You got circles under your eyes as big as hammocks.
I’m taking on the characteristics of my clients.
Walter laughs, revealing saliva-slick pink gums absent of teeth. He always calls me by my full name. Tom Murray, where’re you going? Tom Murray, I need to talk to you. Tom Murray, what’re you doing? Like a parent scolding me. He says he’s from Gulfport, Mississippi. Lost his home in a hurricane and came to San Francisco because he has family in Oakland. I don’t know if any of this is true, but if he has people across the Bay they must not want to see him, because I refer him to our shelter almost every night.
Tom Murray, help me out with a dollar.
A dollar? What’re you going to get for a dollar?
I give him ten bucks and tell him to buy us both some coffee. He hurries up Leavenworth to a convenience store on Eddy. I don’t expect him to buy coffee for either of us, not the way he’s shaking. In a few days he’ll pay me back. He’s good about that. He’ll hand me a ten-dollar bill, maybe more, whatever he thinks he owes, and I’ll take it knowing I’ll give it back to him in a day or two. But at that moment when I take the money from him he will smile and feel pretty good about himself. See Tom Murray, I told you I’d get it back to you, the grin on his face will declare, and it will be a genuine and honest expression of how he’s feeling at that moment, not his shuck and jive, what-can-I-get-out-of-Tom-Murray routine. I will thank him and he’ll feel part of the human race again, a guy like any other paying his debts, as if he owed a balance on a credit card. Or maybe not. Maybe he’s just playing me for a fool he knows will give him more money the next time. I try not to give it too much thought.
You need a new coat, Walter. It’s December, man, you’ll freeze.
Clothes closet going to be open, Tom Murray?
Yeah, and if we don’t have what you need, go to Sally’s, I tell him, using the shorthand for Salvation Army.
Mr. McGraw’s in your office, Tom Murray.
I see that.
I saw him go in.
What time?
Maybe an hour ago.
Seven o’clock in the morning?
Walter shrugged.
You in trouble, Tom Murray?
No more than usual, I don’t think.
Walter laughs.
You want cream in your coffee, Tom Murray?
Sure.
I first met McGraw three years earlier at the monthly meeting of the Department of Social Services. The directors of nonprofit programs for the homeless always attended. Salvation Army, Episcopal Sanctuary, St. Vincent de Paul Society, the whole clique. They used their time to plead for money. I was a social worker for Central City Shelter on Ninth Street. The director, Harry Earl, would drag me along to talk about clients we had helped get jobs and housing.
I respect the difficulties the city faces with the budget, Harry began, always the diplomat. Still, I’d appreciate it if you would remember the numbers of people we’ve saved from the streets when you consider the budget. Whatever you do, we’ll continue our work knowing we can count on your support.
After he finished, Harry would fold his hands and bow his head as if he was about to pray. He had a thick mustache and goatee that lent him the dignified air of a monk straight out of the Middle Ages. The twelve commissioners always thanked him for his good work. Harry would nudge me to start my spiel. I rattled off stories of guys finding work after years of being on the street. I didn’t bother to say these were day labor jobs and that they took the work in the middle of the month after they’d gone through their general assistance checks and needed money for alcohol and drugs. No, I just talked about guys like Walter going to a warehouse to unload trucks for eight hours as if it was a new day dawning for the Seven Dwarfs: Heigh ho, heigh ho, it’s off to work we go. Really, I made myself sick sometimes with my bullshit. We were begging and telling lies, but as long as we told the lies the commissioners wanted to hear, we’d get our money.
Then at one commission meeting, the secretary asked if James McGraw with New Horizons Inc. had any comments. Harry groaned.
He’s new, and he’s trouble, Harry said.
