The Problem with the Homeless Problem

A question.

Who was he?

I think the same question each time I see him (once a week, sometimes more often): the same man in the same spot, holding the same sign that tells everyone who he is now—“HOMELESS VETERAN”—prompting me to wonder: who did he used to be? He has worked this intersection for several months now. The cardboard sign he holds asks us to put pocket change in his plastic cup. Even if he isn’t really a veteran, I think, he has been homeless long enough to be one now; or if he is not actually homeless, he has been acting the part long enough to earn the title. Either way, it is time for a promotion.

And so, I think, this is the problem with the homeless problem: it isn’t the ones who hustle or approach you who are truly down and out; they’re the ardent ones, still showing signs of life, maybe even hope; it’s the ones you never see, even when they’re sprawled on the concrete right beside you, the ones who are down, the ones who are out, the ones who have nothing to ask for, nothing to say, nothing to do except wait, sit it out until the inevitable end. It is the ones you can afford not to be afraid of, the ones who can’t not even hurt themselves, because they’ve already dug as deep inside as their ashen fingers can reach, the ones too dead to tear out their own hearts, but not dead enough to unloose their souls, the ones who have learned (too late) that death is only impatient for the fools who fail to acknowledge it, it has all the time in the world for those whom the world owes nothing except the decency of an overdue release.

ii.

A poem.

“Grief”

E detto l’ho perché doler ti debbia!
Inferno, xxiv, 151

Snow coming in parallel to the street,
a cab spinning its tires (a rising whine
like a domestic argument, and then
the words get said that never get forgot),

slush and backed-up runoff waters at each
corner, clogged buses smelling of wet wool . . .
The acrid anger of the homeless swells
like wet rice. This slop is where I live, bitch,

a sogged panhandler shrieks to whom it may
concern. But none of us slows down for scorn;
there’s someone’s misery in all we earn.
But like a bur in a dog’s coat his rage

has borrowed legs. We bring it home. It lives
like kin among the angers of the house,
and leaves the same sharp zinc taste in the mouth:
And I have told you this to make you grieve.

—William Matthews

One of my favorites from a poet whose work changed my writing in many ways, all of them positive—and to whom I owe debts I can never repay (Matthews passed, very prematurely, aged 55, in 1997). His collection Time & Money, from which “Grief” is taken, is a masterpiece.

iii.

An essay.

In this month’s Esquire there’s a long-form piece of journalistic reporting (remember those?) entitled “The Invisible Man” by Patrick Fealey. It needs to be read in its entirety, absorbed to appreciate, so it can inform you, properly infuriate you, make you sad and angry, and do its part to ensure you don’t look at a significant issue the same way (the way we’re trained, and society reinforces us, to do, the way capitalism all but compels us to prey upon each other, an increasingly zero-sum model where in order not to win so much as survive someone (many someones) else must lose, the suffering is the implicit rule of engagement to secure a seat at a shrinking table, to opt out or fail means you’re on the outside, like the author of this piece, and we’re increasingly told it’s no one’s fault but those who suffer; this—among many other things, some good, many bad, some ugly—is what America’s wavering experiment with Empire has wrought).

Excerpts from the piece, below:

Statistics vary by source, but last year there were a record-high 650,100 homeless people in the United States, many of them suffering mental illness and substance-abuse issues. Of course, most citizens suffering mental illness and substance-abuse issues are not homeless.

One of the primary causes of homelessness, obviously, is a lack of affordable housing. Wages have not kept up with escalating real estate values and rents, especially in major cities. The number of homeless people has grown significantly over the past couple decades. An advocacy group in New York says that the rate there is the highest it’s been since the Great Depression.

“Do you want the other half of my meatball sub?” she says. “Nothing beats PB&J, but you might want something different. I just went out with a friend. It’s still hot.”

I’m surprised by her kindness. “Yes,” I say.

She retrieves a carton from the car.

“Thank you,” I say.

She walks for the beach. Does she know I’m homeless? Maybe she’s seen me here before. She will be the only person in six months to offer help.

The American flag flies over Walmart. When I was young, I was proud of and found comfort in the flag. I felt fortunate to have been born in the United States of America, where every life mattered. I still believe this.

Many men and women fought and died for what the flag represents, freedom and democracy. My father was rocketed and shot at in Southeast Asia and came home a bomb waiting to explode. His nervous system was shattered. He could go from laughing to rage instantaneously. He wasn’t like this before the war.

