Observations

I was puttering around a few weeks ago like I often do on Saturdays, doing various household tasks, when someone knocked on my door. I was surprised to find a young woman with several large bags of groceries on my doorstep. I told her I wasn't expecting anything and tried to send her away, but she insisted it was the right address, holding out her device so I could see. It was definitely my address, but the wrong name. "This isn't mine," I told her again, "that's my ex." As she nudged the bags closer to my house, I could see from her expression that she thought she had stumbled into a romantic attempt at reconciliation. At a loss for what else to do, I hauled the heavy bags inside the house. While the cats began their initial inspection, I considered the situation. Despite the fact that I don't respond at all, well beyond the point where a sane person would have given up, my ex does still frequently try to get my attention, texting everything...

I'm making my way through the never-ending stack of paperwork on my desk - requests for disability accomodations for clients, time off requests from staff, interview inquiries from press, etc - when I get a call from the staff member at the door downsstairs. "There's a new guy here," he says and pauses. I wait to see what the problem is, normally they just bring new people right up. "He really needs help, but he's 30." My staff have big hearts and remember their own days on the street. If they see someone in serious need, they hate to turn them away, but 30 is past our cut off point. "Send him up," I say, "but I am going to refer him somewhere else." The eligiblity requirements for various kinds of shelter are so complex that I have to hear at least some of someone's story to know where to send them. The new guy is a little shy, hesitating in the doorway until I invite him in. "I came from Chicago, I was living with ...

Even once our clients are housed, the struggle continues. Many of them have lived surrounded by people for so long that being alone is jarring. The silence lets their thoughts creep in. Sometimes the guilt gets to people who can’t forget their friends out on the street and they move everyone in, which can quickly lead to chaos. Figuring out money and how to feed themselves and pay the bills on the impossibly small amounts of assistance the government doles out sinks some people, and budgeting not just money but time gets to others. And then there are neighbors. People who qualify for mental health housing often wind up in buildings where some or all of the other apartments are occupied by other people with complicated minds. Conflicts over issues real and less real erupt. Queer clients are sometimes faced with homophobic neighbors. A. used to come in often complaining about being targeted by her neighbors. Some of the complaints made less sense than others, like her insistence that...

Yesterday was Robert Herman’s birthday, and I don’t know why Facebook, with their know-it-all technology, can’t avoid sending birthday reminders for dead people. So there it was, sandwiched between the birthdays of two people I like a lot and seeing his tiny square face sent my mind spinning back through the years like someone was holding down “double speed” and “rewind” at the same time. I spent my first few years of life in an illegal, incompletely converted loft on Kenmare St. It was a long narrow space, getting narrower at both ends. It had huge windows overlooking the street that my grandfather rigged with some kind of netting to keep a small child from crashing through to the sidewalk 3 stories below. The bathroom had no solid ceiling for some reason, just fabric staple-gunned in place, and lit so poorly my mother reached out to pet a rat one night, mistaking it for our kitten. It was a strange space, but at that time my mother was part of a crowd of arty people moving i...

It’s 8pm and my day started at 7am. Today was hectic, with three new intakes, a client in the hospital, and one staff member short. It’s closing time and I am tired as hell but there’s a gaggle of queer asylum seekers crowding my doorway. Two are young people I know well, and the 3rd, M, I have seen with them lately. M is transgender and has serious challenges. She is deaf, but also clearly reliant on the other two for basic things like finding food. K has recently spoken to me about how he would like to get legal guardianship of M, because he says she needs help getting to appointments, taking medication, etc. It is very sweet of him to take on a stranger he met in a shelter when he is barely getting by himself, with a deportation order because he could not magically get from NYC to Dallas for court. When I called Dallas, and eventually got someone on the phone after several rounds of “we can only speak to the client. But we do not have anyone who speaks Spanish,” she responded to...

Almost everybody who was involved in the AIDS world in 1996 knows someone who pretty much came back from the dead. Those were the "bad years" of AIDS, the years when every week at the ACT UP meeting, a slot was set aside for remembering the members who had died since the previous week's meeting. Those were also years when we were fighting hard, using death itself in our activism. We marched with bodies of our friends and comrades through the streets of NYC, and we threw the ashes of people with AIDS over the fence onto the White House lawn. I'm not sure anybody even knows how many people's ashes we threw - there were the ashes that were planed, but word had spread and as we marched to the white house, people started passing ashes forward through the crowd to the people doing the throwing at the front. I remember it as a warm still day, with huge AIDS quilt blanketing the capitol mall with grief in the form of fabric and thread. But when we got to the White ho...

