Composing a Life

cardboard box, mixed in with homeless individuals. As if moving backward in time, we went from Project Hope to the Pine Street Inn, one of the oldest and most famous of shelters for homeless individuals. It was designed to stretch resources as far as possible in order to meet urgent and short-term needs. Even so, resources are still not sufficient. Unlike Project Hope, which is a temporary home for periods of a year or more, Pine Street is a refuge for one day at a time. Every morning, the guests must leave and pass the day elsewhere. Even those who return will not get the same bed they had the night before. In the interval, all of the bedding will have been stripped and the empty rooms disinfected.
    We arrived at about half past four, in time to see a line of men being processed slowly through the front door. A young woman frisked them efficiently and impersonally for weapons, drugs, or bottles; they then filed past a uniformed policeman in the entry. Outside, there was a small plaza where a few men lingered, finishing their bottles; this is a “wet” shelter, and they are not turned away if they check in drunk. The only concession to the desire for a home, as contrasted with a shelter for the night, is that guests can hire lockers on a monthly basis, but because the same guests do in fact come back night after night, workers and guests often greet each other by name. After entering, some men go to the clinic, where aspirins are handed out, wounds are tended, and swollen feet are soaked in antiseptic solution. “How are you today?” the attendants ask. “Let’s see how that sore on your leg is doing.” Other men line up immediately for meals donated by local restaurants.
    I stood in the lobby trying to understand what I was seeing and what it said about changing standards and our increasingly interdependent lives. I grew up in a New York neighborhood where I learned to step around drunks on the sidewalk, to think of them as failures or dropouts whose predicaments were unconnected to me, rather than generated by the same social system that supported me. Today, less than a third of the shelter population have the familiar look of alcoholic derelicts, bleary eyed and red faced, marked and bruised by falls. A number of men look reasonably healthy and able, often quite young. These are men who have been economically uprooted, who are weathering some kind of transition in their lives. But the air of unpredictability in the room emanated from another group of men who seemed disoriented or who behaved bizarrely.
    Five years ago, the administrators of Pine Street, like others dealing with the homeless, were adamant in insisting that homelessness was primarily an economic matter. Partly because of Ellen’s work, it is now accepted that a large percentage of homeless individuals are mentally ill, including many deinstitutionalized long-term mental patients. These lost souls were often abandoned by their families during their years of incarceration, as they became less and less competent to deal with the mechanics of modern life or to form sustaining connections of any kind. They were then extruded from large public institutions on the assumption that they would be cared for by community public-health facilities, but the facilities were never built and the stabilizing medications ceased to be dispensed or supervised. Even as they draw comfort from routine and are glad to benefit from the shelter, there are too many different rhythms and too many people, men involved in fantasies at cross-purposes with one another, muttering and arguing with the empty air when their conflicts intertwine. Fights and arguments break out from time to time, and then one or more are removed—as several were delivered earlier—in a Black Maria.
    After the meal, all those for whom there are beds must shower, stripping before entering the unpartitioned shower room where attendants watch for signs of body lice or infections that need treatment. Clothes are kept overnight in a heated room that kills vermin. A set of fans draws room air across ultraviolet lights turned toward the ceiling, in the hope of preventing the spread of drug-resistant TB. Pine Street Inn was once a laundry, and the upstairs sleeping area consists of huge loft-like rooms, surprisingly clean and free of the smell of urine or antiseptics, with row on row of cots. The donated bedding and linens reflect domestic fantasies of every kind—Mickey Mouse, rainbows, flowers, a riot