As the police instructed, I sleep in the car in the Walmart parking lot. I park where they said to, in back of the building near where people pick up orders and the semis come in to unload. Inside I shop for food…and nicotine patches. I use the restroom.

I begin parking at Walmart in November. The masses flood the lot to shop for the holidays. People drive fast in the lot, as aggressively as they do on the roads, whipping in and out of empty spaces while pedestrians walk in the low fluorescent glow. They make me nervous. People are economically squeezed, the stress of everyday survival and the fear of uncertain futures turning into hostility. Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and many have no emergency savings—they are one crisis from homelessness. A job loss or an unexpected illness and they are where I am. They are on edge, driving bigger and faster and louder cars—a society speeding along as it disintegrates.

iv.

Another question.

Could that be me?

A primal foreboding, an ancient fear. Who knew how it happened, who could make sense of it? And yet. These people do not wake up one random morning, on the streets and out of their minds. Or do they? If you believe the signs the man on the corner holds, the government did this to him—and could do it to anyone else: that is his message, his mission.

The problem with the homeless problem is that so many of these lost souls are chasing something they can no longer name: memories. Or, even worse, it is the memories that are chasing them, speaking in tongues they long ago ceased to understand.

A song.

(How can we talk about—much less do anything about—homelessness without being trite or maudlin? I’m not certain any artist has ever consistently combined compassion and censure, mingling the New Testament empathy of Jesus with the Old Testament admonition of Ecclesiastes, quite like the immortal Bob Marley. This one (from Marley’s masterpiece Natty Dread) is a J’accuse from the voice of God (literally and figuratively): “So Jah seh ‘Not one of my seeds / Shall sit on the sidewalk / And beg your bread.’” Imagine a politician—or a priest, for that matter—invoking this sentiment, and actually meaning it.)

vi.

Another poem.

Pharoah Sanders Donating Blood to Buy Food, 1962*

Be wary of anyone filled with confidence,

insisting that everything was better before

the world went insane, suddenly too small

to satisfy the untold exigencies we inherit.

For one thing, humankind has always been

unbalanced: people with skin in the game

seldom tire of telling us it’s good business

having the powerful slice the pie of society.

And few of us feel unfairness more keenly

than artists caught between buying bread

and selling their souls, our markets incapable

of sustaining those who bear beautiful gifts.

To create one needs to live, and staying alive

means feeding the machine, so it’s impossible

to find peace, unless you abandon your Self—

believing that The Creator Has a Master Plan.

*Thanks again to Decolonial Passage for publishing this one (which also appears in my third collection Kinds of Blue).

vii.

Another story.

In My Cups*

When you’re not certain where your next meal is coming from and don’t know if you’ll be sleeping indoors, there’s one thing you learn to count on. Coffee.

Let me tell you about coffee.

I’ve had free coffee and I’ve had coffee I paid for the way people buy used cars: slowly, agonizing, counting the amount over and over, angling for a deal, hoping for an impasse, seeing a blank face staring back at me. I’ve paid a price for every cup of coffee that’s ever crossed my lips.

I’ve had cold coffee and I’ve had coffee so hot it turned my tongue into a blistered sponge. I’ve had coffee that’s sat in a stained thermos so long it smelled like an animal. I’ve had coffee so fresh it’s turned me into an alien without words to describe it. I’ve had coffee when it’s been so long between cups it tasted like the glistening drops from Christ’s cross.

I’ve had coffee over conversation. I’ve had countless cups of coffee alone, composing symphonies of silence, epic poems of regret, confessions even I don’t believe. I’ve bought coffee and I’ve brought coffee to someone who needed it even more than I did, feeling like an angel with dark stains under unclipped fingernails, glowing with a mercy I too hope to attain.

I’ve fought over coffee, holding a scalding prize with bruised hands. I’ve tossed a perfectly made cup of coffee in the street, some kind of statement to whomever is saying something I can’t hear inside their air-conditioned cab.

I’ve dreamt of coffee and I’ve woken up wanting coffee, like a scared baby grasping in the dark. I’ve spent entire afternoons counting the seconds until a cup of coffee will warm my extremities, even if it’s an illusion. I’ve wondered if there’s more coffee than blood streaming through my veins, like legless pedestrians pushing each other through a crosswalk.

