You mean you need shelter? I say to her.
She nods yes.
OK. Any children?
No.
Good, I think. I don’t take women home who have kids. Gets a little complicated with kids. I rummage in my desk for a shelter directory.
We have a shelter here but it’s just for men.
She doesn’t respond.
That doesn’t mean I can’t help you, I say.
She has all her teeth. Funny the things I notice. But teeth are a plus. Most of my clients don’t have teeth or the few they do have stand alone in their mouths like rotted stumps, brown and chipped, ready to dissolve into what’s left of their gums. Their fingers, too, are often stained from rolling cigarettes. Her fingers look as pale as mushroom stems.
She stands out as much as that woman and her husband I saw last month. The husband wore black slacks, a pressed shirt, and dark tie as if he thought some sort of formality was involved in asking for help. At first, I thought he was dropping off a donation. His wife stuck close to his side and I caught a whiff of her perfume. She looked anxious, as if she had not slept. Her clothes fit her well. She was put together, flat stomach, slim hips, full mouth with red lipstick. I imagined touching her neck.
Her husband held a referral slip like it meant something. He took out a pair of reading glasses, read it, and handed it to me: Needs housing, someone had scrawled across it. The man explained he had been a chef at a Marina District restaurant, someplace I’d never heard of, when an earthquake damaged the building beyond repair and he lost his job. She had been a bank teller but got laid off about the same time. They resorted to temp agencies but found little work. After they lost their apartment they stayed with friends. It was a friend who suggested they go to the DSS for help. Someone there sent them to Fresh Start.
We don’t belong here, the husband said.
But you’re here, I replied.
They looked at the floor. Outside my office, men and women in clothes that hadn’t seen a washer in days, reeking of their own fetidness and the smoke from campfires they had passed out beside in Golden Gate Park stood waiting to be let into the drop-in center. They raised their voices above one another and got louder and louder until the words collapsed from the weight of their own volume into a tumult of senseless noise made even louder by the spacious building that had once been a warehouse and now served as an echo chamber to all the racket. The husband and wife stared at me bewildered by all the commotion.
Do you have a place to go tonight?
No. But we’re not homeless, not in that way.
In what way are you homeless?
The husband didn’t answer. His wife glanced at the ceiling and held a hand up against the lights. I smiled understandingly. It was a smile that reassured and prodded shy smiles from them in return, because to them it meant what they wanted it to mean: Things would work out. Things would be fine. It told them they mattered, but to believe this they had to believe in me, to give up a part of themselves to me and be led into the unknown. To be dominated, as I liked to think of it. I mattered, not them. To be sitting in my office meant they no longer existed as anything more than my clients, whom I would do with as I pleased. For their benefit or my pleasure. Sometimes both, but not often. My choice in any case. I held my smile just long enough to provide temporary comfort before I dragged a hand across my mouth and wiped it from my face and the ambiguity of their situation returned and they stood looking at me, a man they did not know but wanted to trust, who did not appear to be all that different from themselves, but who, without my smile, conveyed no thought or feeling at all. Be a mystery, I told myself, and exert control.
`After a moment, I explained to them that I could give them shelter. By shelter I meant an army cot and a blanket. However, I would have to refer the wife to a woman’s shelter. If they had a child, I could refer them both to a family shelter. Without a child, however, they would have to split up.
Men and women sleeping together—it gets complicated, you understand, I said. Of course, if you want to stay together, I can refer you to a residential hotel. By hotel, I mean a room in a rundown building in the Tenderloin or on Sixth south of Market. Do you know Sixth Street? It’s skid row. We’re not talking Marriott, just so you understand.
I think someone made a mistake, the husband said. I don’t think they meant to send us here. They gave us the wrong referral.
I did not ask who that someone was. Some bureaucrat under the illusion that a nonprofit social services agency could help where the feds, state, and city could not or would not. I didn’t tell them they were too late, that they were no longer deserving of help. Not once they reached this level. They were down now with the bad people: drunks, junkies, hookers, those homeless men and women who had been on the street for years and lived off soup kitchens and shelters and the stamina of their abused bodies. The ones stepped over and ignored. That’s who came to me. That’s who they were now.
Mistake or not, that’s what I can do for you, I said.
We’ll take a hotel, the husband said.
I gave them a seven-day referral to a dive on Eddy. I stood and shook their hands. I held onto the woman’s hand and squeezed her fingers before I let go, and she pulled her hand away but not quickly, and she gave me a searching look and he returned her look.
I saw the couple the next morning. The husband still wore his tie and slacks. Her hair was pulled back and looked as if it had not been combed. Their clothes were not as crisp as the day before. Perhaps they had dressed in a hurry and did not pause long enough to pat out the wrinkles. Or maybe they slept in them, huddled together, frightened. The hotel, they told me, disgusted them. Rats, broken toilets, filthy mattresses, no sheets or blankets. How could it even be called a hotel?
I tried to warn you, I said.
The couple returned to the hotel and stayed for the length of their referral. They stopped by my office day after day looking a little more haggard each time. I gave them referrals to soup kitchens and a Salvation Army jobs counselor. The husband stopped wearing his tie. His wife kept her hair pulled back but it was clear to the benefits advocate that she was no longer washing it. Circles pooled beneath her eyes, and lines I had not noticed before stretched out from around her mouth, thinner without lipstick. When their time at the hotel was finished, they asked to stay in a shelter.
You’ll have to split up, I reminded them.
We understand, the man said.
I gave the man a bed ticket for the Fresh Start night shelter. The line to get in starts at five, I told him. First come, first served. I then made some calls to three women’s shelters. I asked the first two if they had space. They did. I thanked them and hung up without reserving a bed. The third shelter, Randolph House in the Haight, was full. That’s what I wanted to hear. I got off the phone, wrote her a referral, and gave it to her with a bus token.
The number nine bus will drop you almost at the door, I explained. You catch it at Market and Van Ness Avenue. You should leave here about five.
She and her husband thanked me. They left my office and sat in the drop-in center like two people in a doctor’s waiting room. They asked me for something to read, but I had nothing. They shifted their chairs away from two drunken men arguing over a pinochle game, toward other men who staggered and shouted at the walls. I let them use the staff restroom so they would not have to deal with the vomit and the clogged toilets in the one in the drop-in. Sometimes, the wife asked to sit in my office. The husband stayed in the drop-in, and I wondered if he was trying to prove something to himself. That he could handle it. Take it. Did he think he was being strong for her? His wife watched me dispense bus tokens and write letters for GA applicants. I glanced at her off and on and concluded that if she was not comfortable, she at least felt safe with me. My office. My domain. She had left her husband to sit beside me, her protector.
It’s a pleasant memory, but I cannot linger on it. I have another woman in my office, the one who came in after Walter. She is waiting for me to help her. She needs me now.
I’ll make some calls to women’s shelters, I tell her.
Will I get in one?
We’ll see. A lot of people got their checks today so shelters should not be as full. But you never know.
She stares out a window at Leavenworth Street and crosses her arms. Her T-shirt rides down one shoulder, and I notice pale purple bruises before she tugs it back up without looking at me.
There’s this place in the Haight, I tell her. Randolph House. I can’t promise they’ll have space. It depends how long they’re letting people stay. It only has ten beds. But it would get you out off the street.
OK.
