Will, Jeanine, Norbert and I met at the Zephyr (which has since closed), a lunch counter in Ravenswood. We left three out of four vehicles behind and drove to the service site. At the site, which is in the basement of a church facility on Lawrence Avenue in Uptown, we parked in the lot east of the building. Homeless people were gathered at the entrance of the easternmost north door of the facility, where we entered. We went through the door, which lead immediately down two flights of stairs separated by a landing. We proceeded through a large public area full of homeless sitting at large round banquet-style tables and took an elevator to an upper-floor suite of offices where we were greeted by K., the REST Volunteer Coordinator. Everyone sat at a conference table and the orientation began.
What is humanizing about the work, first, is the consciousness of the problem, new to many of us. The paradox of all service to those less fortunate, and arguably an aspect of human love itself, is the objectification of the person or persons one helps or loves. It is a fact of life that one's responsibility for one's brother must include an aspect of objectivity. Love, like vengeance, is often more responsible and useful served cold. That which may, in the pedestrian and surface world, seem dehumanizing-- the institutionalization of human misery and warehousing of damaged human beings-- may be the only means to the remediation of their suffering. That which is life-giving is Godly, and well beyond the values of casual conversation. The common dispassion of doctors, teachers, social workers, soldiers and police all testify to the necessity of those in the caring and correcting professions to suspend their personal sympathies for the period of time in which they must truly engage the enemies of violence, ignorance, hopelessness, addiction and poverty.
Descending the stairs, the ill-clad, not lately washed, but uniformly boisterous homeless were all around us. The stairs were clogged with people, and the homeless men and women who met us outside on the street preceded and followed us through the door, calling, "Volunteers coming through! Make way for new volunteers!" and the queue parted for us to pass. Downstairs, the institutional yellow of the walls, grayed linoleum, and the not unpleasant smell of human perspiration, cleaning products, and savory cookery was pervasive. Present, too, was the sound of talk: low, civil, and accommodating, not unpunctuated by laughter.
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Awoke at seven o'clock, dressed in old flannel shirt, blue jeans, hiking boots, frayed Navy blue quilted coat. Packed notebook, writing instruments, work-gloves, and bandanna. Stuffed wallet, cel-phone, notebook, eyeglasses in deep inside jeans pocket, switched off cel-phone ringer. Had my ride drop me off two blocks from Lawrence, in front of the Aragon ballroom, and walked the remaining (2) blocks east.
Met the security guard, Nikki, and at her instruction entered and went down the stairs to the common area. Stood in line until V., the registrar, called out to me, initially mistaking me for a client, which was gratifying (my intention was to not attract attention, and to appear to "belong"). Told her I was volunteering, and she showed me where to walk to get to the kitchen.
When I went into the kitchen, the early-morning cook was just cleaning up, and showed me the stainless-steel sink, where two or three large pans were waiting to be cleaned. He gave me a steelwool soap-pad and I cleaned the pans. Afterwards, nothing was left to be done until the lunch cook, Isaac, arrived, so I returned to the common room and sat down at a table with two men asleep with their arms and heads on their backpacks. They covered their packs with their arms, and their heads on top of their arms, on top of the tables.
Two more people entered the kitchen and took off their coats. I re-entered the kitchen to work. Bob, an ex-addict, and I prepared a tray of doughnuts for a mid-morning snack. Three 2-foot by 4-foot trays were filled with doughnuts and rolls, and Bob told me to wear plastic gloves and hand the baked goods to the clients. "Do not let them touch the doughnuts," he said, but he did not say how to prevent it. We carried the trays out to the common room and the homeless men and women queued up. We handed out all the doughnuts without any incident, although one tall Caucasian homeless man twice took doughnuts with his own hands, not from my plastic-gloved ones. Bob and I exchanged looks, but because he only touched the doughnut he took, we thought it expedient not to mention it. After the doughnuts were all gone, I took the trays into the kitchen and scrubbed them. Then I went back to the table where I had last been sitting, and reoccupied my chair. Bob came out with a mop to clean up where some coffee had been spilled, and I took it from him, which he appreciated, and mopped the indicated area. The homeless clients talked about "volunteers," within my hearing, but my impression was they were probing for a response, which I did not offer. I believe they did not know, given my silence, and my dress, and my unshaven appearance, whether I was a volunteer, a client, or an as-yet undetermined species.