I’ve crushed empty cups of coffee like the metal teeth of a trash compactor, ready for the next pile of whatever gets thrown on me. I’ve cursed coffee and wished to kill the people who give it away or sell it or use it as credit for a debt that can’t be repaid.

I’ve seen and studied the ways coffee can buy compliance, a bribe or an excuse.

I’ve imagined a world without coffee and people who don’t care. I’ve caught myself creating a life where no one needs coffee because no one works, or looks for work, or has to pay for the things work provides.

I’ve had cups of coffee where I’ve counted how many cups it would cost to sleep one night in the cheapest motel. Or how many of those cups it would take to add up to a month’s rent in the smallest studio in the most broken down walk-up in the city. I’ve multiplied those cups to make a down payment on an apartment. I’ve sold it and escaped to some subdivision named after a tree they create in laboratories to grow faster and mingle well with other trees, lined up like fences around houses around people who don’t really know what hunger or heat is, or how time’s only kept on clocks if you’re leaving and arriving at a place you recognize.

And I promise myself it’s not too late and it’s never too cold and one day I’ll know what it’s like to forget what it felt like. When the only thing I wanted was some way of being certain I could reach out my hand and someone would meet me with a cup of what keeps me alive.

*Thanks again to Flash Fiction Magazine for publishing this, which appears in my 2024 collection This Kind of Man.

viii.

A memory.

When I was a kid, (I couldn’t have been much older than ten) my father and I had a layover in Newark Airport. Even then, I was perceptive enough to understand that this was no place I ever needed to return to voluntarily.

An unassuming older man (at any rate, he was noticeably older than my old man, which made him old) sat in one of those impossibly plain plastic chairs, with his pants leg rolled up. It wasn’t until we got closer that I realized two things: he was alone, and he was scratching at a series of scabs on his shin. For some reason he looked our way the moment we passed him, and after sizing us up, he stood and amiably approached my father.

“Sir, did you need someone to help you and your son carry your bags?”

“No thanks, we’re okay,” my pops replied, looking ahead and picking up the pace.

The man was persistent. In the space of fifteen seconds, my father denied him three times. My emotions slid from the appreciation of possibly having someone carry my suitcase for me, to the vague, uneasy suspicion that my father was being somehow rude, a jerk, to the unsettling awareness of recognition. I sensed something I’d seen plenty of, but never before in any person older than myself: fear. I saw it in his eyes, and felt it in my insides.

As we walked away my old man waited until we were at a charitable distance, then looked at me meaningfully and offered the somber assertion: That’s as low as you can go. I asked him to elaborate, as was my style, and he was either unwilling or unable to add anything to his observation, as was his style. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand what my father was saying, I understood him perfectly. It was because I understood him that I needed him to say more, to talk to me a little longer about it, about anything—anything to interrupt that silence and the sudden thoughts that accompanied it.

* * *

It’s easy to believe that people like this exist for our sakes: they are dying lessons on how not to live, warnings of what could happen if you weren’t careful and found yourself scratching at scabs in the world’s ugliest airport. Or enlist, get used up, and ask not what your country can do for you, because you’ve already received the answer. We forget, or we don’t allow ourselves to entertain the idea that these people have histories, that these shadows and signposts don’t happen to serve a purpose for anyone else—they were once actual people themselves and still are.

I realize, now, my father was wrong about one thing. That’s not as low as you can go. You can go lower, a whole lot lower. But perhaps it’s more disturbing to see the ones who are on the way down, it’s somehow easier to accept the ones at the bottom of the ocean; it’s the ones who are sinking, who are still within reach, who are drowning noisily in front of you, who sometimes have the temerity to ask you to hold out a hand. These are the ones we can scarcely tolerate, because every so often we look at them and see ourselves.

iv.

A final question.

Hey brother, can you spare a life?

I don’t have any to spare, but
I’ll dig deeper and give ‘til
it hurts you more or less
than it hurts me.

It’s always been thus,
God might explain, but
He’s busy with a billion other things:
street corners, alleys, slums, and
the newer tent cities He can
scarcely keep track of.

The earth itself is silent.
but what would it say?
All its stages a world
With so many passion plays.

So many dispirited shapes,
sleeping under overpasses;
bridges with graffiti singing
songs of pain and witness.

Huddled masses, created in their own
image, forever and ever.
World without end
Amen.