Out Of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire: The Nomadic Life of an #OWS Occupier Sans Occupation

Native America

My exit from the New York City 30th St. Men's shelter (Bellevue) on November 3rd was uneventful. Resolved maybe. It wasn't so hard to choose not to have one's psyche attacked by the government and the myriad of insane laws against the homeless in search of more US budget cutting as cities spend millions to rid their centers of anti-corporate/government 'Occupations'. It made a lot more sense to become an occupier of public spaces, instead of remaining a prisoner in them. Why not build a teepee on Wall Street and really piss em' off? When one has nothing to loose they don't feel so much revolutionary but rather evolutionary - the old rules having outgrown any usefulness and a set of new ones just waiting to be written. When the government criminalizes the state of not being able to make enough money to survive in even a modicum of decency (click prior for Huffington Post story), one doesn't feel so much like an outlaw as they might feel like a pioneer - breaking ground that will not be common for quite some time, but common to be - just getting there first.

The Beginning of the Beginning

The police raid of the Occupy Wall St. camp in the early hours of November 15th came at just the right time, a time when the movement was running out of steam and festering in its own philosophical excrement. "Time to put that rubber to the road boys", said the government. (Continued...)

This blog. aHBiNYC is now available as an eBook. It covers the writer's homeless experiences in New York City from September 11, 2011 through January 2013 in 245 pages and 50 chapters. To order simply use the PayPal button in the sidebar, send $10, and include your email address in the PayPal memo form. Thank you.

Homeless 101.5: All in Good Humour

Jack Nicholson

Living in Bellevue, the crazy house - even as a re-purposed homeless shelter, is one thing but letting it drive you crazy is quite another.. So it pays to keep a sense of humour on oneself at all times. Having a good laugh can make a whole crappy day go away. Poof. Gone. And so I use an old Quentin’ Tarantino trick to remember the little things that happen that I might otherwise forget. I had heard once that when asked how he could write prison lingo film dialog that Tarantino said he had been thrown into the drunk tank once, and so he just wrote down everything all his cellmates said. If I wrote down everything my roommates said at Bellevue, I’d never be able to stop writing, so I just write down the memorable stuff. Here’s some:

 “Nah, it’ll just make me feel like a cop”, responds one guy to another on the elevator when asked if he wanted a free donut. 

The Back to Work program is a government program that is supposed to prepare people to re-enter the workforce after unemployment, but what it seems to excel at is in making people wait. For instance, at the subcontractor CEC (Career Educational Consultants) that I attend, after punching in on a clock, people must wait to sign into their class (yes, that's like punching in by hand a second time), this can take an hour or more because the hallway is just jammed – and there really is no class – just a room full of banged up old computers that people who have never used a computer before try to use. And after signing in there, you can sign up again on a clipboard to see your case worker or a job consultant. This could take an hour more, or two. And then there’s the line to get your Metrocard, the card used on buses and subways – a half hour at least. And so the place is always SRO with people waiting. 


Phone rings, lady waiting in the crowd answers and then responds: “I’m at the zoo”, she says. And this oddly, all becomes normal.

“I kissed a white girl in rehab” – Says a guy on 8^th avenue to his buddy as I walk by on the way to the soup kitchen for lunch.

The other day the library gave me a little tiny library card with a hole in it for my keychain. Funny, homeless people don’t have keychains, I thought.

Back at Bellevue a conversation ensues in the room in which the word ‘tomorrow’ was used twice by the same guy – and almost, as if on cue, Marvin and I break into a chorus from the musical Annie, “Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I love ya Tomorrow! You're always A day A way! ”, we sang in unrehearsed unison. It was friggin' hilarious.

"HA, HA, HA, Ha!", bellowed another roomie. "That's Belleview at its finest!".

So the other night at the Occupy camp was 'Kid's Night' - a night in which middle class parents brought their kids down to spend the night in a tent. Now, if that's not funny, I don't know what is. "Lookie Skip", those are hippies over there", said dad. "Just like grampa used to be".

The laughs never end around here. Wonder what Bloomberg had for dinner tonight?

