A Rough Start

I woke up and reached for my glasses.  No glasses. Every now and then the cats relocate them during the night.  I have tried telling them “fetch glasses” since I know they know where they are but I was met with wide-eyed stares.  Looking for my glasses without my glasses is a problem since I have to feel around while trying not to step on them.  Usually when this happens, it takes about half an hour to find them, but on Thursday the search went on and on.  It got to be the time to leave for physical therapy so I called to cancel.  The receptionist informed me that they were going to charge a fee since it was less than 24 hrs notice.  I wondered how they thought I was supposed to know that my glasses would get lost 24 hrs before it happened.

 

Two hours later, I finally found them in a crevice between the furniture.  By then the cats had gotten tired of watching me search and fallen asleep.  In a rush to get to work, I grabbed my stuff, went downstairs, put on one rainbow sandal and then could not find the other.  Foiled again.  I searched the floor near where I found the first one.  Nothing.  Annoyed, I put on another pair of shoes, closed ones too hot for the weather.

 

By this point I was late, and every cell of my body was screaming at me to just go back to bed, but I hauled myself to the train.  I got off the A at Port Authority and found a text from Misty, my assistant.  “Are you close by?” she asked.  “A lady came from NY Presbyterian about one of the clients, I can’t discuss the problem here.”  The unusual nature of this made me nervous, so I picked up my pace, blew past the staff in the vestibule who always want to talk to me about random things, and rushed up the stairs.

 

The ”lady” turned out to be a community health worker trying to find one of our street homeless clients, a trans sex worker.  She wasn’t answering her phone so we couldn’t get consent which left the worker in the position of having to convey enough about the situation without telling us details.  “She has a condition she really needs treatment for,” she said, pausing.  “Without treatment, she can die.  We’ve lost a few street homeless people like this.”  She doesn’t say more, but Misty and I share a look – we’re pretty sure she’s talking about AIDS.  I tell her I understand, that we’ve lost some clients under these circumstances ourselves, and I show her our memory wall.  “They’re so young,” she says sounding shocked.  “We’re a program for young people,” I remind her.

 

Once she left in the quiet I heard D., one of our former-client staff,  cursing in the library.  He was boiling with anger when I went in there.   “I felt ambushed,” he said.  I asked him to explain.  It turned out that Misty, knowing he had a connection  with the missing client, had had him come to the office, where the worker started asking him questions about her.  “I was in this little office and she was asking me all these questions.”  He was very agitated, but something about the situation he was describing didn’t fit.  “ I think this might not be about the current situation,” I said gently.  “Really?” he asked.  “Have you ever been in a situation like that, a small room with someone asking you questions?”  Realization came to his face quickly.  “When I gave my first baby up for adoption.  They had me there for days, asking so many questions.”  Having connected the feelings back to their source, more than twenty years in the past, he calmed down.

 

The rest of the day went by in the usual blur of emails and walk ins and paperwork.  Then ten minutes before closing, the staff issued a pale young person with their face decorated in eyebrow pencil into my office.  I asked for their name and date of birth, and then started with my usual question.  “What can I do for you?” The story came tumbling out.  They have been squatting with another young person, and now the building owner has begun eviction proceedings.  

 

They have a passport, but not the birth certificate they need to get a state ID or change their name.  We see a lot of people with ID issues – when families kick a queer kid out, they don’t usually think to give them their documents.  Even clients with documents often have them lost or stolen while making their way through the streets and the shelters.  With a passport we can order this client’s out of state birth certificate, and then tackle the name change, and the ID last so that the name on it is correct.  The trick is that things have to be done in a certain sequence since one item may require other items first.  Not knowing the sequence can leave someone tangled in the vines of bureaucracy.