Category: Homelessness

I had been wondering where Steve was.  I hadn’t seen him for a month.  I see many of the homeless people again and again in the same spots at the same spots but Steve and his art were nowhere to be found.  I was happy to see him this morning on my walk to work, surrounded again by this art, his pens and his other implements.

Human beings have a natural contempt for those we deem to be “free riders”: taking more while giving nothing in return.  Scientists even has a term for this tendency: altruistic punishment.  We feel contempt towards anyone who violates the social norms of reciprocity by taking without giving.

It’s easy to see why many people sneer when they see Steve and other human beings like him.  It’s natural.  We assume he’s taking from us while we toil away at our jobs, while he gives nothing.  Before I met him, I thought the same.

Steve’s art is the most important thing in the world to him.  He works on his art constantly because, as he said, “Maybe I’ll be somebody someday.”  He hopes his talent will be discovered.  I gently reminded him, “You’re already somebody.”

Steve has no roof over his head, no paid work, no possessions save those within five feet of him.  All he has to give to the world is his art–which is everything to him.  That’s all he has to offer the world: everything.

It was raining on Friday so I didn’t expect to see any homeless people on the streets, but there she was on the north east corner of 42nd and Fifth, wrapped up in her poncho, smiling at everyone who passed by, whether they looked at her or not.  I had met Laura the week before but I couldn’t stay long enough to listen to her story.  I’m glad I found her again.

Laura said she was 26, about to turn 27, but with her baby face and open smile, I would have thought that she was even younger.  She’s from the area but had been living and working in Los Angeles when her father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, one of the its most severe forms.

According to a recent study and as reported by CNBC, most personal bankruptcies in the United States are due to medical bills.  Although some of the numbers are in dispute,  there is no doubt that skyrocketing medical costs are sending more and more people into poverty.  I was staring at the evidence in the face.

Laura has a college degree.  She even has a graduate scholarship that she had to hold off in order to go home to take care of her father.  Her father had no insurance so in order to pay for his care they had to mortgage their house.  He passed away last year and the bank foreclosed on their house.  On her way back to the airport to return to LA after her father passed, she was mugged, losing the last few dollars she had.  Adding insult to injury, her Social Security card had been in her wallet and she has become the victim of identity fraud.  She’s been staying in a shelter for women in New Jersey for the better part of a year.  She’s the youngest woman in the shelter by 25 years, she said.

For most of the time I’d talked to her she had a pleasant smile and she tried to smile and look at each person who passed her in the eye.  She betrayed no self-pity, only displaying hope and optimism.  In the time I sat with her several people stopped to give her money and food and they rewarded her with something she found far more precious: a smile in return.

It’s when I asked her what she would want people to know about her that she revealed some of what she was truly feeling.  “I want them to know we’re not all fakers,” she said.  “We’re not all junkies.  Some of us have had bad luck.”  Her eyes finally started to well up.  “Do you know how many people smile back at me?  One percent.  Fifty percent sneer at me, look down at me.  A few help me. The rest just ignore me.  It hurts.  We’re people, too.”

She was in a corner of Grand Central station, right beneath the Apple Store, hidden away in plain sight, packing her things into two shopping carts as commuters made their way to their trains around her.  She said her name was “Ada” and that she was from Cuba and that she didn’t want her photo taken.  She’s one of the dozens of homeless people who choose to stay in Grand Central instead of going to shelters.  

She’s been in New York for four years and had been in the United States for over thirty.  When I asked her what brought her to New York, she talked about a claim she’d made against the government, about boxes with her papers burned, about her property forcibly taken away by dark forces, about appealing to Kofi Annan at the UN.

Her incoherence and talk of conspiracies led me to believe that she was a paranoid schizophrenic.  In other words, she seemed to be one of the 25% of homeless people that were severely mentally ill.  I’m not a professional, of course, so my “diagnosis” can’t be taken seriously.  But I do know this: Ada does not belong in the streets–or in Grand Central.

I saw her from across Fifth Avenue, from behind.  She was sitting on the southwest corner of 52nd and 5th.  As I approached her, I started to see something very wrong: there was an enormous tumor on the right side of her face.  Her sign declared that she had cancer and she was trying to collect money to save her life.  

I have a standard list of questions to get these conversations started.  What is your name?  Where are you from?  How long have you been out here?  What would you like people to know about you?  I did get her name, “Amy”, and she did say she was “hanging in there” but as I was sitting there with her, I was stopped in my tracks, stunned to be in the presence of someone in the direst of needs.

While I was sitting there, a man on a bicycle stopped in front of Amy.  He took out two fresh $20 bills and gave it to her.  He knew her because he had spoken to her before, but she didn’t remember him.  With uncommon warmth he hugged her and kissed her on the cheek as if she were a precious child.

Again, I was stunned, because I had never seen anyone do that before: kiss someone the rest of us revile.  He said his name was “John”.  I asked him why he stopped to help when no one else would even come close to her.  “Because it’s to the poor we owe everything!” he thundered.  I bore the full brunt of his passion.  “The poor are here to teach us how to love!” Over and over he hammered these themes.  The passersby barely noticed.