The kitchen staff with whom I worked was Isaac, Jesse, Will, and Robert. Isaac was the head cook, and Will was his assistant. Jesse was another assistant, as was Robert.
Introducing myself to Isaac, he acquainted me with which tasks I could assist. I was instructed to sit out in the common area until he beckoned to me to help. Soon afterwards Isaac and Robert walked across the stage at the east end of the common room, and I got up to follow. Isaac told me to take two boxes into the kitchen, which I did. Then I sat down again at my place at the table. Soon Isaac beckoned to me, and I went into the kitchen to begin to help in earnest to prepare the lunch.
The lunch consisted of spare ribs, steaks, chicken and pork chops broiled for the volunteers, and a huge pot of beef and vegetable and noodle soup and cornbread for the clients. My tasks included:
- Mixing and stirring soup ingredients
- Cleaning trays, pots and utensils as they were used
- Blending eggs, milk, mayonnaise and butter with cornbread mix
- Tending boiling water for noodle preparation
- Turning cornbread in the oven to insure even baking
- Assisting Will and Isaac in offering an extra set of hands for oven-work
- Buttering finished cornbread
- Blending finished noodles into the soup
During my own period of poverty and disenfranchisement I was often used by employers, men and women, for the worst forms of drudgery and work, and had learned at that time how to put my sensitivities in a state of suspended animation and to merely accomplish the mechanical work in front of me. At that time in my life I learned to attack distasteful and grimy tasks with a steady and relentless vigor, determined to not allow unpleasant jobs to master me, but instead to master them; and to subject myself, in the Zen manner, as chela to the master-- whomever the master at the time may have been, and whatever his or her intrinsic worth; to subject myself to the onslaught of fate, and to serve selflessly.
Those who will make eye contact will very often use such an opening as a proxy to more intimate contact-- seduction or attack. One keeps one's eyes to oneself in such circumstances, and this experience was not different than it had been for me twenty years earlier, and was as successful, with a single small exception.
Later that morning, when we had got to know one another, Robert said to me, "That you wife dropped you off this morning?" I told him it was.
"You have a good eye," I said.
"You got to," he responded.
Despite my careful precautions, I had been to a small degree found out; and the moment was instructional, since to be found out is the essential experience of the disenfranchised. To be known in one's most intimate vulnerabilities is not the modern, or affluent experience. So the disenfranchised keep their feelings to themselves and from each other, having been otherwise so mercilessly exposed.
As I had hoped, Isaac, and Will, and Jesse, and Robert, soon forgot my chimeric status as a volunteer from a university, and as a result of observing my "inner-ness," and my dedication to the labor, opened to me as equals. The nature of the work of cookery, making do with ingredients not limited in quantity but in variability, and the feelings of homelessness, their own struggles to achieve independence– all poured forth to a degree limited only by their own pride in having achieved so much after such extravagant suffering, and to the degree that a kindred soul might understand, from the inside, as it were, the feelings of being essentially outside the normalities of bourgeois experience.
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"'These,'" Will said, grinning. "'You can get you some of these,'" he said, joyously jingling his keys, the sacred objects of his freedom. Will was quoting his conversation with a homeless friend, and how he adjured him to "'keep your eye on the ball,'" and "'keep your head down and do your work,'" the principles we, by then, knew we both shared. These were the principles we both, by then, knew we had both learned in varying degrees of the hard way.
