The subway exit creaks open––the rickety passageway between cars marked “for emergencies only.” A man walks through. He is drowning in greying clothes and greying patches of skin, and perhaps his cool grey surroundings––the steel doors and car, and the steely gazes of everyone in it. Seconds after his arrival, those who come prepared bury themselves in books and iPods. Those who are less thoughtful are left with no barrier between their hearing and his plight.
My mom is one of the latter. She spares a glance for the homeless before staring at a fixed point, as if willing everything else out of existence.
“They want money for drugs,” she tells me. When I pull out a spare dollar, she lays her hand over mine and shakes her head.
“When you offer to buy them food, they always say no,” other people say. "It must be for drugs then."
"Why can't they just get jobs?"
I set out to find that reason.
On the way home from work one day, I sat down next to a homeless man. Let’s say his name was Tim.
Tim was camped out in front of Staples. The ground he sat on was littered with blackened gum, but he looked at it with fascination. Maybe he saw something else altogether. I never asked. When I sat down beside him, he was very polite.
We talked over our cups of bad coffee.
“I’ve started asking for drinks instead,” Tim said, “but mostly, people always buy me food. They buy me so much food that I’ve started giving it away.”
According to Tim, no one’s willing to trust a homeless guy with a scraggly beard and an even scragglier ponytail. He looked like a stereotypical drug addict when ultimately, all he wanted to do is get enough money for his gym membership.
“It’s where I take showers and make myself look human.” Tim eyed the meager amount of coins in his plastic cup. “I’m fifteen dollars off for the month.”
Since he got fired from his last job, Tim learned that New York’s job market is littered with prejudice against the homeless. Despite his experience in construction, Tim was denied his last paycheck; weeks after he was hired, he was back on the streets. This is because most employees can be fired at-will, meaning that their job security is up to their employer (with exceptions).
Tim hoped to escape the system by presenting himself as someone “who has his life together.” Unwilling to settle for a minimum wage job when he knew that his resume made him overqualified for most entry-level positions, Tim dreamed big.
He would hold out until he got enough money to get off the streets––whether that was through begging, or through a lawsuit against his old company he claimed he was waiting to hear back on. Then, he’d go back to work. He’d get a good position and build skyscrapers, or bridges, or a new life. Yet as determined as he was, something about his ambitions seemed nebulous, improbable.
We live in a country in which the homeless and needy are afraid to go to shelters. We live in a country where we label soup kitchens as a gathering place of welfare queens.
Somehow, we have created a social caste of the invisible. As a nation, we all suffer from a sense of superiority over all those who make us feel ashamed to be so privileged. And so, we cherry-pick convenient scapegoats of an entire group of diverse individuals. Yes, there are those who cheat the welfare system, and there are those who waste the generosity of passerby on drugs. I have no guarantee that Tim is not one of them.
More importantly, I know that Tim's story isn't representative of everyone on the streets.
But there’s something Tim said that I want to remember.
“No one is out here with plans to stay out here,” Tim said. “I don’t want to stay out here.”
