Timothy Jenkel, 2012
“I’ma kill that nigga if I eva see ‘im again,” one tattooed black man said and spat in the face of another. A third black man stepped in front of the affronting man and pushed him backwards. At their feet, a middle-aged white man lay asleep in his urine. Earlier today the shelter workers found the plastic vodka pint he had hidden in his coat. A month ago I had helped pick him up off the asphalt and set him in a wheelchair and with his nose still bleeding he had cried, “Why you helpin’ me? Why you tryin’ to make me do this?”
Two other volunteers sat down across the table from me, beside the bearded homeless man I had held a conversation with earlier. They wore t-shirts that read “Boston College” and the chrome watch on one of their wrists reflected orange fluorescent light onto the man’s worn jacket.
A white man wearing women’s makeup sat alone in the corner of the room. He whispered to himself as his hands disappeared into the front of his pants.
Further down the wall, an overweight black man stared ahead as he bit into a chunk of canned salmon held within his clenched fist. I heard that he had a family once. His daughter developed a tumor on her leg and his wife worked overtime to save a few thousand dollars in a shoebox for her operation. He lost his job when the economy recessed and his best friend brought him a dimebag of cocaine as a consolation. When it was gone he took the shoebox to a crackhouse and binged for a few nights. Afterwards, he came to the shelter and never went home.
A man peddling items walked through the center of the room holding a pair of white off-brand sneakers above his head. Every few steps he stopped and called out, “Fresh shoes. Ten bucks.” He passed a man sitting on the floor that held his knees to his chest and rocked back and forth.
“I was a sniper in Vietnam,” the rocking man had told me last year. “We would find the bodies of fellow soldiers, but there would only be pieces left. Blown up by mines or hacked up by the gooks. We’d take an arm, a leg, a torso and throw it all into a box and nail it shut to send back for a closed casket funeral.”
Two men in business suits – one white and one black – sat on a bench in the center of the room. They hunched forward and stared down at their cap-toed shoes.
A group of elderly black men gathered around another table. “Finally got a brother in the White House,” one said.
“About time,” another answered.
“He gonna fix all this. Bring change.”
“And if he don’t, Jesus will.”
“Amen.”
The bearded homeless man turned to the other student volunteers and asked them what they were studying in college.
“I am a junior studying biology and in the pre-med program,” the first said.
“I am a sophomore and a finance major in the business school,” said the second.
“There’s good money in doctors and business,” the homeless man said. “Wish I would have gone to college.”
“Well I’m sure you still could,” one of the students added. I turned my head.
A group of men played dominoes nearby. With each move, they slapped the tile violently down onto the tabletop. This was the table where the tutoring program would soon begin – I had spent the last few weeks organizing it and was unsure of whether it would succeed. I had begun by surveying a few homeless men, asking if they had ideas for a program that they would regularly attend. Several Hispanic men, having just returned from hanging drywall – the piecework they had found that day – had asked for a program to improve their English. A young Indian man had wanted math tutoring to work towards his G.E.D. A man with a lazy eye had told me that he had an idea for a new invention but needed help drafting a letter to post around M.I.T. in search of a partner that could handle logistics. An older black man who wore a Lacoste sweater, dress slacks, a bowler hat and kept his possessions in a rolling suitcase, had smirked at me, “It’s noble of you to try, but these dogs don’t want to learn anything. It’s too hard for them. And if it doesn’t involve their next fix, they aren’t interested.” A man with a dull expression and callous hands had pulled me aside. “I can’t really read or write” he had whispered, “but I want to send my daughter a letter. We haven’t spoken in years.”
I had combined these ideas into a general program that focused around tutoring but could meet a broad variety of needs by involving several student volunteers. I had created fliers, made announcements at the monthly meetings between staff and guests, passed the idea through the shelter’s administration, talked with fellow Boston College student volunteers, reserved a table space for 4 PM every Wednesday, and spent hours sorting through the materials of the prior learning program that Pine Street had cut a few years ago.
A nearby noise stopped me from thinking about what would define success for a learning program in a homeless shelter. An older Chinese man wearing a fully zipped ski jacket lay on the floor near where I was sitting. His twisted beard was soaked in vomit and it stuck to his coat as he repeatedly kicked his legs up in the air and flailed his arms in a movement that resembled an overturned cockroach.
When he stopped flailing, a young black man in dark jeans and a hooded sweatshirt approached him. He stood over the Chinese man and nudged him with his work boot. “Dis Chinaman’s out,” he said and reached into the old man’s pockets.
“What are you doing?” My voice sounded unfamiliar.
“Jus’ seein’ what he’s got.”
I looked at the other students who had stopped talking. “Put it back,” my voice cracked.
“Da world is tough. It’ll eat ya. Dis Chinaman shoulda been more careful.” He stood up and looked me in the eyes. “Besides, you won’t snitch.” He turned and walked steadily out the back door into the smoking park.
The other student volunteers stared at me. The bearded homeless man shook his head. “It just ain’t right. The world ain’t right,” he said, but he did not get up.
…
I walked into the smoking park with the floor manager and several large staff members. This was not where I wanted to be. I pointed to the young man and the staff began to clear the other men from the fenced-in area back into the building. The homeless men glared at me as they extinguished the Newport butts that they had bought for a quarter and had not been able to finish.
“Is this the man?” the floor manager asked me as I stood behind the workers.
“Yes.”
“What’s he got on me? He’s jus’ blamin’ me ‘cuz I’m black,” the young man said and tried to push past the workers.
“You took money and cigarettes from an unconscious man. I asked you to put them back and you ignored me.” My voice was strange again.
The staff asked me to wait in the veranda until the police arrived. The two officers walked out slowly, tall men with stomachs hanging over their belts. They talked to the manager and sighed when they heard the scale of the robbery. A truck was backing up in a nearby alleyway. The officers watched something in the distance. I asked them if they would like to talk to the victim. They looked at each other and the officer of lower rank accompanied me into the building. When we were inside, he stopped to talk to one of the younger women that worked at the shelter. I found the Chinese man awake, sitting with his back against a row of lockers.
“Sir, are you aware that you had money stolen from you?” I asked when the officer had walked over and stood beside me without speaking.
The Chinese man stared at me. He did not understand English. I motioned for him to take out his wallet and he finally understood. When he looked down into the empty wallet, he began to laugh heavily from his toothless mouth. The officer walked away.
I went and stood by the back door, unsure of what to do and feeling like I might breakdown. The door opened and the police brought the young man through in handcuffs. As he passed me, he looked at me and whispered, “I will find you later.”
…
The first few weeks, eight men showed up every night for the tutoring program. My efforts were complimented and the workers were surprised with the turnout. The next few weeks, six men attended. The next week, four. Some of the administration comforted me with the idea that helping a single man achieve a small task was worth the effort of the entire program, but soon, no men walked over and sat down at the designated “learning” table. The man who had asked me to help him write a letter to his daughter never came.
…
The three dollars and cigarettes were recovered from the young man’s pockets and he was barred from staying at Pine Street. I passed him a few months later, walking by myself on the street at night. “Sir, do you have any spare change?” he asked.
“No.” I slipped my hands in my jacket pockets and continued walking. He didn’t recognize me.