"He's my big brother," Will said of Isaac, as he passed. Isaac himself remained stoic, and quiet, content like leaders everywhere to allow his second-in-command to offer a digest of his intent and evaluation. These two men, one towering and statuesque, two meters tall and 250 pounds, the other as tall but weighing half as many pounds, were four hands and arms connected to a single will. The cookery was accomplished by one completing to perfection the tasks started by the other, when one was in the kitchen and the other out. No talk, and no writing, could be as complete as the Arab object-letters of their shared assignments. The meat was browned, and added to the soup. The cornbread mix was emptied from the package to the mixing bowl, the eggs cracked, the butter and milk and mayonnaise added, the mixing done, the meat for the volunteers cut and browned and turned, the cornbread reversed on the racks, the noodles cooked, all without recourse to conversation, discussion of process, parsing of responsibility.
"Al dente?" Will asked me, as I pinched the steaming macaroni.
"Yes," I said.
Robert said goodbye, Tina, a heavy-set black woman with a mis-set jaw, broken and wrongly-healed in some long ago violence, said thanks, and called me "baby." Jesse, small and dark and rotund ("powerful. Don't mess with Jess," Isaac said), wished me well, and said how much they all looked forward to working together with me again, soon.
At the end, Isaac took my hand in the soul-grip, and we snapped fingers away (when we first met he had given me a soft and regular hand-shake). Will grasped my hand in the classic shake, with astonishing strength, given the spareness of his arms.
"Not many people come here wanting to actually do something," Will said. I looked into his eyes and they were surprisingly clear, and snapping brown, like agate stones in a clear stream.
This experience did not challenge any assumptions or stereotypes I had cherished, but rather reinforced the lessons I learned so painfully many years before. Men are but men, whether Jesse ("The Powerful"), or Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric. At their base, in their heart of hearts, all men wish to do is to learn, and teach; to be of use to their fellow-men; and perhaps to love and be loved. Absent learning, and absent purpose, men become little better than animals, and worse than many animals, who are faithfully charged by instinct, and become perverse, violent, and malign with confusion and desuetude.
Of homelessness, I learn, but have to again re-learn, even the petty lessons of my own small history. What then is the legacy of us all? I am but an average man, no different from most, and inferior to many. The lesson I cannot fathom is why, in a just society, are not the lessons I have learned permanent in law and custom, and so saving those, the weakest among us, from destruction? Why are some the chairmen and some the charwomen? How does society measure and reward success? What is the essential nature of fairness, and equity? What is our duty to our fellow-men and -women? How are the mighty humbled, and the humbled raised up? Who are the heroes?
Politically, neither the Socialist nor Capitalist conceits, nor, apparently, the reality of our mixed political economy, answer.
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Arrived at REST at 0900 sharp. Moving through the community dining-room, full of mostly men and some women, with my toolboxes in each hand and under my arm, I was unsure how to get through the crash-bar door at the west end of the room without setting off the alarm. As I approached the door I slowed my walking pace, and heard the shouted, "Sir! Sir! " which was the usual address of a case-worker to a client-- or any other man. Women are called "ma'am." Everyone at REST is addressed as "sir," or "ma'am," at least until a name is learned. Since I had only been a volunteer for four hours served almost three weeks earlier, this particular caseworker of course did not know me.
Seeing my equipment, however, she shouted "go on!" but I could not understand her. A tall, gaunt man with a long face, and uncombed hair said, "go on though," and when I looked at the door somewhat skeptically, with its bright red-and-white "EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY," crash-bar, he smiled, showing big, stained teeth, and said, "just push on it, go ahead."
"You sure?" I asked, smiling with him. "Last thing in the world I want is for this thing to start ringing like crazy."
The elevator rattled to a stop and the door opened. I did not remember on which floor the REST offices were located, and since I was alone on the elevator and there were only four floors I pushed every button. I rode up to the first floor, and two white women entered the elevator, an attractive younger woman wearing gray pants and a pinstriped blouse, and a full-figured middle-aged woman with gray hair. A slightly-built, older man also got aboard, wearing a suit shiny with age, and a mustache and stubble of white beard. The middle-aged woman looked at the three activated buttons.
