human dignity

"Would it be possible, after you have closed up, for me to get into the brown boxes, there?" The finger he used to point was trembling.

I turned around and looked at where the old man was pointing. "You want some boxes?" There were stacks of empty banana boxes at the edge of the parking lot behind our pantry.

"Those boxes are locked," he continued. I turned back toward him and could see that his shoes were splattered with dried mud and his sleeves were soiled and frayed. "Can I please come back tonight?" He reached out for my hand. "Would you leave them unlocked?" He spoke politely--respectfully--but it seemed as though he were censoring himself. Behind his courtesy I got the sense that he was pleading with me, that he was begging.

Next to the stacks of cardboard boxes were two squat, wooden containers, the pair of which looked like a rusted washer and dryer with padlocks dangling from their doors. Only gradually did I begin to realize what he was asking.

A few times each week trucks pull up to these wooden containers. We unlock them and the contents are removed and taken to farms--where it is fed to pigs: wilted cabbage, bread black with fungus, potatoes half devoured by swarming insects, apple pulp, carrots covered with white fibers, onions soft and shriveled. The smell is sweet and awful and with the onset of the summer heat, it can be nauseating.

"Please."

I looked into the eyes of the man before me. He was doing his best to maintain some level of dignity. Having  someone considerably my senior beg me for something was itself discomfiting, but when the object for which he is begging is so pitiful ... I felt ashamed. 

I did my best to offer alternatives. It was evening and we had already closed up for services. Eventually I told him to wait at the gate for a moment. I walked over to our pantry refrigerator and was thankful to have found a few of our brown bag lunches that had not been distributed. Each had a sandwich, orange, and brownie. I gave the man a couple of the brown bags, for which he thanked me (this is simply what any of us at Sacred Heart do in such circumstances). And then he departed.

I had always wondered why we kept the slop boxes locked. Now I wondered how this elderly man knew about their contents.

what he could afford to give

With his duct-taped crutch pads looking as if they had been gnawed by rodents, George explained as best he could why he sleeps on a mound of leafy soil behind an apartment complex. 

"There's something wrong with my disability p-payments. They aren't giving me the right amount of dollars, so I can't pay for my rent. The lawyers s-said it would be better if I stay homeless. It would be better for my cases. Then I'll be able to move into my own h-house. But I'll still need someone to take care of me."

Developmentally disabled, George struggles with his words. They seem to slip heavily from his tongue before being fully formed. Until six months ago he had stayed in a group home with 24-hour supervision, unable as he is of taking care of himself. But after a fall down some stairs this past January he awoke in a hospital, and for some reason, from the hospital he ended up on the street. Try as I did, I never understood how he ended up homeless. All I know is that he is getting old.

It was Sunday, and we were at church. George had at some point earlier in the year come up with the idea of taking shoelaces and knotting them to his backpack, and from there wrapping them around his crutches to ensure that the latter wouldn't disappear in the dead of night. "I need them to help me walk" he explained. He also told me that he has a blanket that he wraps around his legs to stay warm.

"Sometimes they t-tell me that I have to get out of there. By the fence. I don't bother anybody." 

"Who tells you, George?" 

"I think it's the guards. So sometimes I go and stay under the bridge, under the freeway, but it's dangerous. You c-could get hurt under there. Yeah, you could get hurt."

George had the week before given his reduced disability payment to God. He had placed the check he received--still made out to him--in the church mailbox. The church secretary had returned the check to George, but he then took it to a bank and returned with a money order and dropped it in the offering basket.

"George, how do you get your food?" I asked, seeing that he had given everything he had to live on.

"I go t-to the dollar store."

"To get food?" The dollar store had never occurred to me as a place to buy groceries. "What kind of food can you get at the dollar store?"

"I get camp food."

"What's that?" I asked.

"Like Deviled Ham and chips," he said. 

For a moment I could only stand there and look at him: powdered sugar covered the greasy stains on his jacket while his face glistened in perspiration. I pleaded with him to consider moving in doors, but he trustingly maintained that the successful resolution of his law suit depended on his destitution.

