American Yarnprose>Living On The Edge Of The World

By last year's standards, I was a millionaire, by today's standard; I am a hobo; flat broke busted, empty white pockets. I am wearing clothes that have not been washed in over two months. I eat nothing but pasta, egg and cheese sandwiches, ramen noodles, drink plenty of water, a lot of tea and gum my saliva when need be.

The man at the homeless agency tells me to come as I am, so I am wearing a pair of dirt-blue shorts, silk boxers, an old work shirt, a clean pair of socks and my battered gym shoes, when I arrive.

I am still simmering about the bastard who reneged on the deal to let me move into his home, just because his estranged wife is crazy and his grown children, grown children who have yet to make it on their own, have “privacy issues.” Bunch of bullshit if you ask me.

Then his half-assed crazy wife tells him to tell me, “Well, if he’s not afraid of blacks, there’s an empty apartment my sister has on 75th Street.” She has got to be kidding, right? However, of course, no, she is not. In addition, the old bastard himself offers me something even closer, “Somewhere close to 31st Street.” Is he kidding? Nope, he is not.

As some kind of token gesture, he offers to store my furniture until I find a place to live and I think, “Oh no. I do not trust it. What if his kids paw through my stuff, especially my music? That is no good. It will not happen and so I have to devise a plan to get me to the next plateau of a sacred holy ground.

I wait around at the office. The guy is late and the volunteer receptionists could care less and behave as if nothing ever happens in their Barbary Coast lifestyles. While waiting, I open my tattered novel and read.

Five minutes pass and then another five pass. I notice a whole herd of refugees flying through the door like domestic cattle waiting to be shipped out to foreign lands, all come asking for the same therapist and the red-haired sour-faced gal at the desk keeps changing the time as to when she will come back. First 30 minutes, then 20, then back up to 30.

Finally, after push comes to shove, I ask her if she would not mind calling to see where this guy is. Shit, I rushed to this place; still late and he is not even there yet. Talk about a non-chalant attitude!

She is so lazy, flipping through Jewish magazines and believing bullshit stories of falsehood and faded glories. Well, I suppose, since they are not paid for their work, they can behave whichever way they please. Yeah, what they need is a little retraining, ‘tis all. Yeah, that’s the stuff!

I am given an intake form to fill out, listing all of my personal habits. I am on the fifth page, when the man, tells me to come into an office, so he can explain the rules of the shelter to me.

As he continues explaining the rules, I begin to realize that this place is much stricter than I realized in the beginning. Stuttering as he speaks, he tells me it is an Orthodox shelter and they have strict rules, which means, I could not have friends come into my room, let alone my own girlfriend or close male friends and worst of all, I would have a weeknight and weekend curfew!

I do not think I could live with that at all. 10 p.m. weeknights and 11 p.m. on the weekend, no, this is not the place for me to be. I do not want to be on the streets either. I may have no choice, but to accept this.

I do not honestly know what to do. Well, a good friend has been doing a lot of networking for me and I have been doing a lot of hooking-up with people too, sending out emails, calling rental agencies, friends, and family and other resources to see what is available on such short notice. This is not easy by no means, no sir!

I have been doing a lot of walking around the Jewish neighborhood, looking for places to live and I decide to take my friend’s advice and start hitting temples. The first shul I come across is the Temple of Thee Lemur. Once inside, a nice young woman with a colorful dress on comes to the temple office window, and start to tell her my dilemma and she tells me to keep away from a particular apartment rental place.

She is kind enough to let me post a note on the temple office window, knowing almost full well, that nothing may turn up at all and I would be forced to live in my car, a possibility I don’t even want to think about, let alone dream.

This is America, I question to myself, land of the free spirits and homeless to the brave? Nah, this is not the same America I grew up with at all. A country that prides in its citizens also prides in taking in refugees and in the process, lets Native Americans like myself fall to the wayside.

We call it co-dependency, a phrase, just like the word depression, overused and misunderstood. We depend on the natural resources of our country, government funding and socialism to see us through our hard times.

That, unfortunately, is not the way it really is, I am sad to say. There are more working poor people in America than any other formalized country in the world, at least in my opinion, if opinions still count and are not tossed into the woodpile for burning you at the stake, like so many other words have done to others in the past.