Hunger

I called Mikell a month or so ago because one of my clients had heard about his program which connects formerly incarcerated people with jazz musicians for lessons and my client wanted to know if he could particpate. This was not a one-call referral because the client has some complications and needed my help naviating those in this context. So Mikell and I were talking about the client and he naturally asked about New Alternatives. I explained, but then I did what I often do - invited him to come by on a sunday to see the program in action. Not only does this give people a better sense of our nontraditional agency than I could ever convey, it also gives me a chance to watch how they respond. Some people thank me and never come, and others take a while to schedule a visit, so I was surprised when Mikell showed up the following sunday. I was even more surprised when he stayed for hours on an August sunday, although he must have been sweltering in his sunday suit in our unairconditioned basement with the volunteers cooking nearby. I could see that he didn't just "get it", like visitors often do - he was reveling in it, asking passing clients and youth staff about their experience with music. This is not something I ever ask and the answers were fascinating. One young man who struggles with addiction so much that he is banned from a free clothing program for taking too many clothes to sell, confidently said "I play the violin." We must have looked surprised because he said, "No, I REALLY play the violin." Then he paused and said, "but I don't have one." Mikell's program gets instruments donated, and the client perked up when he told him that. Then Robin, our newest peer staff member stopped by and said "I've played the trombone," and then when we, very surprised by that, asked him about it, rattled off a series of equally unlikely instruments and then explained that they had had an orchestra at his residential school. When Mikell asked him what he would like to play going forward, the answer was equally unexpected. He paused for just a moment, mentally reviewing instruments, and then said "the xylophone," and headed back to his job collecting the compost. Mikell excitedly started talking to me about all the ways our programs could collaborate, and went back to talk to his colleague about it. Mikell set off my gaydar, but it wasn't until he had known me for a few weeks that he said anything personal. Then pieces of his story started to emerge, a bit at a time. He told me he had been homeless himself as a young man, having been kicked out for being gay. He is significantly older than I am, and even when I was young there were no LGBTQ+ shelters, and Covenant House was not a safe place for queer youth, so I know that there were no resources when he was a homeless youth. Another time, when he called to say he was in the area and dropped by on a weekday, he watched Robin fetching microwaved burritos and beef patties for our case management clients, and told me how hungry he had been, how clearly he remembered looking in the window of a bagel shop with his mouth watering. Misty was sitting across the room at her desk, doing her work, but I knew she is taking in everything that goes on, so I didn't say anything, but in my mind I was remembering that hunger, the feeling of being completely hollow inside, the way water trickles through you tracing the twists and turns of your organs. I thought about passing fruit stands with the piles of fruit sitting out in the open, so easy to snatch, and the intense temptation. I was in summer night school at Washington Irving - Stuyvesant did not have a summer school because Stuy students were not supposed to need one. I had failed English of all things, a class where I normally excelled. But the teacher, an older man with a scraggly beard, exuded a creepy vibe, and the way he stood too close, hovering over the female students made me feel like puking. He seemed to always be skating on thin ice, an expert at innuendo, going just far enough that there was nothing explicit to report. So I just didn't go, and failed the class. Years later, he was arrested, a big scandal, his face on the cover of the NY Post. So I was at Washington Irving, a dusty old building with creeky fans that barely moved the humid air. I was in the front row, a habit I developed in the years before I got glasses, because it was my only hope of seeing anything. The rest of the class was variously slouching and dozing in the back rows. The only thing I remember from that class was the painful beauty of Langston Hughes' Mother to Son, "Life for me ain't been no crystal stair." Washington Irving was a really long way from the group home across from Sea Gate. You had to take the train to the end of the line and then a bus that emptied out as you got closer, leaving you dodging men who figured out that you were from the girls' home and figured you might be up for some of the same things other girls were doing, climbing down the tree outside the bedroom window to the street below, leaving body-shaped lumps under their blankets and coming back without their panties. It was late when I got back from school, dinner was eaten and the dishes washed. Chores were already done, so I was punished, never getting the tiny allowance the state provided for their wards. I told them they could leave me a chore, that I would do it when I got back, however late it was, but that was Not The Way Things Were Done and did I think I was special? What I thought was that I wanted to graduate and that I was not going to let them and their rules get in the way. I started walking instead of taking the bus, almost 3 miles each way but it let me save the bus fare. You couldn't get much to eat with bus fare, but it was something. I don't know how the english teacher figured out that I was extremely hungry. I was losing weight fast between missing meals and all that walking, and getting paler and paler while other people were getting their summer tans, so maybe that was it. I remember the first day she brought me a sandwich, just a standard peanut butter sandwich wrapped in tin foil but it felt like a miracle.