I had to pick Marley up from the vet today- she’s been there for two nights since half her face swelled up with a dental abcess. By the time I handed over half my paycheck and dropped her at home, I got to the office pretty close to the start of client hours. On my way into the building, Dilo started to tell me about a new client who had stopped by earlier. “He has REALLY red hair” he said emphatically. I figured he meant a natural bright red like my childhood hair before it darkened with growing up and lack of sun. With that expectation, I was startled when a tall, pale young man with hair dyed intense orange appeared in the doorway. Folding his long self into the chair in the small space between my desk and a cabinet, he explained that he had come from Siberia with his boyfriend looking for a place they could be themselves as openly gay men. He told me about being bullied through the lower grades and how it intensified in college until he dropped out and considered suicide, abo...

My very sick client calls me as soon as I wake up. I haven’t put my glasses on yet and Connor is meowing loudly for his breakfast. He wants to order Nepro, nutritional shakes for people on dialysis with his food stamps but he can’t do it alone because you also have to provide a debit card to cover the fees and tip, about $11. I don’t actually have it either. After two separate cats at the vet last week, I have exactly $5 in the bank. But this is something the organization can reimburse so I call Misty and ask her to send it to me. “I hope someone gives me a kidney,” he says, “I don’t want to die like this.” In all his thousands of interactions with medical personnel, I can’t believe nobody’s explained this to him. “They don’t usually give kidneys to people who used to use drugs,” I tell him. “I should have lied,” he says, ruefully. I have a feeling they could have figured it out. “They also don’t give them to people with a history of non-compliance, because transplants are delica...

I got a text last night from JD letting me know Bubbe, a small grey terrier, had died. Bubbe was a rescue from back when JD and Jaelynn were live-in caregivers for my Dad. Bubbe was brought to us by B, a former client, who had gone to visit his kids and found Bubbe locked in a cage, starving and filthy. He grabbed her and brought her to my Dad’s apartment. She was so weak she couldn’t lift her head and her hair had grown over her eyes so she couldn’t see. Between us, we couldn’t afford the vet, so we looked online and started giving her tiny sips of pedialyte. A few gentle baths and a hair trim later, she was starting to look better, but getting her back to normal was a long, painstaking project. Dogs are tremendously resilient and even early on she didn’t hold a grudge against humans. She knew we weren’t the ones who hurt her and just wanted to sit on laps and be cuddled. That was a long time ago- Dad died in 2012, so Bubbe was about 15, years of love she would not have had withou...

It's after hours and I am home sick today anyway, blowing my nose a zillion times and being grouchy about the fact that these germs got to me the day before the monthly infusion that is supposed to protect me from germs. I'm reaching for another tissue when a text message lights up my phone. I have never heard a text message before, but this one, just one word, tentative and searching, sounded like it had been spoken out loud in my empty room. "Kate?" it said. The message was from S., a client who is so polite she would not interrupt my personal time except for a major emergency. I immediately think of her two cats, who stayed with me until she got her apartment, and I wonder if something is wrong with one of them. But that's not it. The next message says "I'm dealing with some bad intrusive thoughts about my life and is there any help somewhere?" She doesn't have to get more explicit, we have discussed suicidal thoughts before. The answe...

I was walking across the office and I glanced at the clipboard where the staff keep track of the meals and snacks given out. I ran my eye down the numbers, 2, 2, 2, 1, silently adding and thinking about inventory. My attention got jolted back to the list when I got to 4,4 and I looked over at the names to see who was eating such an unusual amount. When I saw the names, my heart sank because it was a dead giveaway that the two girls who were supposed to be safely if unhappily placed, were not safe at all. When they sat down, the story came tumbling out. They had both headed over to AFC, and were settled at the drop-in for the night, when the staff mentioned that they had to call ACS, who would come in the morning. Freaked out, they left and spent the night on the subway. The next day, D., 15, called her mother and spent an hour begging her to let them come. She gave them one night, put them out in the morning, and now here they were, starving and uncertain. Even as I sat there, ...