"And what's your name," she said to the older man.
"Nice to meet you, Fred," E. said.
Pretty soon K. came back, and said I would be moving furniture with B., another caseworker, and three homeless volunteers.
Then we suggested to the tenant she should talk to the gas company about coming out and inspecting the stove, and until then should only open the valve behind the stove to cook on the stove-top, and to make sure to re-light the pilot light in the oven to use it. B. had the tenant's name, and she promised to call the gas company on her behalf and have them come out for an inspection. Then we left and headed back to Uptown and the REST center.
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K. is from Seattle, and was trained in social work through the Lutheran church. E. has a Southern accent, and has been the longest-serving director of REST. B., who drove the van to the two furniture-moving sites, seemed the youngest although I do not know for sure. Among them all, unrufflability, calm, practicality, and a kind of firm kindness seemed the most common characteristics. These characteristics expressed themselves in the way they managed allocation of work, handled crises, and interacted with the clients. When the client-woman at the first furniture-moving site asked B. where the companion piece to her sofa was, B. answered kindly but firmly that they had limited pieces of furniture to go around, but that possible something could later be done. She looked the woman in the eye, and without condescension or evasion, simply spoke the practical truth of the matter. It is not beyond imagining that a slight, white, young woman might have some trepidation addressing an older, and certainly in the brutal ways of the world, almost certainly wiser woman, but B. spoke in a tone of equality and pragmatism in which it would have been hard to find any fault of superciliousness or insensitivity. At the second furniture-moving site, the young white woman there clearly did not sense the smell of natural gas, or understand the potential consequences of a gas leak, but B.'s firmness of purpose and solution-oriented approach did not address the underlying causes of the young client's lack of knowledge, but simply and confidently addressed the issue: "The gas company will call on you," was the topmost solution, and B. grasped it without hesitation.
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The two men and one woman with whom I worked, and the two client-tenants to whom we provided some new furnishings did not lack the energy or will to live, and work, but most assuredly were isolated from the world of modern commerce, and the rapid changes whirling all around their conditionally static lives-- in media, business, and culture-- changing their lives without their knowledge.
We are all at the mercy of The Unseen Hand, Adam Smith's unknowable but tidal economic effect on the headway of the vessels of all our lives and endeavors. But if we who are of the "educated" class are all, as in Melville's construct impending upon spirituality, "too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air," in connection with our understanding of our place in the world, how much more benighted are the poor, and then another rung down the social ladder, the homeless, whose prospects are limited to obtaining a meal and a place to sleep. Samuel Johnson had it right: "Nothing concentrates the mind of a man more than the knowledge he will be executed in the morning," and the scrutiny the homeless must bring to bear upon surviving the present and the most immediate of futures-- the morning, as it were, and then each morning serially after that, ad infinitum-- is near-incomprehensible to women and men with shelter, and food, and books with which to get surfeit, for a time, from the final reckoning. The homeless, and the desperately poor and underemployed, cannot put off this reckoning for a day, a night, or even an hour. They are imprisoned in the present.
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The chairs were made of a steel frame, to which was screwed a foam-packed vinyl pad sewn and glued to a Masonite backing. The chairs, like everything else in the room, had been donated. The Masonite back on most of them had been damaged by water, which caused the backing to warp, curling away from the dimensions of the steel frame of the chair for which they were designed.
"Will it fit and not slip off?" she asked. I held up the chassis of the Dust-Buster receiver, where I had test-fitted the screw-and-washer from the assembly.
"Yes, ma'am," I said, and she nodded.
The room was eight feet high, six feet long, and four feet across. The steel cabinet had had its previous hasp-and-lock assembly forcibly removed, and a taped-up sign on the cabinet specifically prohibited, by name, a certain individual from accessing the cabinet's contents.
Using a Vice-Grip and flat driver, I removed the old assembly, and bored holes for the new one using a high-speed 5/8" bit and a cordless driver.
