Rachel and Her Children (25 page)

“I’m a number. When I was evicted I was given a court docket number. When I got on welfare I received another number. Now I’m in the shelter I have a bed number. If my wife and I can get our kids in a hotel someday, we’ll have another number, a room number. I have to keep repeating to myself: I have a name. I was born. I have a mother and a father. I am not a number.

“When you go to welfare the first thing you have to do is show them that you have a birth certificate. Many people lost their birth certificate when they were dispossessed. Or you lose it in the streets or in the shelter if somebody steals your clothes. But you have to prove that
you were born in order to receive a check. Why do they do this? How much can you stand?”

We say good-bye outside the subway ramp on Forty-second Street. I give him the dollar—he refuses to take more—and we shake hands. I write to him later but I’ve never gotten a response. It’s possible that, in my haste, I got the wrong bed number. Back in the zone of safety in my clean hotel I wash my hands.

Many homeless people, unable to get into shelters, frightened of disease or violence, or else intimidated by the regulations, look for refuge in such public places as train stations and church doorways.

Scores of people sleep in the active subway tunnels of Manhattan, inches from 600-volt live rails. Many more sleep on the ramps and station platforms. Go into the subway station under Herald Square on a December night at twelve o’clock and you will see what scarce accommodations mean at the rockbottom. Emerging from the subway, walk on Thirty-second Street to Penn Station. There you will see another form of scarce accommodations: Hot-air grates in the area are highly prized. Homeless people who arrive late often find there is no vacancy, even in a cardboard box over a grate.

A man who’s taken shelter from the wind that sweeps Fifth Avenue by sleeping beneath the outstretched arms of Jesus on the bronze doors of St. Patrick’s Cathedral tells a reporter he can’t sleep there anymore because shopkeepers feel that he is hurting business. He moves to the south side of the church where he will be less visible.

Stories like these are heard in every state and city of the nation. A twenty-year-old man in Florida tells me that he ran away when he was nine years old from a juvenile
detention home in Michigan. He found that he was small enough to slip his body through the deposit slot of a Good Will box. Getting in was easy, he explains, and it was warm because of the clothes and quilts and other gifts that people dropped into the box. “Getting out,” he says, “was not so easy. I had to reach my arms above my head, grab hold of the metal edge, twist my body into an
S
, and pull myself out slowly through the slot. When I was fourteen I was too big to fit into the slot. I believe I am the only person in America who has lived for five years in a Good Will box.”

Thousands of American people live in dumpsters behind restaurants, hotels, and groceries. A woman describes the unimaginable experience of being awakened in the middle of a winter’s night by several late-arriving garbage trucks. She nearly drowned beneath two tons of rotting vegetables and fruit.

A thirty-four-year-old man in Chicago found his sanctuary in a broken trash compactor. This offered perhaps the ultimate concealment, and the rotting food which generated heat may have protected him against the freezing weather of Chicago. One night, not knowing that the trash compactor had in his absence been repaired, he fell asleep. When the engine was turned on, he was compressed into a cube of refuse.

People in many cities speak of spending nights in phone booths. I have seen this only in New York. Public telephones in Grand Central Station are aligned in recessed areas outside the main concourse. On almost any night before one-thirty, visitors will see a score of people stuffed into these booths with their belongings. Even phone-booth vacancies are scarce in New York City. As in public housing, people are sometimes obliged to double up. One night I stood for an hour and observed three people—man, woman, and child—jammed into a single booth. All three were asleep.

Officials have tried a number of times to drive the homeless from Grand Central Station. In order to make conditions less attractive, benches have been removed throughout the terminal. One set of benches has been left there, I am told, because they have been judged “historic landmarks.” The terminal’s 300 lockers, used in former times by homeless people to secure their few belongings, were removed in 1986. Authorities were forced to justify this action by declaring them, in the words of the city council, “a threat to public safety.” Shaving, cleaning of clothes, and other forms of hygiene are prohibited in the men’s room of Grand Central. A fast-food chain that wanted to distribute unsold donuts in the terminal was denied the right to do so on the grounds that this would draw more hungry people.