Whether or not you believe Jesus Christ is a deity, he was clearly a historical figure, flesh and blood, living in Jerusalem at the height of the power of the Roman Empire.  The record does say that he preached love for the miserable and the downtrodden, the sick and the dying.  He wrote no words down, himself, and yet we remember him two thousand years after his time on earth.  What would it have been like to meet him?  As John thundered away with his wild passion, exhorting us to love the poor, I had to wonder if meeting Jesus Christ would have been a similar experience.  In the picture I took it may not be obvious where Amy’s tumor is but here’s how to find it: it is right where John is kissing her.

I asked Amy what I always ask: what would she want people to know about her?  “I wish people wouldn’t judge me,” she said.  “What people do is cruel.  “They treat me like I’m a disease.  They move as far away as possible when they walk on the sidewalk.”

John added that no matter why people are out on the street, whether it’s because of drugs or because they are sick, they are more compassionate than those who aren’t on the street.  I can’t say if that’s true or not, of course, but I have seen a remarkable connection amongst the homeless people I’ve met.  As I’ve noted in past posts, they look out for each other.  I understand now something that baffled me before.  More than once I’ve seen a homeless person accept food they don’t necessarily like or want and then store it in their bags.  I assumed it was just to save it for future use just in case they became severely hungry.  Amy explained the real reason because it’s something she does.  She keeps the food she doesn’t need just in case another homeless person needs it.  She wants to have something to give.

Before John left, he gave Amy another warm hug.  Moved by her story, I came over to her and I hugged her, as well.  I was privileged that she let me.  

I noticed her sitting on the ground and leaning against the wall of a building on 53rd street because a large police officer (or security guard) was talking to her.  I thought he was going to shoo her away, as was the policy of the NYPD in previous administrations policy of the NYPD in previous administrations.  Instead, he was just checking on her, trying to see if she was okay.  She was an older woman, probably in her fifties, her hair gray and frazzled.  

She said her name was “Karen”.  I asked her if I could sit down next to her and she said it was fine.  I saw her eying the bottles of Gatorade in my bag and I offered her one.  It was the only thing she wanted from me–besides the conversation.

She’d been out on the street since January because of problems she’d had with the shelter system.  I asked her brought her out into the streets and she said that she was an incest survivor and that she had been battling dark, nefarious forces–and lost.

Before I even asked she said, “No pictures!”  but she offered a picture of her one friend, the stuffed Leprechaun she named “Lucky”.  She had lost her cocker spaniel last year, she said, so she got Lucky as a consolation.

What would she want people to know about her, I asked?  She answered, “You need to watch the shelters.  People are being abused.  People need to be housed.”

Patrick lost his right leg in Afghanistan while serving with the United States Marine Corps. He had been shot twice with a Kalashnikov and the damage was so severe they had to amputate it. He was out on Fifth Avenue asking for money so that he could save enough to get a prosthetic leg so that he could get a job. He has his construction license and a culinary degree but both professions would require him to stand up.

Patrick had a lot to say. He told me he lost his cash benefits from the military (though he still retained his medical insurance) because he moved to Toronto after he married a Canadian citizen. After four years in Canada, he got deported and can no longer return.  He is still trying to bring his wife here.

For the first time since I’ve started talking to homeless people, someone else stopped to talk to the same person. An older gentleman, a professional, engaged Patrick in a warm conversation, thanked him for his service and then took down his phone number so that he could reach out Patrick so that he could give him a hand. I asked the gentleman, Neil, why he stopped to help. Neil said, “Matthew 25: ‘Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ I stopped to help because Jesus told me to.”

When I asked him what he wanted the people who pass him on the street to know about him he said, “I don’t want them to know me. People don’t even say. ‘boo’. I want them to know that thousands of my brothers have died. Appreciate your freedom.”

He was standing at the corner of 45th and Lexington, two garbage bags filled with stuff hanging around his neck. He said his name was Jeffrey and that all he wanted was enough money to buy a hamburger. He spoke with a slight British accent and he did, indeed, confirm that he was from the UK.  How he ended up growing up in Newark, I didn’t ask.

He’d been homeless for a year and half.  He had been living with his girlfriend but he said that she threw him out.  He didn’t quite explain why.  Unlike many of the homeless people I’ve met, Jeffrey said he actually liked the shelter system—when he could stay there.  He had been put out, he said, for causing trouble but didn’t specify what kind.  Usually he slept underneath the Triboro Bridge, he said.

A few hundred feet away from where the world famous ball drops at the stroke of midnight, I found Barry. He’s a young man, not yet 30, his thick beard belying his age. He’d been out on the street for six months.

He’s from a small town upstate, close to Troy. He had come down to New York because of a job at a restaurant. He was the last one hired so he was the first one let go when the ax fell. He’s been trying to find work ever since. During the weekdays (I met him on a Saturday) he’s on his smartphone, connected to one of the kiosks that provide free wifi, surfing the web, looking for jobs. “I have my resume on Indeed [a job posting site],” he said. So far, no hits.