In applying the new hasp assembly I dropped a bolt. Leaning down in the dim light, I found it against the wall behind some 5-gallon capped steel-and-cardboard cans. In the corner a few feet away was a neat pile of rat droppings, the size and color of coffee beans.
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Taking a pen imprinted, "Courtyard Suites-ATLANTA," my feelings were somewhat abstracted from the problems of homelessness, and I perceived, musingly, that the trip this promotion, a printed ballpoint pen, traveled to get to this spot, in my hand on a heavy wooden conference-room table with the finish flaking off, in a vast unused theater utilized as a warehouse, in a homeless shelter in Chicago's Uptown, was not unlike the journeys we all make, ant-like, across the surfaces of our lives. Who brought that pen up from the tropical state of Georgia to the lake-watered and arboreal Chicago? Was it a traveling salesman who left it in the drawer of a desk which was then donated to REST? Did E. go to a convention in Atlanta and bring it back (although I thought this was unlikely).
It is difficult to not restate my own subjective feelings of suspension in time. Without a college degree I had arrived in Chicago and talked myself into a job as a wire-service rewrite man, then as an editor for a venerable jazz magazine, and then I was unemployed in a great metropolis, knowing only strangers.
Two shifts of young black men worked as custodians and cleaning-men during this day at REST. In the middle of the morning, the first of them asked to borrow a flat-bladed screwdriver, and I handed it to him. He was working to open the refill-door on a bathroom soap dispenser, but the screwdriver was the wrong tool, and he was not used to using hand-tools. I asked him if I could try, and he held the appliance over to me. We held it together for a minute, working on it, but in four hands the work was clumsy.
Holding steady throughout a day of work is a great satisfaction, and the accomplishment of simple goals among those gratifications of life which upon accumulation, can aggregate to what might be considered certainly one of the forms of personal success. If this is human nature, how difficult then, must it be for the days to pass with no useful occupation?
The old saying is, "by the work, one knows the workman." At different points in my afternoon's work I had different feelings about the work of others which I handled in the course of it. An experienced carpenter and rehabber, I have learned to read predecessors' craftsmanship as easily as a forensic analyst reads a fingerprint. My first response to foolish and misguided work is pity. Then of course as the corrective measures necessary to undo bad work and start my own mount, this gives way to irritation, and finally collapses into amusement.
In my personal management of mankind's folly, amusement, in fact, has largely replaced anger as the end-result of irritation. My admiration for Elvis Costello's lyric, "I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused," has lead me to the opened door of thinking of my positive attitude in the celestial terms of the angels, perhaps, actually wanting to wear my red shoes. On a roll of pop lyricism, I might also say like Dylan of my early angry-young-manhood, "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." I resented fixing chairs when I was twenty-five, and would have been irritated that E. questioned and reviewed my work. Now, I was grateful a woman with the life-experience and generosity of spirit of E. valued my work, saw its merit, and gave me the ultimate accolade of eventually trusting me alone to do it.
"See you be kickin' out the jams," he said, grinning broadly, and coming out of the shadows. I could not deny it, I was the only other person in the room. No stranger to mortification, I said, "thought I was alone."
"I said you sound good, singing, too."
"Well," he replied, "takes me a while to feel at home with it, but I like it." The doors to the theater opened, and when E. came in, he moved away, his work in hand.
"Next week I'm going to have a whole LIST for you," she said.
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A tall, late-middle aged white woman, well-spoken and gracious, came to REST to get some slacks and look over the shoes. A diminutive Caucasian man speaking in Slavic-accented English found a jacket, an overcoat, and a backpack. A clean and decently-dressed black matron chose some slips and blouses, and on the way out groused to K. about the impenetrability of the government relief forms she had to fill out, and the intransigence and laziness of the government office workers with whom she was compelled to treat.
"When the paperwork is done, it's done," she said. "And it all works out in the end. But they sure don't make it easy."