At one-thirty every morning, homeless people are ejected from Grand Central. Many have attempted to take refuge on the ramp that leads to Forty-second Street. The ramp initially provided a degree of warmth because it was protected from the street by wooden doors. The station management responded to this challenge in two ways. First, the ramp was mopped with a strong mixture of ammonia to produce a noxious smell. When the people sleeping there brought cardboard boxes and newspapers to protect them from the fumes, the entrance doors were chained wide open. Temperatures dropped some nights to ten degrees.

In a case that won brief press attention in December 1985, an elderly woman who had been living in Grand Central on one of the few remaining benches was removed night after night during the weeks preceding Christmas. On Christmas Eve she became ill. No ambulance was called. At one-thirty the police compelled her to move to the ramp outside. At dawn she came inside, climbed back on bench number 9 to sleep, and died that morning of pneumonia.

At Penn Station, fifteen blocks away, homeless women
are denied use of the bathroom. Amtrak police come by and herd them off each hour on the hour. In June of 1985, Amtrak officials issued this directive to police: “It is the policy of Amtrak to not allow the homeless and undesirables to remain…. Officers are encouraged to eject all undesirables…. Now is the time to train and educate them that their presence will not be tolerated as cold weather sets in.” In an internal memo, according to CBS, an Amtrak official later went beyond this language and asked flatly: “Can’t we get rid of this trash?”

In a surprising action, the union representing the police resisted this directive and brought suit against Penn Station’s management in 1986. Nonetheless, as temperatures plunged during the nights after Thanksgiving, homeless men and women were ejected from the station. At 2:00 a.m. I watched a man about my age carry his cardboard box outside the station and try to construct a barricade against the wind that tore across Eighth Avenue. The man was so cold his fingers shook and, when I spoke to him, he tried but could not answer.

Driving women from the toilets in a railroad station raises questions that go far beyond the issue of “deterrence.” It may surprise the reader to be told that many of these women are quite young. Few are dressed in the familiar rags that are suggested by the term “bag ladies.” Some are dressed so neatly and conceal their packages and bags so skillfully that one finds it hard to differentiate them from commuters waiting for a train. Given the denial of hygienic opportunities, it is difficult to know how they are able to remain presentable. The sight of clusters of police officials, mostly male, guarding a women’s toilet from its use by homeless females does not speak well for the public conscience of New York.

Where do these women defecate? How do they bathe?
What will we do when, in her physical distress, a woman finally disrobes in public and begins to urinate right on the floor? We may regard her as an animal. She may by then begin to view herself in the same way.

Several cities have devised unusual measures to assure that homeless people will learn quickly that they are not welcome. In Laramie, Wyoming, they are given one night’s shelter. On the next morning, an organization called “The Good Samaritan Fund” gives them one-way tickets to another town. The college town of Lancaster, Ohio, offers homeless families one-way tickets to Columbus.

In a number of states and cities, homeless people have been murdered, knifed, or set on fire. Two high school students in California have been tried for the knife murder of a homeless man whom they found sleeping in a park. The man, an unemployed house painter, was stabbed seventeen times before his throat was slashed.

In Chicago a man was set ablaze while sleeping on a bench in early morning, opposite a popular restaurant. Rush-hour commuters passed him and his charred possessions for four hours before someone called police at noon. A man who watched him burning from a third-floor room above the bench refused to notify police. The purpose was “to get him out,” according to a local record-store employee. A resident told reporters that the problem of the homeless was akin to that of “nuclear waste.”

In Tucson, where police use German shepherds to hunt for the homeless in the skid-row neighborhoods, a mayor was recently elected on the promise that he’d drive the homeless out of town. “We’re tired of it. Tired of feeling guilty about these people,” said an anti-homeless activist in Phoenix.

In several cities it is a crime to sleep in public; in some, armrests have been inserted in the middle of park
benches to make it impossible for homeless people to lie down. In others, trash has been defined as “public property,” making it a felony to forage in the rotted food.

Grocers in Santa Barbara sprinkled bleach on food discarded in their dumpsters. In Portland, Oregon, owners of some shops in redeveloped Old Town have designed slow-dripping gutters (they are known as “drip lines”) to prevent the homeless from attempting to take shelter underneath their awnings.

Harsher tactics have been recommended in Fort Lauderdale. A city council member offered a proposal to spray trash containers with rat poison to discourage foraging by homeless families. The way to “get rid of vermin,” he observed, is to cut their food supply. Some of these policies have been defeated, but the inclination to sequester, punish, and conceal the homeless has attracted wide support.

“We are the rejected waste of the society,” said Lazarus. “They use us, if they think we have some use, maybe for sweeping leaves or scrubbing off graffiti in the subway stations. They don’t object if we donate our blood. I’ve given plasma. That’s one way that even worthless people can do something for democracy. We may serve another function too. Perhaps we help to scare the people who still have a home—even a place that’s got no heat, that’s rat infested, filthy. If they see us in the streets, maybe they are scared enough so they will learn not to complain. If they were thinking about asking for a better heater or a better stove, they’re going to think twice. It’s like farmers posting scarecrows in the fields. People see these terrifying figures in Penn Station and they know, with one false step, that they could be here too. They think: ‘I better not complain.’

“The problem comes, however, when they try to find a place to hide us. So it comes to be an engineering question: waste disposal. Store owners certainly regard us in that way. We ruin business and lower the value of good
buildings. People fear that we are carriers of illness. Many times we are. So they wear those plastic gloves if they are forced to touch us. It reminds me of the workers in the nuclear reactors. They have to wear protective clothing if they come in contact with the waste. Then you have state governors all over the United States refusing to allow this stuff to be deposited within their borders. Now you hear them talking about dumping toxic waste into the ocean in steel cans. Could they find an island someplace for the homeless?”

His question brings back a strange memory for me. In Boston, for years before the homeless were identified as a distinguishable category of the dispossessed, a de facto caste of homeless people dwelt in a vast public housing project built on a virtual island made, in part, of landfill and linked only by one access road to the United States. Columbia Point, adjacent to a camp for prisoners of war in World War II, was so crowded, violent, and ugly that social workers were reluctant to pay visits there, few shop owners would operate a business, and even activists and organizers were afraid to venture there at night. From the highway to Cape Cod, one could see the distant profile of those high-rise structures. A friend from California asked me if it was a prison. He told me that it looked like Alcatraz. I answered that it was a housing project. The notion of shoving these people as far out into the ocean as we can does bring to mind the way that waste-disposal problems sometimes are resolved.

New York has many habitable islands. One of those islands has already earned a place in history as the initial stopping point for millions of European refugees who came to the United States in search of freedom. One reason for their temporary isolation was the fear that they might carry dangerous infection. New York’s permanent refugees are carriers of every possible infection; most, moreover, have
no prospering relatives to vouch for them, as earlier generations sometimes did, in order to assure that they will not become a burden to the state. They are already regarded as a burden. An island that served once as quarantine for aliens who crowded to our shore might serve this time as quarantine for those who huddle in train stations and in Herald Square.

Lazarus may not be paranoid in speaking of himself as human waste; he may simply read the headlines in the press. “I just can’t accommodate them,” says the owner of a building in midtown Manhattan. The mayor of Newark, where a number of homeless families have been sent from New York City, speaks of his fear that displaced families from New York might be “permanently dumped in Newark.” He announces a deadline after which they will presumably be dumped back in New York.

New Yorkers, according to the
New York Times
, “are increasingly opposing [city] attempts to open jails, shelters for the homeless, garbage incinerators” in their neighborhoods. The
Times
reports the city has begun to “compensate communities” that will accept “homeless shelters and garbage-burning generating plants.”