Tom
I look at my watch. Five o’clock. I’ve been at work since seven. I’m expecting a call from the mayor’s office. Probably too late, city offices are closed by now, but I’ll give it a few more minutes. I go over my staff list and have barely begun going through it when the reception desk phone rings. I jump in anticipation.
A call for you, Tom, Jay shouts.
Send it through.
Jay patches the call to my phone.
Fresh Start, may I help you? I say. You want to donate clothes? Well, just bring them down. Park behind the building and ring the bell. Thank you for thinking of the homeless. Have a good day.
I hang up.
We don’t need more clothes, we’ve got tons, but if someone gives you pants and shirts one day, they might give you a check the next. So I accept their stuff. After they drop it off, I’ll ask a volunteer to take it to the Salvation Army. Our clothes closet is full. I could use underwear and socks, but those things rarely get donated. I think people would feel self-conscious giving away their old underwear. I get it. It’d be weird. So buy some and donate new underwear. No one does that, or at least very few. They’ll write me a check. But ask them to buy new clothes and give them to me, no way. Doesn’t happen.
I pick up the staff list again.
The California State Assembly and governor agreed on a budget last night that will slash social services statewide. The cuts will be passed on to cities. Our mayor will make noise about trying to absorb them, how he’ll lobby the governor. Some years he means it. Sometimes it helps but not much. A few thousand dollars saved here and there. Not enough. Never enough to avoid deep cuts of some kind. Once all the posturing is out of the way, social service providers like me with city contracts will get a call from the mayor’s homeless coordinator. He’ll tell each of us how much our budgets have been reduced. I’m waiting for his call.
Budget redistribution, as the city calls it, always boils down to laying off staff, something my contract forbids. It doesn’t look good for a helping agency that hires the homeless to terminate employees. So the city passes along budget cuts but forbids me to reduce staff. However, my contract allows for transition opportunities. No one gets laid off. Instead, I transition them out. It’s just words, man. I can play the game.
In the past, I’ve made these opportunities available to staff I thought had a good chance of finding work elsewhere, staff who had acquired some education before their addictions consumed them, who had at least a minimal work history that preceded their time with me. Last year, I transitioned Shelley, our alcoholism counselor. She has a master’s degree in sociology and was more than qualified for the position, but she showed little initiative and spent most of her time on her phone chatting with friends. Faced with budget cuts, I eliminated her position. She took it hard. I lied and told her it had nothing to do with her job performance. That it was solely a budgetary decision. Dollars and cents. I had to cut somewhere. I didn’t see the point of scolding her for her lackadaisical attitude. Frankly, she could have been God’s gift, but because she was one of my higher-paid staff I probably would have cut her anyway. I heard she got married and has a kid on the way. That’s good. That’s nice. I’m glad she’s doing all right. I wish I had a few more like her. But after years of transition opportunities, I’m pretty much out of people like Shelley. I’m left with staff who have been homeless, some of them for years. They have problems, ongoing mental health and other issues that mean they won’t enter the traditional workforce anytime soon. Only another social services agency would hire them, but the directors of those programs are doing what I’m doing: cutting staff.
My program coordinator, Don, walks into the office. He calls himself codirector because I include him in decision-making. Some people are like that; their job title means everything and codirector sounds better to him, I suppose, than program coordinator. It’s about power, prestige, some need for his self-esteem, but he’s not my equal. On the staff flowchart his name is right below mine and he knows it. We all answer to somebody and he answers to me. I’m not heavy with it. I don’t lord it over him or anyone. But I am the director. Just saying.
I get up, pace around my office, sit down again. I wish the mayor’s office would call. I want to know what I’ll have to do, how deep I have to cut. It won’t make it any easier, but at least I’d know and could get it over with, crunch the numbers, who stays, who goes. Hired one year, gone the next. That’s how it works. Fired, laid off, transitioned, it doesn’t matter what you call it. It’s all the same, someone’s out of a job. The look in their eyes. The sense of betrayal. The tears. All the self-respect they had clawed back into their lives after years of screwing up—or maybe not screwing up but just experiencing bad luck—gone in the two or three sentences it takes me to tell them they’re out of job. What will they have left? A room at a residential hotel they will no longer be able to afford, a tab at a convenience store they will no longer be able to pay, a mirror over a sink they’ll no longer want to look at, that’s what. I’ll see them back on the street in no time, back to passed out on the sidewalks and in doorways or asleep in our homeless shelter, back in line at the DSS applying for whatever benefit they might be eligible for, and they’ll be back the next day and the day after that until it’s time to return to the shelter, a homeless person’s version of nine to five, an indistinguishable mass of men and women in ill-fitting thrift-store clothes, as if they’d never been employed by me or anyone. As if standing in line and sleeping in a shelter had always been their life. After a while, it probably feels that way.
