A Resident of Nowhere

Homelessness is absurd. Homelessness is unnecessary. Homelessness is hell. Homelessness is dereliction, frostbitten toes, crooked and lost fingers, burning, bleary eyes with bad vision and a pair of drugstore reading glasses to mask the shame and blindness.

Homelessness is Henry. Henry grew up in North Carolina and 20 years ago came to Atlanta in search of work and his shot at the American Dream. Black, strong, easygoing, Henry now finds himself a resident of nowhere, while a member of the human community that names itself Atlanta. Henry lost job after job as do all unskilled workers in our economy. Henry drinks alcohol to ease his pain and grasp once more at his dream, in the same way others do at a Falcons football game or the Hilton's Sunday brunch.

Henry sleeps under a bridge just off the interstate. Sleep comes only in bits and pieces, so he is exhausted when he gets up at 5 a.m. and stumbles toward the local private enterprise labor pool.

"Will I get work today? Do I want work today?" These questions haunt not only Henry but the 2,000 other men, and some 50 women, who sit in the various downtown labor pools each morning. If a job is offered, most of them must make a choice: to eat or not to eat.

To go out on a job means the worker misses the opportunity for the two meals at the soup kitchens. Stomachs, already groaning from digestive juices sloshing against empty stomach walls, say "Go for the soup kitchen." But a labor pool job, that last glimmer of hope--"maybe today the break will come"--is hard to turn down.

Torn between another day of hunger and a $25 paycheck, Henry chooses food today. So he will not work. At 6 a.m., sitting in a metal chair not far from the greasy hand-written sign "No Sleeping Allowed," Henry falls asleep.

At 7:30 a.m. Henry pulls his aching body out of the chair and heads to Butler Street C.M.E. Church for the "grits line." There he meets 200 others who stand in line until the door is opened. By 8:15 he has had a cup of coffee, a bowl of grits, a boiled egg, and a vitamin C tablet.

Just as Henry is ready to hit the streets, his bowels yell out. He looks for a place to go to the bathroom, but the church has locked its doors, not wanting the poor and the dirty to use their facilities. So he quickly hides himself behind the dumpster outside.

Atlanta refuses to provide public toilets. One theory offered by a local politician is that if the city provides public toilets, the homeless from all over North America will come to Atlanta! Yet the city spends $50,000 each year processing the average of four people arrested per day for public urination.

Henry hopes, with his pants below his knees, that no one will see him. When he's finished, a flicker of desire passes through the broken man's heart: "If only I had a few sheets of toilet paper, and maybe just a piece of soap and a little water." But he does not. Now he stinks. Now, as daylight has filled the city streets, Henry is an enemy of the professional, a discarded person, a punk, wino, and bum, in a local newspaper columnist's terms. He can't even keep himself clean!

Henry wanders toward Grady Hospital downtown. If the guard at the entrance is nice or sleepy, he can wash off there. If the guard is absent he can sit in the waiting room until discovered. Then he can get some of that wet and cold out of his torn socks. He sits and looks at his filthy feet. "Damn, how I wish my left shoe had a sole," he thinks silently to himself, for there is no one with whom to share this most human wish.

When one is poor and carries the terrible burden of homelessness--having nothing to do but wait--time moves so slowly. Henry, now with nothing to do except shuffle his way uptown, heads for St. Luke's soup kitchen. Walking hurts; hunger hurts. He longs to travel the mile so he can stand and wait for the soup and sandwich along with 700 other men, women, and children. In the dining hall, music plays in the background, people mumble to themselves about love and lost children, young men without tender fathers search in a macho, violent-prone society for a way to test and prove their manhood. Henry eats his soup.

It's 11 a.m. Henry's day that really never began is almost half over. He now decides to go for the big $8 job which the medical board allows twice a week: selling his blood plasma. With $8 he can get cigarettes, a half pint, and a chicken supper. So Henry, reduced to a man who can only muster the energy and hope for survival, heads off to the blood bank.

After a two-hour wait, his name is called. Slowly he arises from the floor where he has watched a Perry Mason rerun interspersed with advertisements which promise a good life if you will only buy some useless product. Henry walks to the hospital bed and lies down.

Finally, for the first time in five days, he is comfortable. A nurse stands beside him and applies the needle. His blood begins to drip out of his body, and Henry sleeps.

Sleep at the blood bank is unlike sleep anywhere else for the homeless. Here, bleeding, Henry is safe. The temperature is warm, and the noise of the television and the voices in the waiting room are muted by the closed door. Yes, the safest and most comfortable place for a homeless person in all of Atlanta is on the blood bank bed. It's a pity that one can only be there four hours a week.

Henry's day is over. His life, according to many who understand human existence as rooted in a structure of meaning and purposefulness, has been over for years. Homelessness is death. Homelessness is absurd. Homelessness is unnecessary. Homelessness is hell. Homelessness is Henry.

Ed Loring was a Presbyterian minister and a founding member of The Open Door Community in Atlanta and of Atlanta Advocates for the Homeless when this article appeared.