"Next week I'm going to give $40.60 to the church for the priest's retirement. I like him. He's a good man. That's how much I get on my next check, $40.60. I want him to be taken c-care of when he's old."

like a dog

How has it come to this? 

How is it that tonight James has been abandoned on the rank walkway of an otherwise-compassionate community?

For him to lay his face down on the sidewalk, to feel his cheek, his mouth against the coarse slab of crawling infection, to lay his face in the worst we can do to one another; how is it that again

James would press his flesh against the pavement for a pillow?

Here is what we do know: James was once a child. He played. He laughed. He dreamed. He more than likely made a wish on his fifth birthday before he blew out the candles on his cake. His mother had hopes for her son, hopes that she treasured within her heart. Perhaps she even prayed for him.

Now the sum of his aspirations is stuffed into a Taco Bell bag, and his bed is every night without a blanket.

How many years does it take to whittle away your soul? How long must you despair before the most reasonable place for you to lay your head is on the stains of the city sidewalk? How do you come to feel so loathsome?

I cannot imagine.

Some might be tempted to compare James to a dog. And why shouldn't we be so honest? But if you walk just a few blocks from where James is laid out tonight, you might hesitate at the comparison. A short stroll up the street is where you will, in fact, find a dog: at the "doggie daycare, spa, and resort". In feather beds and heated rooms, the dogs here are fed nutritious meals and given all the love you would expect for your own children. They are bathed, groomed, exercised, pampered, and played with. O, happy dog. 

But this dog's life does not come cheap. The cost of boarding one precious pup is what it would take to provide housing for four people at the apartment complex less than a mile down the road. 

I can't imagine the uninterrupted series of nights that James must endure. When I try, I can enter into a few days of the experience, and from there a few weeks. But a year? A decade? I can't do it. My empathy breaks down. Are the nights spent in an all-consuming anger? Are they spent in mourning? Or do they simply fade from consciousness?

James, I'm sorry.

a part together

As I prepared to leave my apartment the other day, I noticed an old man across the street. In tattered black I could have taken him for a monk, and upon reaching the curb he lowered himself to his knees. This prayerful attitude was odd and inspiring, but before my admiration had a chance to take root he had dropped himself into the gutter, beard and belly down in the dusty trough.

As I watched, grabbing my backpack and patting my pockets, I realized that the man outside my window was acting with mysterious purpose; looking closer I discovered in his hands a crooked stick, and with it he was reaching through the opening of a storm drain. But I was in a bit of a hurry, so I bent down and tied my shoes.

After several more minutes had passed, I turned off the lights and stopped a final time at the window. What is he looking for? What of value could he find while lying in the gutter, thrashing about at the bottom of a storm drain? I stood transfixed as the drama unfolded before me.

Soon it became apparent: after several minutes had elapsed, he carefully brought up from the pipes and waterways a single aluminum can. Is that it? I thought. All that for a single can? 

I was a bit put off. Surely there are better ways to earn one’s sustenance, which is what I assumed was the point. At the very least he could get food—and many other services—from us at Sacred Heart. This stick business seemed at best a poorly-thought-out strategy.

Only later that evening did it occur to me that maybe sustenance was not the point of his exercise. What if it were not simply the attempt to fish a couple pennies worth of scrap from a hole in the street? What if there were something more, something that involved me, the observer? What if--and this is what made me shudder--I were not merely an observer, but a participant in the event? And if I were not a spectator beyond the bounds of the scene, What role did I play within it? 

More importantly, Had I played it well?

fear and clothing at the swish and swirl

Stack upon stack of washers and dryers sat harboring who knows what within, whirling the filth away to someplace else under cover of sanitized lighting. The sun had set, and Sherri moved like a ghost through the lonely motions of folding her clothes. One black t-shirt followed the one before, then another, followed by another. As I watched her repeat the movements with her arms, the pile of tees grew from four, to seven, to twelve ... but each shirt she folded was exactly the same.

There in the laundromat, amidst the stainless steel and sloshy scent of Tide's jasmine rain, we talked about how the recession had wrapped its long fingers around her.

