If any good came from my Thanksgiving weekend Homeless Like Me project, it might be that it focused some attention on the people without homes rather than homelessness as a social ill or what some call the homeless industrial complex.
Tim White hosted an excellent conversation about it on Newsmakers this weekend. (The segment on Homeless Like Me starts at 15 minutes in.)
WPRO did a news feature on Homeless Like Me last Friday morning. just a few hours after waking up on the State House lawn. You can listen to that here.
And Ian Donnis, RIPR’s political reporter, wrote this about it:
RI Future’s Bob Plain has emerged as Rhode Island’s leading exemplar of gonzo journalism, and his recent 48 hours on the streets of Providence is case in point. Plain mixed contemporary technology with his unconventional approaches to tell a series of stories about being homeless in Rhode Island’s capital.
Please check out RI Future’s entire Homeless Like Me coverage here.
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Sleeping at Harrington Hall, the overnight shelter in Cranston, is something of a mix between being in prison and being at a frat house for old men.
The very spacious, former gymnasium/auditorium at the Pastore Center state services campus, was even once a part of the prison system. The building somehow related to the psych ward, I was told, or the “old insane asylum,” as one homeless man called it. He was happy to talk history, but not to give his name.
(I live-tweeted 48 hours of living on the streets of Providence. Click here to see them. Or here for #HomelessLikeMe project.)
It has super high ceilings and giant windows on two sides; the front door is on a third side and a stage on the other. There’s a bathroom in front and a shower room off of the stage. The showers are a source of much consternation among the residents. They are filthy, and not handicap accessible, and two Harrington Hall regulars are confined to wheelchairs and unable to bath there as a result.
An old wooden floor takes up the rest of the real estate and is literally lined with beds. Very uncomfortable-looking beds; like something out of WWII-era hospital. 88 of them in all, each a few feet apart from one another.
Last night, Harrington Hall had fewer guests than that, meaning I got to sleep in one of them. Most nights there are about 10 people who aren’t so lucky; they’ve been averaging 97 per evening. Late comers sleep on the stage, where the light stays on all night.
The beds are somewhat first-come-first serve, though many of the long-timers have staked claims. One man who has been here more than 5 years said he takes the bed closest to the bathroom even though it’s a high traffic area at night for its proximity to the facilities. He’s in his 70’s, in a wheelchair and – like many people who take advantage of Harrington Hall, though by no means all of them – he’s a heavy drinker.
I slept in bed C3. I waited until about 10:30 to take the spot, just in case the shelter was full that evening. Which it often isn’t around holidays. The homeless, much like the rest of us, reconvene with family over the Thanksgiving weekend, I was told by some of those who weren’t so lucky.
A staffer gave me a clean sheet, there was a cover-less pillow and scratchy wool blanket waiting for me on a bumpy old mattress than had long ago lost all of its firmness. A heavy-set, shirtless guy in his fifities sleeping over in C2 snored as loud as anyone I have ever heard. The chorus of snoring throughout Harrington Hall was cartoonishly loud and melodic.
After check in opens at 4pm, a process that asks for a social security number, as well as criminal, marital, mental and employment information, we were only allowed back outside for designated smoke breaks. The staff, situated behind a table on the stage, would often bark out directives, such as “Lights out!” and “30 seconds left in the smoke break.”
Tensions sometimes ran high among the residents. There was a discrepancy about who lay proper claim to a bed, I saw a guy take considerable umbrage when another guy allegedly got too close to his belongings. Oftentimes, people would cause a commotion be simply arriving intoxicated.
For me, a first-timer, I felt like I best keep my wits about me for the duration of my stay. Staff concurred, in fact cautioned me to do so. Theft is common, they said. Only once did I let my 30-pound pack – stuffed with some emergency layers of clothes, a computer and my sleeping bag – escape my sight. I rudely jumped out of a conversation and rushed around a corner to retrieve it when I realized what I had done.
The tensest situation occurred when I approached one guy about an interview. He was in his mid-forties, and had a prosthetic leg. He stormed off – on his prosthetic leg, mind you – and offered what sounded like very unfriendly advice in Spanish as he walked away. For a good while afterwards, I could feel him staring at me from across the room. He didn’t blink when I caught him doing so. I made a very conscious decision to not meet his glare again. I made sure to talk to someone else, to send the message that I had friends.
I often overreacted after that. When I reached for my shoes at the side of the bed in the morning, I spent a good three seconds thinking that I was going to have to walk outside and get on a bus to Providence in my stocking feet because I didn’t instantly put my hand on them. It was telling how quickly I assumed the worst.
Maybe I overreacted about the guy with the prosthetic leg, too, I wondered?
The community at Harrington Hall
For all its institutional problems and shortcomings, the sense of camaraderie and community at Harrington Hall is, in a way, even more noteworthy.
