Change, not Coins

You shouldn’t fall asleep on a park bench. Some drunk could steal your valuables during the night. On the other hand, you wouldn’t need to sleep on a park bench with the drunks, unless you already lacked those valuables.

I slept on that bench. I had lost those valuables.

I had three jobs, all at once, not long before my first night on that bench. The movie theater went out of business. Telemarketing relocated. I panicked. The restaurant fired me for crying in front of customers. At the end of that month, rent came due. What money I had, which wasn’t enough, was better spent on food, so I left. The food money didn’t last long.

People would leave half a sandwich behind at the train station. Hurried departures from the cafe usually result in a steady supply of cold appetizers. These became dinner, thanks to the help of a compassionate bus boy or two.

Passers by, seeing me on my bench, probably would have thought that I had no actual need for spare coins. I survived without them. I never asked for coins; I asked for change.

Of course, I tried to get a job. After a night on a park bench, it is difficult to make a positive first impression. My spine ached. My feet were sore; where I went, I walked. I smelled like automobile exhaust. An illegal immigrant is a more viable applicant than an American drop-out. In the city, when the economy is slow, and without a degree, a desirable job is out of the question.

It was difficult for me to wait for a return call from a potential employer on a payphone. I quickly learned that the police will suspect you for a drug dealer if you do that. I walked the streets, for miles, to get to where I needed to be, which took hours, and exhausted me. It was difficult to be near the telephone. Sitting near it, it was difficult to stay awake. Anything makes a good bed when you’re that tired.

“Could you say a little bit about your reasons for applying for this job?”

I could list: food, water, and shelter; life itself, happiness. In a word: desperation. Those are the things that motivated this simple applicant. Desperation implies to a potential employer that the applicant had come to it through some fault of their own, which I had not.

Someone must have died because there were nearly a dozen bags of clothes in the garbage. Those bags of clothes became a bohemian free-for-all. Hipsters haggled for clothes with good labels. I hoped for pants with good seams. There was a suit that barely fit.

I found a classified ad that looked promising: paid training, probably with no promise of a job. One of those hipsters offered up a couch and a bathroom I could borrow. The next day I presented myself as a potential “marketer”, and it was a convincing presentation.

I was hired, for one weekend, to be a door-to-door salesman. I sold nothing, but I was paid for my “training time”. The check was exactly enough for one hot meal, a motel room, a five-dollar phone card, and travel out of the city.

I had dropped out of school for the same reason that I had dropped out of my apartment: for lack of money. I thought I could follow the American dream, pull myself up by my own bootstraps. After that failed, I thought I could rely on another American promise, the notion that the government would be there to help me.

When you’re young, the government assumes that the financial status of your family is related to your own, even if it isn’t. Being homeless is difficult to admit, so I was estranged from my family. It seemed easier.

Financial aid doesn’t come on the basis of being poor enough, it comes when you’ve been poor for long enough to prove it. It was foolish to think I could sweat it out.

After one full year and several more odd jobs, I qualified, officially, as “below the poverty line” so that I could get government assistance for my return to college.

I met with a councilor, and with the difficult of admitting it all.

“It is difficult for me to imagine a person surviving on the income you have reported on this form,” he said.”It is difficult to call it surviving,” I said.

I wasn’t homeless for very long, but it could have been a lifetime.