By Jay Thiemeyer, Contributing Writer
After the soul-blinding sermon, after being shepherded to the front then in line serpentine around and into another smaller room where we were instructed to get our clothes off and prepare for a shower, we stood waiting, naked and silent before each other. We showered. Then some kid with a large plastic bottle told us to stand in front of him and hold our arms straight out from our sides while he squirted us. He didn’t even tell us what it was for, enjoying thoroughly his control over us. No one even wanted to risk being told to leave the Mission for asking why we were being squirted by this boy, till I asked, “What’s this for, kid?”
He said it was for de-lousing. I think it was for his pleasure.
He squirted our chests, then our genitals, then under our arms. I said, “Kid, don’t squirt me near my face. That could mean trouble.” He looked up at me, getting my message, and was careful where he squirted. I didn’t begrudge him his pleasure. We all averted our eyes the same way, away and up. The kid was no discriminator of age. He just squirted and squirted.
We then were handed flimsy “bed clothes” like a hospital gown, and were directed to the dorm, packed with new double bunks, fine pine from northern Georgia, the place so new it smelled of sawdust. Everyone silently paraded to an open bed.
Since I was still young then, in my early 30s, the Reagan years not yet in full fledge, and since there were plenty among us who were arthritic and having difficulty walking and maneuvering, I took a top bunk. Climbed up the backside ladder and lay my body down. I lay on my back and the breath just went out of me in a long sigh.
All around me I heard other men doing the same. At last we could just lie down, stretch our limbs on cool, clean sheets and treasure the moment, however brief it was going to be. This was freedom back then, in those bone-weary days spent plodding all day, going from one thing to the next, to wait in line after line, for the barest of necessities. Pounding pavement, a daily act that added up and up and means these days, in my early 60s, deterioration of the joints, compressed vertebrae, constant, barely negotiable pain. Pills that dull the thrumming sharpness. Back then, there was just the pervasive aching of my whole body as I relaxed on the bunk waiting for the overhead lights to be turned off, and my body and mind to ease into exhausted dreamless sleep.
Around me I could hear men already snoring as the bunkbeds creaked and the plastic covers for the thin cheap mattresses squeaked. But it didn’t take long before my mind was simply overcome by exhaustion. The blinds went down on the window, and I slept like a dead man.
When I woke and had to go to the bathroom, I didn’t hear a sound. It was literally tomb-like, which caught me by surprise. At first I thought I’d missed something, that everyone had got up at some call to assemble I didn’t hear. But when I put my glasses on I saw humps on the surrounding beds outlined against the dim light from the window shielding us from a streetlight with its frosted glass.
The alleyway outside the window. I remember wondering who might be curled up out there.
I made my way to the new stalls and did my duty and marveled at how new and clean and antiseptic everything was. I had been hitching through D.C. not that long ago during the summer and stayed in the huge, filthy, decrepit building, once part of the bureaucracy, then a free university and now, most recently, a hulk left to the homeless to infest. It stank of urine and dope and cheap wine and the sweat of hundreds upon hundreds of men (and some women) who had nowhere else to go at all in our nation’s capital. And I had been grateful, thoroughly grateful, to get in off the street. Where I might be in danger. … And I remembered that smell as I stood at the bowl marveling at how new this mission was, and full — already. Every one of its five-dozen beds filled. There had been a crowd when I arrived to wait and I was way early. It was too cold to be standing out for that long, but you couldn’t take chances or you’d spend the whole night in the cold. Sleeping in an unlocked car, or an abandoned apartment building, or just walking, moving, pounding more pavement till the rest of the world reappeared an hour after daybreak and you could, or I could, bum change and wait for the package store to open at eight. There’d be a crowd there, too.
It seemed I had barely got back to my bunk and nodded off to sleep when we were woken by that same young kid. He yelled at us as though we were indeed dead and needed to be shouted back to life. God knows what became of that kid. Whose “assistant” or proselyte or gopher he was, whose whore he was, and what role he would assume in the poverty industry which like plasma donation and temp labor was a growth industry back then, made to order for people like him. People whose need for pleasure was acute and easily played upon. As the Reagan era advanced, and since in fact, as the homeless among us have only increased, the industries have become more mainsteam. More established as the American way of life. Along with the plasma joints and temporary non-union labor, the homeless and those who feed off them, has been a growth industry. The notion that the poor are always with us has advanced in these times from a holy presumption to an excuse for indifference. Like the lottery. Like the economy. It was just there. And always getting bigger, more of it, everywhere for every sort of person.