Much more than they disagreed, the guys got along with one another. Some joked around, others played cards. There were dozens of micro-conversations occurring at any given minute all across Harrington Hall. Homeless people pretty much talk about the same stuff those of us with homes do when we get together: the good old days, current events, plans for the future, the weather. A group watched “Fantastic Four” on the TV beside the stage. A lot of people read books.
Word got out that I was a reporter – maybe it was the live-tweeting, or maybe it was the video interviews? – and I quickly became a curiosity. Many were eager to tell their stories, even more just wanted to talk. I represented a sort of liaison to the more-established sector of society that they are pretty much otherwise alienated from in so many tangible and intangible ways.
I’d say most people I spoke with were either clean and sober or on the road to becoming so. Some, though, were flagrantly not on that road. Many were employed, to some degree or another, some full time. A bunch of people wanted to ask about the internet, Facebook or their smart phones.
I reunited with the first friend I made in my 48 hours on the streets, Billy Cormier. It was like seeing an old friend as I felt like I had lived a lifetime since we went to Thanksgiving dinner together at the Ebenezer Baptist Church. He asked how my project was going and I tried to show him the video I put together with him. A bunch of guys huddled around my computer but my internet connection wasn’t working.
We all ate together, very informally, at several long tables just below the stage. Pasta with red sauce and dinner rolls; there was a second course of ham and cheese and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. To the best of my knowledge, there was no dessert.
I sat with Paul Pisano and John Renauld. They both drink, but John much harder. As evidenced by the bandage on across his face. He struggles with booze, prescription painkillers and crack. He said he stays at the shelter, instead of outside, because it costs too much to get sufficiently high enough to be able to brave the cold winter nights. He told me he’d have the shakes in the morning, an true to his word he was in rough shape when I said good morning to him the next day.
Paul said he only drinks a little Sambuca with his morning coffee. He’s been living at Harrington for three weeks and four days, he told me, since being evicted from his apartment. He said he has pretty good luck turning odd jobs like yard work into more long-range employment. He seemed like the kind of guy you’d want to give some work to; earnest, honest and caring. He was fun to talk with and instantly struck me as a fellow seeker. He spoke of Florida like Dustin Hoffman did in Midnight Cowboy.
He talked about the community he has at Harrington Hall, and how the people and the place are helping him get through a hard patch. He doesn’t want to live there forever – no one does, I don’t think- but he recently lost both his girlfriend and his apartment and admits to being a little lost in life right now.
“Everybody calls it being homeless but I call it the lost star state,” he said to me. “Everybody has a calling, and for some people this is it.”
Other posts in #HomelessLikeMe project:
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One of the most common reasons people are homeless is because of substance abuse. This isn’t reason to shun them. Alcoholism and drug dependency are diseases, and diseases aren’t easy to overcome all by yourself. Especially not when every single aspect of life is a struggle, as can be the case when your homeless.
It was a struggle just to get out of my sleeping bag this morning, never mind pack up all of my stuff before going to bathroom and walking a few blocks through the cold, dark pre-dawn city.
And besides, from a purely selfish point of view, as a community we have a very vested interest in not having addicts roaming our public spaces and streets.
To that end, I thought it was important to ask some of the people I meet about their relationship with drugs.
This isn’t an easy topic to bring up with strangers. While the wealthy are probably just as prone to lie about substance abuse as are the homeless, I expected some of my potential sources this morning would try to spin me about it. One fellow told me social service agencies in both South Carolina and Rhode Island erroneously took his children away from he and his wife – different children, too! Two each in South Carolina and Rhode Island. Either he was lying, mistaken or extremely unlucky.
Zachary Borhem, a young man with dreadlocks and rotten teeth who grew up in Providence and now lives on the streets here, scores drugs outside of Corssroads, he said. He wasn’t willing to go on video, but he and his friend A.J., short for Apple Jacks, did let me record audio of our conversation about the drug culture on the streets.
Greg Boisselle was willing to talk to me on video about his struggles with alcohol and crack addiction.
Like so many homeless people, Boisselle doesn’t work and collects social security disability. In this clip, he explains what how he injured his head and how he plans to rehabilitate himself.
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Words can’t describe how thankful I am for the spate of warm weather this Thanksgiving weekend. I’m sure the thousands of other people who spent the night sleeping on streets of Providence would concur.
Because I know the area, it’s well protected, grassy and soft and – most importantly – close to other humans in case of emergency, I slept on the lawn of the State House.
While I could see my breath all night long, it never frosted; didn’t even come close. And being that I slept wearing long johns, thick canvas pants, a long sleeve shirt under a sweater with a wool hat on inside a mummy sleeping bag wrapped inside a tarp, I stayed completely warm last night.