And in this we see a cross-section of REST clients: not abject, not insensibly ignorant, criminal, or unmotivated to change their lives, but simply surpassed. For one reason or another, the economic miracle of American prosperity has left these competent and practical people in the dust. If the great questions deciding the successes and failures of a society rest upon the manner in which they treat their prisoners and the poor, then despite its many successes, American policy has-- in small, if not in large-- failed.
The potential for success remains.
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Arrived at REST at 0945. After waiting for about twenty minutes in the lobby, E. asked me to come in and finish the work on a wood-work lobby chair, upon which I had spent much of the afternoon, a week ago, working the wood.
Entering the theater, a black woman was at work at the table ripping the satin and silk and sateen borders from blankets. Her eyes darted up at me as E. and I entered.
“L., this is Charles,” E. said. “He’ll be in here working today.”
“Hey, L.,” I said, but she did not speak. L. was a light-skinned black woman older than sixteen and younger than forty-five, probably. She was wearing earth-colored clothes, an ankle-length brown woolen dress, a cardigan sweater, and a small kerchief. She pulled the borders off the blanket with a scissors, making a small popping sound, and kept her head down.
Then, the moment of truth. Selecting the (¼)-inch bit, I bored the piece for the bolt and the two dowels. I dry-mounted everything without banging it completely together. Then I glued it up and using a rubber mallet set it all up.
The chair clinched together pretty well, so I scrubbed it up a little with the knife and sandpaper. K. came out and reviewed the work, putting a hand on it, and said it was good. I had a problem making the bone-colored filler match the rest of the maple-stained chair, and K. brought me a brown magic marker.
Then I looked around, expectantly, but at some point L. had gone. A cardboard box once used for a washing machine was full of woolen blankets, naked of borders. The small trash-can by the double-doors was full of silk strips, trailing gossamer thread.
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Where can they gather to themselves empowerment?
The case is exacerbated by the most sensitive treatment, which to the average middle-class American, manifests the exact opposite of the ideal of independence, the freedom to fail, and if need be fail spectacularly. I would not, could not, force my comradeship upon the silent and reluctant, seam-tearing L.
And then before I knew it she was gone.
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The improvisation of solutions is among the most important skills to put to use in such a management environment, but in another of the manifold Catch-22s plaguing charitable enterprises and their staffs, while “real-world,” experience dictates that the way in which a chair should be repaired involves, perhaps, hardwood dowels, and wood-stain and varnish, the “real-world,” of shelters like REST, has to be more inventive, with a consequent reduction in quality. The problem is that homelessness and poverty may contribute to a certain cunning, but “craft,” in the sense of a disciplined approach to systematic, quality workmanship, is almost wholly absent in the lives of people so crushed beneath the cares of the day’s living they have no time and no incentive to achieve such abstract skills.
When E. said, “L., the work you do means a great deal to us,” and L. modestly bowed, faintly smiled, and then diligently and silently finished her work, E.’s gentle words illustrated perfectly how such complicated mechanisms of the human heart may be deftly moved.
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Strewn across the conference-room table were boxes after boxes of contributed clothes, pots and pans, blankets, sheets and pillows.
Working with me was a tall cadaverous white man named Dan, who wore dungarees, an old white T-shirt, and sneakers. He stood between the clothes-racks and shelving where the men’s clothes were stored and using a yardstick measured each article of clothes for size, before putting it with like-sized pants, or shirts, or jackets, or sweaters.
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Circling the great room time and time again with contributions, I find myself unifying, in objects, the flow of everybody, together. The rich, the poor, the dead, and the living, seem to finally be unified in these objects.
Like God himself, I suppose, does tall, cadaverous white-haired Dan measure with his massive veined hands the exact size and shape of each article coming into them, selecting, appraising, placing it finally on the shelf where it belongs. Measured, valued, categorized and catechized in its place, until that moment of redemption, brought off the shelf and back to life, awakened again to useful service.
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This may be how Dan gains his philosophy: to sit tranquil, heavy-lidded with manifold grace, before his stone fireplace high above the winking metropolis, a glass of sherry in his great gnarled hand, and reflect.
səˈlæn
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