New Horizons was a small agency that offered shelter to homeless people. McGraw, a former welfare-rights advocate, had just become executive director and had plans to expand. I’d heard his name mentioned at provider meetings, but I didn’t know him. When I saw him at one of the monthly meetings, he was wearing a loud purple shirt and a thin, black leather tie. A bush of untamed blond hair spread in all directions like vines searching for a trellis. Hands on his right hip, a corner of his dark blue jacket draped behind him. His left fist gripped a piece of paper that he glanced at before he spoke. He looked furious. He didn’t have to open his mouth for me to know he wasn’t there to beg.
I wrote down my comments, but I don’t need this, he said waving the paper. I don’t have to remind myself of what to say, because I know it; I see it every day in our shelter when I come to work. We provide people with barely enough to rent a skid row hotel room a dog wouldn’t live in, and you want to cut their checks even further so they can’t afford even that, he said in a high-pitched, nasal voice. We foundations appeal to the state for moneys it says it has and we get nothing but scraps, and we’re expected to feel grateful.
His glasses crept down his nose and he scrunched his face to push them back up, tossing his head to keep one of many strands of hair from his eyes. He looked at his paper and then jammed it into his jacket pocket.
I never understood budgets and spreadsheets and why people said moneys when they talked about grants instead of just money. I got lost in the intricacies of community block grants and federal McKinney fund applications and in abbreviations: CMHS, HUD, HA, TLSHC, HIC, and, of course, DSS. What I did understand was that there weren’t enough shelter beds, weren’t enough detoxes, weren’t enough jobs, weren’t enough anything for the people I wanted to help. Whenever I got someone a place to live, it was always in a filthy hotel room I’d never stay in. Listening to McGraw, I realized I wasn’t alone. Maybe he understood why people said “moneys” instead of “money.” Maybe he knew what all those abbreviations stood for. He probably did. But what mattered to me was that he sounded like he felt the same way I did about those crappy hotel rooms.
Imagine sleeping on a bed stained with dried urine and filled with lice, he said. Imagine scratching yourself. Imagine thinking that this is what your city feels you are worth. Now you want to take even that away. We don’t have enough room in the shelters for the people coming to us at night. Where exactly would those people who now stay in hotels go when they can no longer afford their rooms? The turn-away figures for shelters are up twenty percent this year. Low-income housing stock has fallen ten percent. There’s no fat on the bone. Never was. Perhaps we’ll just refer our people to the front lawns of your homes, and you can provide them with the tents and sleeping gear you bought your children for their Boy Scout camping trips.
When he stopped talking, the commissioners stared at him looking as jittery as someone suffering from indigestion. Maybe they were. Thank you, the chairman finally said and closed the meeting. As we got out of our chairs, agency directors clustered around McGraw and talked at once. Jesus, what are you doing? Just promote your agency, they told him. Don’t scold. We have to work with these people. They recommend our budgets to the Board of Supervisors. Are you trying to lose all your funding? McGraw smirked, turned, and walked away. I watched him leave. I thought, I want to be that guy.
I didn’t get into social work for the love of people. I delivered pizzas for Charlie’s Restaurant out in the Mission. I double-parked all the time and collected enough tickets to wallpaper a house. A judge sentenced me to one hundred hours of community service at Central City. I served coffee and put mats on the floor at night for the shelter. Every so often, I ripped off a few pizzas and donated them. After a few weeks, one of the shelter staff started drinking again and lost his job, and Harry offered the position to me. The job paid more than Charlie’s. I took it.
My coworkers were all guys who had been homeless. They had drunk most of their lives away and hadn’t worked in years before Harry hired them out of detox. They were nervous and seemed to think they were going to screw up. A lot of them started drinking again just to get the screw-up part over with rather than to keep waiting for it to happen. I did my job and didn’t trip. In a couple of months, I was promoted to shift supervisor. Day after day, I made calls to find shelter for families when we had no room.
Nothing.
Day after day, I made calls to see which inpatient alcohol programs had beds.
Nothing.
Day after day, I called temp agencies to see who was hiring.
Nothing.
Day after day, I talked to every agency and asked for something
