Night 4 at the Emmanuel Baptist Shelter

I woke this morning to the sound of one man angrily shouting at another man from across the huge sleeping quarters, and the other man responding in kind, the exact same way I fell asleep. I change clothes for the day while sitting on my bed and exchanging a few pleasantries with the neighbors, most of whom are packing up and leaving. The shelter attendants are chop-chopping the dozen-or-so stragglers to get out of bed. Exit time is 7 a.m. If you’re not out by then, you’re barred from entrance for seven days. Someone is showering; you can hear the water falling and see the steam rising from the stall area. In the lobby, men are eating pastries and drinking what little coffee there is in the carafe. Out front, men are smoking and chatting chummily. Night 4 at the Emmanuel Baptist Shelter, a.k.a. “The Grand Avenue Hotel” or “The Reservation,” depending on who you ask, has come to a close. I leave my allotted one bag (big blue suitcase) on my assigned bed, don my backpack (Mobile Containment Unit, or MCU, I decide to call it), and head out into the brisk morning air.

The weather is overcast and briskly cool, but blessedly warm in comparison to last week, when the skies opened up and dumped untold inches of snow all over New England. Most of the snow has melted already; story of our winter. It’s been snowing and melting to brown, snowing and melting to brown all season long. You and me and homeless people and rich people and everyone we know is hoping this is our final thaw. I walk down Grand to McDonald’s for the free 5 a.m.-8 a.m. small coffee in a Newman’s Own cup. I finish it off by the time I reach Au Bon Pain, a faux French coffee house and delicatessen on the Yale campus.

I’m here for the WiFi connection. My laptop is working beautifully. I want to log my experiences at the shelter, soup kitchens, social services, and other aspects of the unseen underground world of New Haven, Connecticut. This story is universal and ever unfolding, but my experience here is unique. I have been to the top of the world, I like to say. I have met U.S. Senators and Congresspersons in Washington, performed in a Tony Award-winning musical in London, and studied French at the Sorbonne in Paris. I attended a Big Ten university in Minneapolis. I have had thousands of dollars in my bank account. My resume includes broad newspaper experience: reporting news, writing arts reviews, and selling print advertisements. I once founded and helped manage an arts organization and sold thousands of dollars’ worth of original art to collectors, gallery owners, and newbie art enthusiasts.

I once saw Martha Stewart’s ranch in Westchester, New York. I have hiked the Black Hills in South Dakota. I have ridden in a truck in the Ozarks, looking down the steep drop-off, feeling my stomach rise with excitement and mild terror.

I am an accomplished performance poet, rapper, singer, and beat boxing dabbler. I am trained classically by way of the euphonium, a sort of tuba but smaller. I held first chair in the Minnesota All-State Band, in the middle of band geek country. I played trombone in the intermediate-level orchestra of the well respected Minnesota Youth Symphonies.

My life is a salad of incongruous experiences, but perhaps this is common. Look at your own life. Try not to idealize it or sum it up. Does everything make sense? Is there anything resembling a straight path? Or are you like me: a river delta, a complex system of tributaries and offshoots, emptying into the vast ocean we call The Self? I am now a poor man. Homeless. I eat at soup kitchens. I want to get out of this system as soon as possible, but not because I don’t like it. In fact, I feel very at home in this underground world of beggars, drug addicts, alcoholics, ne’er-do-wells, jilted lovers, nicotine freaks, unlucky bastards, and so on. These are PLM’s, or People Like Me. I get along with them. They are sharp, funny, caring, desperate, sad, angry, hopeful, spiritual, Zen, conflicted.

I am in love. She lives in the Southwest. There will be much to say about her. She is one of my three reasons for living. The second reason is my parents and the rest of my family. The last reason is that life is a gift to be accepted gratefully. I have never before felt so alive, or wanted so sincerely to accomplish my childhood goal of living to be 120 years old.

These are the dog days of poverty. Pray for me. No one in the shelter knows I own a laptop. Too dangerous. The shelter is a den of thieves. My body is relatively safe, from what I can tell. But if I lose this laptop, I will not be able to write in this blog.

I have to go to work now: hanging door flyers and holding up signs for a new laundromat in West Haven, a suburb of New Haven. I will be back tonight for another post. God give me the strength and continued manly resolve to work up and out of this system. Meanwhile, please enjoy these posts however you wish. It will be a how-to-be-homeless guide intermingled with anecdotes. The homelessness will sometimes be in the foreground, sometimes in the background. If I am still posting, and you are still reading, it means I am still alive. I am still me.

To my girl: I love you more today than I did yesterday. Everything is going to be OK soon, and then it will be fantasy after fantasy come true. I am a juggernaut.

Have a great day everybody.

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