I look at my staff list and pause at Don’s name. He could easily get another job. College educated, master’s degrees in theology and sociology. Never been homeless. He lives as middle-class an existence as I do. I like him. More than that it helps having someone in charge when I’m out of the building, but now I have to decide whether to keep him or cut him so another staff person less likely to find another job can stay. Everyone’s expendable. Don understands that. Or he will.
Jay’s phone rings again and he transfers the call to me. As I pick up the receiver, Don lights a smoke and takes the staff list from me. After a moment, I hang up.
More clothing donations, I say.
He thrusts the list at me.
You marked my name?
Just an ink mark, Don. I was counting the number of staff with my pen, how we can combine positions to make up for any staff cuts. I’ve made no decisions.
I haven’t. I’m not lying but there’s no point saying I’m thinking of eliminating your position either. At least not until I know what’s what. No point adding to the stress. I’m not trying to torture people. And I was counting. How do we stay open twenty-four hours with fewer staff? How do I pick up the slack? Ask those who remain to work overtime? I don’t have the money for that. Who do I need? How much will I save if I cut this person and that person? I have to give my recommendations to McGraw after we get the call. He’ll examine my numbers, see if they add up. The bottom line is the bottom line, he likes to say. It is what it is, no more, no less. It’s not my fault; I remind myself of that.
I know you have to consider everybody, Don says.
I was just counting, I say again.
Don is a recovering alcoholic and is HIV positive. He recently applied for an administrative position with the AIDS Foundation. He’s one of three finalists. The foundation’s director told him he would decide by the end of today. I hope they offer him the job. I’d miss him, but it would allow me to cut a position without any pain.
Don doesn’t appear sick. He’s thin, as thin as he was three years ago when I interviewed him for program coordinator. He came in late his first day at work, circles under his eyes, unshaven, not a great way for a new employee to make an impression. He said his alarm didn’t go off, but I wondered if he’d had a slip and begun drinking again. But he was alert, didn’t smell of booze, and he was never late again. That night on Don’s way home, a mugger jumped him, held a knife to his back and demanded his wallet. One of his new business cards fell out of his pocket and the mugger picked it up. When he saw that Don worked at Fresh Start, he apologized and returned the wallet. He had crashed in our shelter several times, he said. He asked for a clothing referral. Don told him to come in the next morning. The mugger didn’t make an issue of it. He apologized again and walked away. Even a mugger understood the importance of this place, Don told me the next day. He was impressed. I have to say I was too. Not with the mugger but with Don. Had I been him, I’d’ve quit, called in, That’s it, I’m done.
What’s funny? Don asks.
I was just thinking of your first day at work. That night you got mugged.
He smirks.
Feels like a long time ago.
Ever see him again? I ask.
Don shakes his head.
Not that I know of. I don’t think he came in for the clothing referral.
You’d know, I say. I’d have given him his clothing referral just for having the balls to come in.
And then eighty-six him for carrying a weapon.
We laugh. We get along. I’ll be sorry to see him go. During the week, we take our lunch breaks together and sometimes catch a movie after work. We watch each other’s cats when one of us goes on vacation. I’d feed his cat on the way home from work and sit in his living room and listen to it eat. I imagined what it was like to be him. Getting up in the morning and slipping into the designer jeans he liked to wear. Tucking in his shirt and tying his shoes. Going out the door. What did he think at those moments? What were his thoughts about going to the job and working for me?
Last December, Don and I spent a weekend afternoon at his house, writing Christmas cards to our staff. Fresh Start’s budget did not have money for a holiday bonus, so we decided personal handwritten notes that we each signed would at least show how much we appreciate them. Don and I sat on the floor with cards and envelopes strewn at our feet, sunlight cutting through the blinds, and dividing the task between us.
I’ll write the notes to the paid staff; you take the volunteers, I said.
Aren’t we both writing notes to everyone?
That would take forever. You take volunteers and I’ll take staff.
Why don’t we split them? Half volunteers, half staff. Each of us.