Sherri's husband was a cabinet maker. As last year's housing market began to disintegrate, dragging with it the trades, the outfit for which her husband worked was hit hard. Sinking fast, his employer began ejecting assets, and soon Sherri's husband found himself the jetsam of an economic collapse he had no part in creating; and just like that, with the approach of Christmas, he was without work.

Without warning, Sherri's part time job in a downtown cafe--supplemented by her husband's modest unemployment check--became the foundation of their self-sufficiency. They moved into a two-room boarding motel where they pay $380 a week. As Sherri's husband struggled to find work, any work, Sherri kept at her $10 an hour, 25-hours-per-week position. "They are good to me there," she commented. "After the food has sat for three days, they have to throw it out. Now they give it to me." 

"What sort of food do you you get?" I inquired.

"Oh, you know, bread, rolls, soup ..." she thought a moment: "muffins." That's when I realized why all the shirts she was folding were the same: they were all from the cafe.

She paused before continuing. "Last month my husband's unemployment insurance ran out." Sherri had for several minutes been folding, unfolding, then folding again the same shirt. I had just asked if I could take her photo, when she suddenly gave up on the shirt she had been compulsively folding and blurted out, "My check isn't even $200 a week ... how am I going to pay $380 for our room?" She took off her glasses for the shot, wiped her eyes, and tried to smile. But she wouldn't look at me. "I'm 50 years old, and the way things are going, there isn't going to be any social security when I'm too old to work."

She went on to mention that they had medical bills in collections, that their belongings in storage were set to go to auction in a couple weeks because their payment was two months past due, and that their car now sits idle for want of gas. Then finally she looked at me: "I'm scared."

tin man

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. I looked again at the ludicrous red lettering slathered across the sideboards. Waves of heat rose from the tar beneath my feet, dust blowing through the razor wire; I moved toward the warning sign, beguiled.

Trucks and wagons limped and lurched around me as I ventured from the sidewalk and entered the scrap yard situated a quarter mile from Sacred Heart. Conveyances held together by rope and wire, these clown cars came bearing their cargo from throughout the city. I stepped cautiously over dirt and gravel and broken asphalt until I came to what had summoned me, seeing the child-script clearly for the first time. In sloppy red: If it’s made of metal we pick-up free.

Lifting a broken computer monitor from his truck to the cart and wincing from atop his soiled t-shirt, Ed looked up at me. And for the next 15 minutes I was schooled in the vagaries of the tin trade. “A minute ago, scrap—like water heaters an’ such—were $250 a ton.” I glanced down at the dolly he had finished loading. “Now it’s at ought $50.”

“What about the copper there?” I asked, seeing a bent pipe, twisted and gleaming in the beaming of the sun.

“That there is at a dollar …” he rubbed a tooth as he thought, “a dollar thirty per pound. That’s down from $3.60.” He had about two pounds of copper pipe on his pile.

“Is this what you do for a living?” I assumed it was, but the calculations I was running in my head belied the term, living.

“Yup.” And as he said this, a woman appeared from behind his contraption—I know not whether from the bed or cab—“We been doing this for about six years now. Since I was 40.”

Ed proceeded to tell me that he and Michelle, his wife of 20 years, made enough to cover their rent. “If you don’t mind me asking, How much do you make in a month?”

After explaining that the amount fluctuates with the whims of the market, he came out with “$2000 or $1500 a month. Sometimes less. It’s enough to pay our rent and get our food and gas.”

On the pile of detritus that earned him his living there were three computer monitors. These took up 75% of the scrap on his dolly, so I asked how much he collected for them. “Five cents a piece.” Five cents a piece. I am reasonably certain that he cannot even replenish the calories required to load and unload these things for what he earns by recycling them.

Ed and Michelle eventually shared with me that they currently rented a room in someone else’s home, that their teenager was expecting a child any day now, and that they were hoping to move in with her and her husband.

When I told them about the services offered by Sacred Heart, they told me that we did good work for the poor, but that they were fine.