Homeless 101: Week #1 at Bellevue - Welcome To The Machine

For the record, the men's homeless shelter on E 30th St. in New York is no longer known as Bellevue, but the locals still call it that. It is not an address of envy - not Park Av. for sure, although just a few blocks away. But as a participant in the US Repatriation program, one might wonder if the initial entry is just a little too first class. At JFK I am met at baggage claim by a pleasant man named Douglas. Douglas works for Heritage Health and Housing, a subcontractor for OTDA, the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, who gets the job from ISS, International Social Services, a subcontractor of HSS, the US Department of Heath and Human Services, who got the job from DOS, the US Department of State - it's a reasonably maddening combination of acronyms and agencies that make you wonder if the whole country, and not just Bellevue alone has somehow become a madhouse. But as Pink Floyd might say, "Welcome to the machine".

Douglas meets me at baggage and announces that his driver is waiting. How nice. Here I am, a man about to be homeless and I will be chauffeured into the city by a man and his driver. What's wrong with this picture? We'll get to that later. Doug's driver turns out to be his cousin, in a rather nice late model Jeep Wrangler. We trundle into Manhattan in this 4/WD and head towards Bellevue. I have not eaten on the plane as airlines in the US now charge for food and I have only $8 in my pocket. The food from Asia was part of the ticket price but in America it costs 3 to 4 dollars for a prepackaged breakfast biscuit so I decided to save what little money I have.

On the way into the city, Douglas leans over the front seat and hands me $150. "This is the first installment in your repatriation loan", he says. He also hands over a receipt and loan agreement to sign. The repatriation program allows a US citizen to borrow money from the government to get re-started in the US. The current amount for New York is $340 a month. I had read on the Internet that the amount was closer to $500 but have been told by Doug that it had been reduced by yet another government budget cutting program. How is it that we can afford to bail out banks, insurance and auto companies but can only give regular citizens $340 a month for food and needs upon re-entry? That's a question that the Occupy Wall Street protest will address as well, but that's not going to start until September 17th and here we are on the 12th. Nobody has any idea what's going to happen over the next month.

So I request a stop at Dunkin' Donuts. With $150 in my hand it's as rich as I have been in months. I deserve a donut. A stop at the shop and it is America in all its branded glory - with a Starbucks next door. We inhale a few donuts, down a coffee and it's off to the mansion, the former psychiatric hospital that was, just last year, a possible target for sale as a boutique hotel. Even Donald Trump wanted it - but it was not sold and remains the 30th Street Men's Shelter. A home away from all the other homes lost by men to the vagaries of life.

Entry to Bellevue is through a metal detector and a conveyor belt for x-ray scan of all your belongings. Guards watch and search and probe. So much for that first class ride from the airport. "Intake" begins in a small faded room with wobbly chairs and a big fat black lady sitting in a glass cubicle with a speaking hole fitted in the glass and a small slot through which to pass paper on the counter. She gives you a clipboard to sign and tells you to sit down. "This will take a few hours", says Doug, but what he really means is six hours. We are there by 10 but my room assignment doesn't come up until very late afternoon.

To be continued - Dear feed readers, I will continue this later tonight. I have a busy day and need to tend to things. Please check in to the blog later to continue...

Welcome to Bellevue and the Ghosts of New York's Psychologically Challenged

Bellevue

Bellevue Hospital Center, most often referred to as "Bellevue", was founded on March 31, 1736 and is the oldest public hospital in the United States. Located on First Avenue in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, Bellevue is famous from many literary, film and television references, and as the training ground for many of America's leaders in medicine. Affiliated with the New York University School of Medicine since 1968, Bellevue has been the site of many milestones in the history of medicine,^[1] from the establishment of the first ambulance service and first maternity ward, to Nobel Prize-winning cardiac catheterization laboratory - according to Wikipedia. But that's not what Bellevue is most known for. New York magazine describes it  more succinctly as it is known to most New Yorkers:

"Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, the Bellevue that for 78 years has stood, gloomy and gated, on 30th and First, the Bellevue made infamous in movies and nightmares, the forbidding destination for so many celebrated and notorious New Yorkers that it stands as a chilling landmark: the Chelsea Hotel of the mad." Today Bellevue stands as a homeless shelter for men and whilst the lunatics of the past have vacated the premises an entire group of new lunatics have moved in. I know them well. I live there. (Continued...)

This blog. aHBiNYC is now available as an eBook. It covers the writer's homeless experiences in New York City from September 11, 2011 through January 2013 in 245 pages and 50 chapters. To order simply use the PayPal button in the sidebar, send $10, and include your email address in the PayPal memo form. Thank you.