The difficult part, as is the case with any winter camping, was waling up at 5 a.m. and needing to go to the bathroom.
Of course, being cold was the least of my worries last night. The biggest concern was for my safety.
I did keep a knife within grabbing distance, just in case, but I actually believe the risk of sleeping on the streets can be a little overstated. I don’t want to minimize the danger – because some homeless people are certainly desperate enough to do anything – but I don’t think that is the typical street person.
The people you have to worry about are the ones in the deep throws of addiction of mental illness, and those tend to be the type of homeless people that congregate around downtown, let alone the State House.
The vast majority, I’ve found on this project and others like it, live by the same sort of code us domicile-dwellers do: do unto others, or else. Homeless people may not have a police force, but they have each other – and they very much need each other – and the type of people who would do harm to others get ostracized from the homeless community just like they do in the homeful community.
I did have some company last night, but my visitors were neither homeless or law enforcement. Shortly after I bedded down against a marble wall of the State House, I heard three college-aged boys walking up the lawn towards me. When they got close enough to notice me, one of them shouted, “Is that a body?” and they all ran off yelling.
College kids are actually just as much a concern as other homeless people because they can be violent, not because of desperation, but because they don’t know better, or don’t see the homeless as people just like them.
After they ran off, I kept thinking what if one of them is a young John DePetro – someone who has aggression and anger towards the less fortunate. It’s possible someone like that could rally an entire dormitory to come and kick the crap out of me.
As brave as I’m trying to be about this project, I was definitely relieved when I woke up in the morning, just as I began to get scared as the sun went down last night.
Tonight, I think I’ll stay in a shelter if I can just to avoid that sinking feeling in my gut for a second night in a row. I cannot imagine having to live with that fear every time the sun begins to set.
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Billy Cormier became the first fellow I connected with as I began my 48 hours of living on the streets of Providence when, by way of introducing myself, I walked up to the park bench he was sitting on in Burnside Park and asked him where the free meal was.
I had talked to a couple of people before him – one man about my age, shivering cold with open sores on his face had asked me for spare change but didn’t want to converse after I told him no; and another guy politely told me to take the 31 bus to the meal but made it pretty clear he didn’t want to join me.
Billy was going too, and was more than happy to let me tag along. We took the bus together.
On the way, he told me a bit of his story. He stays in Harrington Hall and collects a disability payment from the government because he has bipolar disorder. He hasn’t worked since 2006.
He grew up in the Pawtuxet Village area of Cranston and was living in Florida with his wife of 26 years when she died of a heart attack and a stroke in July. I asked, and he said they weren’t doing drugs. But he was with her when it happened, and he took her to the emergency room here she passed away a few days later.
Whatever happened, he intimated that her family held him responsible. So he came back to Rhode Island and ended up in our system.
You can hear him tell his own story here:
Billy and I ate Thanksgiving dinner together at the Ebenezer Baptist Church. It was a traditional affair with all the fixings – turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes (or yams, I have no idea how to tell the difference and didn’t ask!), even pecan pie. The bird was sufficiently moist and the stuffing sufficiently filling. But, no, it wasn’t like you get at home. There wasn’t even seconds.
The real treat was the service before hand. We listened to a minister preach the gospel for about 15 minutes then sang for another 15 minutes. Both were powerful and uplifting. They wouldn’t let me take any pictures inside – because unlike Billy, a lot of people on streets don’t want their stories publicized – but I did record a little bit of both the sermon and the signing.
Here’s an excerpt from the sermon:
And here’s one of the songs we sang:
After dinner, Billy took the bus and I walked from Cranston Street down to India Point Park. It’s a long walk but so far acting homeless has been an exercise in killing time. My pack, which holds my sleeping bag, some long johns and extra wool socks (which were no fun to wear today), weighs about 30 pounds, and that gets kinda heavy after lugging it on your back from one end of the city to the other.
Along the way, I tried to make eye contact with as many people as I could as a sort of unscientific social experiment. I dressed to fit the part, in my normal weekend attire: tattered old Carharts and a tattered old LL Bean button up with my tattered old winter coat on over it. Add my tattered old baseball cap and a week without shaving, and yeah I think it’s fair to say I look a little bit homeless.
What surprised me most was not how many seemingly middle class people didn’t want to make eye contact with me as I can understand why people would want to pretend like homelessness isn’t the social ill that it is – even though there are some 5,000 people living on the streets in Rhode Island every day. What really caught me off guard was that the homeless folks didn’t want to make eye contact with me either.
Maybe they aren’t used to people looking at them, or maybe they don’t trust the new guy? Either way, it was easy to feel how alienating being a street person can be. In just a few short hours I had become invisible. People didn’t want to know I existed.
On my way, I came upon a camp on the banks of the Providence River:
It’s a little hard to believe that scene can be so close to this one:
