I regret that I managed in this new economy to hit rock bottom without a drop of alcohol or a hint of drugs. I imagine that my continuous delusion that there was still hope for people that tried cost me greatly in the full experience of homelessness and depression. I truly believe that I could have been completely aware of the fragility of my existence while enjoying a mind altering substance and that altering of the mind would have provided a distance allowing me to stop the wallowing and self pity that generally accompanies needing to pee in the middle of the night whilst making my home on the street in front of The Coalition for the Homeless.
It’s not like people didn’t try to warn me. A very nice homeless woman elegantly stated, “Girl, you needs to get stoned. They not gunna help you unless you stoned.” Another wisely stated, “You don’t have to be falling down drunk. Just get a pint, drink it and then go in there. They won’t help you if you screen comes back clean though so you gotta do something.” They were right, of course, but I was stubbornly and stupidly optimistic. I can do this. I can survive this. Someone will realize that I have something to offer. Someone will realize that my being on the street is a great travesty of justice and they will offer me a job. That was the only boundary between my existence at the time and a life- a job. They didn’t notice. For five days and nights I set up camp outside the place that was supposed to help me. For five days they repeated their mantra, single, no kids, no family, no friends = no assistance. For five nights they walked passed me after their long hard day at the office and pretended not to notice me.
The funny thing is that the people charged with helping the homeless were the only people who did not make eye contact with me while I was homeless. Although I had managed to live quietly in New York City for over a year without making eye contact with anyone, except that one guy who felt the need to apologize after nearly beheading me with his umbrella one rainy afternoon in Midtown- clearly a tourist, everyone seemed to stop and stare at me while I was at my lowest. Not being a person who enjoys being the center of attention really hurt me in that area.
Not to mention the fact that my Diving Bell and the Butterfly experiment went all awry as the staring New Yorkers did not seem to get that I was trying to communicate with them by blinking excessively whenever they said the next word that in the sentence I was creating in my mind. You don’t know how difficult it is to form the sentence “You suck for judging me you worthless chum suckers” until you’ve tried to blink it out with random strangers on the street. I gave up and started reciting the alphabet in my own mind, storing up all the letters until someone would stare at me with disgust in their eyes as I blinked out the last S. It was remarkable unsatisfying as they never seemed to hear the judgment I was shooting back at them. Apparently you have to actually have locked in syndrome for people to take your blinking seriously, which sucks.
I made other mistakes besides not hitting the heroin hard, as I’m sure most newbie homeless people do. I thought the most important thing besides having clean underwear and personal documentation was to give myself enough reading material to keep my mind sharp. I would finally have the time to read Moby Dick, to tackle the lesser known works of William Shakespeare and, of course, no life in the gutter would be complete without the talents of Edgar Allen Poe, but that goes without saying. I learned the hard way that the words of these great minds were never as heavy in the metaphysical sense as they are in the physical sense. I also believed that if the continuous threat of being mugged ever came true, the villain would surely return after finding he wasted his time and effort stealing five pairs of underwear and fifteen books and rightfully shoot me in the head. I luckily survived that mistake.
One thing I never truly sorted out was the sleep situation. Another issue that would have greatly benefited from the use of alcohol was the eventual delirium that overtakes the mind due simply to the lack of sleep. It is illegal to sleep on the street, you see, and I was determined not to break the law. It was that same misguided integrity that kept me from making a home in abandoned buildings or begging for money. I even turned down the offer of five dollars from a neatly groomed Hasidic Jew who was perplexed and irritated that I would turn it down. I did, however, accept seventy-five cents from a Crack dealer because that was drug money anyway but I feel I have been punished enough for that. Money was not the issue. Although the 92.00 I received weekly from unemployment wasn’t enough to pay the rent, electric and food required to barely scrape by in the modern world, it was surely enough to barely scrape by on the streets.
Human beings, it seems, need to break the law as eventually they need to sleep. It just happens. The eyes become heavy and start to close on their own and there is no amount of integrity or desire to be a law abiding citizen even in the direst of circumstances that can stop that once it starts. I found a cozy spot in the corner of a subway car on the 1 line and slept for 45 glorious minutes. I only managed 45 minutes because a pristinely pressed uniformed officer of the law grabbed me knee and shook it. He asked, “Can you sit up?” “Yes” I replied in my delirium. “Sit up,” he said without a hint of humanity. If I were less tired, I would have tried to express in a rational and well thought out statement of facts, but I was inevitably altered from an exhausted mind getting only about 1/8th what it needed. I managed a quiet but determined “Pig” as the subway doors closed. I can only hope he heard me. I tried to sleep some more but couldn’t because I had been warned. I hate that cop and would like to talk to him now. Not sure what I would say but it would be a curse filled rant about decency and karma. I hate that cop!
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