Homeless Meal

It is a damp, frigid evening in Oregon, the kind that generally makes me pray for the warmth and protection of the homeless people I cook for every Tuesday night at Ashland’s Methodist Church. I worry about them on a regular basis, yet sometimes I think I should not, as they are a hardy, resourceful, and seemingly resilient lot. Survivors though they appear, I know their lives are often incredibly difficult, especially in the colder months, when any romanticized notions of  “camping,” or “sleeping under the stars” get quickly subsumed by subfreezing temperatures and constant precipitation.

Last Tuesday seemed a dividing line, as folks walked in heads down, dirty clothes tucked under big worn parkas, greasy-haired, scowling, in no mood. As I tried to catch their eyes--eyes that too often don’t get met—most appeared lost in a world far away. And while this crowd is generally happy, grateful, even animated, that night it seemed that the reality of the long, cold, dark days ahead had settled into their bones.

Oftentimes, the lines between me and them blur. When I’m done serving, I stand on line with my plate and we sit together at big tables in the church hall and eat our meal. Last week I sat with a 6-year-old girl named Lotus, her parents and surrogate family. Homeless kids always slay me. I watched as people urged her to eat her meal, goaded her on, teased her, smiled at her. And I thought to myself, She may be OK. This is a damn sight better than some kids with homes are getting.

Last year, a social worker paid us all a visit as we were eating, and as I was seated at the table, she interviewed me as a homeless person. She was a youngster, really. A kid just out of grad school, mid-20s soaking wet. Before she got to me, I watched her quizzing my tablemates. Asking questions with great diligence, she worked hard to try and get it right. But there was a difference, very real as she perceived it, between herself and us. And, nice as she was, that made her hold her body stiff and away. Play with her hair and wiggle her glasses a lot.

I picked up a hard-boiled egg and began to peel it, bit by bit, sometimes popping it in my mouth and edging the shell with the tip of my tooth. Then pulling it out and flaying more skin, till just the soft white underbelly was exposed. I could see her watching me from the corner of her eye as she spoke with the man to my right, a 60ish fellow with a grey dreadlocked beard and knocked-out teeth who looked like he’d just walked away from Captain Ahab on a whaling boat. He said to her, “I can’t stand the feeling of being in an enclosed building. I’ve tried it, and I can’t do it. The only time I feel at home is when I’m sleeping outside. So does that make me homeless—or suitably housed?” He broke into gales of laughter. She tried to laugh along in a forced, choked, scared sort of way that sounded like she was attempting to be both politely amused and genuinely amused but not really laughing at him but then again not exactly getting what he meant. I guess, when designing her survey, she hadn’t bargained for a street-smart Plato.

She then turned to me and pushed a questionnaire about quality of life for the Ashland homeless population in my general direction. Then she began quizzing me about my life. I glanced down at my old T-shirt and faded jeans with the hole in the knee, and realized I looked the part. I had become one of the faces of homelessness in her study. A specimen. Someone whose life she seemed both frightened of and trying to improve.

I picked up the egg again and continued to work it. Because I wanted to seem a little more threatening than I was. I wanted her to know that I was, perhaps, a little bit crazy, and that’s what had landed me on the streets to begin with. That I wasn’t particularly concerned with food-handling manners...and might just smash this hard-soft object into her cranium should she provoke me by asking the wrong question.

I was rather hard-boiled in my soft-boiled plot. But the way she was fidgeting as she spoke with me, I knew I’d made my point.

“How often have you been homeless in the last 18 months?” “Do you generally make use of the local shelters, when available?” “Do you receive public assistance or food stamps?” As her questions mounted, I felt myself begin to feel more and more identified with my toughness and resiliency as a homeless person...and see her increasingly as a tan windbreaker-clad nelly who was merely dabbling in the field of social work to introduce vicarious thrills into her tedious life. Maybe to have something to go home and talk about with her banker fiancé, Herbert. When I asked her a question about one of the items on her survey, the tone in her perhaps-25-year-old voice became almost singsong, like a 4th-grade teacher enlightening a student. Somewhere in the space between us hung a pile of judgment—if I was homeless, I must somehow be stupid. If she wasn’t, she must know more.

Condescension. She wasn’t trying to be condescending, but there it was. Inherent in the difference between she and me in that moment. Draped into the folds of her skirt, into the rope of her pearls, into the band of her Seiko.

I had just about stripped the egg bare and considered mashing it between my fingers and smearing it on the wall, on the table, across the front of my T-shirt, branding me as rotten. Instead, when she turned her back, I shoved it whole in the pocket of her windbreaker.

Suddenly feeling like I had a little tiny bit of power, I strode confidently to the front of the hall--and asked for a second helping.