would you want them to know about you?” I asked him.
“That life is real,” Mr. Eight began. “This can happen to anybody. The struggle is real. I’m still going through it. But I’m still fortunate. I havent given up hope. I still go to church once a week. And have an Associate’s Degree, believe it or not.”
He held up his sign and then showed me the back. “This young lady helped me out,” he explained. She had been homeless, herself, and knew where to get food and other resources. He wrote all of her suggestions on the back of cardboard sign. “Now I know I can go to Bowery mission to get something to eat. There was a time all I could get what the sacrament to eat but the young lady helped me.” He continued, “Theres a small network out here. If you can help someone out, you help them out. I give people information. I help when I can.”