Johnny, I said, you know how this works. When state budget cuts come down, I have to lay off staff. My way of doing things is to let go those people I think can find work. You can find work. You can get another job if you chill out on the drinking.
Over the last three years, I’ve laid off more staff than I want to think about. Fired. That’s how it feels to them. The look in their eyes. The sense of betrayal. The tears. All the self-respect they had clawed back gone in the two or three sentences it takes for me to tell them. What did someone who had spent years on the street have other than the minimum-wage job I gave them? A room at a residential hotel, no kitchen, bathroom down the hall, and a tab at some restaurant that extended them credit, that’s what. I laid them off and saw them back on the street in no time, back to what they’d known, back to the sidewalks, the doorways, the homeless shelters, in line with everyone else for whatever benefit they might be eligible for—general assistance, SSI, unemployment—blending in with one another in an undistinguished mass of ill-fitting thrift-store clothes in a poor version of a nine-to-five routine, as if they’d never left. In a way, I suppose, they hadn’t.
This because of yesterday? Johnny asked.
Yes, I thought, it is. But instead I lied one more time to spare him the truth and to spare me his denials. Besides, our funding had been cut. That was no lie.
No, it’s about the budget. It’s about who I think can find a job.
I hated to fire Johnny. He was one of my guys I could rely on. But when the state slashed our funding, I had choices to make. My program coordinator, Don, found a new job. That saved some money but other staff still had to go. The way I saw it, a drinker like Johnny, who no matter how lit he gets can still make it to work on time and supervise the shelter, has a chance—I’m not saying a great one—of finding another job. That person, according to the skewed logic I engage in, should be laid off.
Is that it? Johnny asked.
I extended my hand and nodded.
I’m sorry, Johnny.
He wiped his eyes and looked away. He didn’t believe me, I knew. Too bad for him he ran into McGraw yesterday reeking of booze. Too bad McGraw knew he was on the clock. McGraw called me. You know Johnny smells like a brewery? I haven’t spoken to him today, I lied. Well, he does, McGraw said, and now here we are.
I nodded and he left.
I want you to have my burrito, Johnny says again.
I’m trying to keep calm but I’m getting a little pissed off. How many times did Johnny show up to work smelling of booze? How many times did I talk to him about it? He used mouthwash, like that’d fool me or anyone. I looked the other way. I considered his drinking a perk I let him have because no matter what I could rely on him. He kept the train running, so to speak. But the staff and clients all knew he drank. They didn’t say anything but they knew, and they knew I knew, and when I caught people nursing a bottle of Thunderbird in the shelter and told them to toss it or leave, they’d say, rightfully, What about Johnny? I had no good answer.
Johnny came to Fresh Start a year ago for a clothing referral. He wore an army fatigue jacket too big for his slim body. His graying hair hadn’t been combed in a while and his missing front teeth left a gap in his mouth that made him hard to understand. He told me he’d been in the army, stationed in the Philippines. One morning, he was called into the office of his CO and told he was being discharged. The base was closing, he was no longer needed, the CO said. Johnny caught a flight out that night with nothing but his duffel bag. Twenty-four hours later, he landed in San Francisco, the closest US airport to the Philippines, or so he claimed.
What a crock of shit, I thought. The army doesn’t discharge soldiers because a base closes. Johnny screwed up somehow. Maybe it was his drinking, I don’t know. If I’ve learned anything I’ve learned this: Don’t believe what anyone on the street tells you. They have their secrets. They’re not all bad or all crazy or all addicts. I’ve met more than a few who have nothing wrong with them. They need a job, that’s it. I have to admit, I’m always blown away when not having a job turns out to be their only problem. But even then they have their secrets, their unbelievable tales to fill in the blanks of what they don’t want you to know. I let Johnny have his story. I presumed he’d lost everything else.
While he stayed at the shelter, Johnny volunteered. He put mats on the floor, mopped the bathrooms, made coffee. When one member of the shelter staff quit, I offered his job to Johnny.
I really want you to have it, Johnny says again, tossing the burrito from hand to hand as if it were too hot to hold. I’ll give you a fork and everything so you don’t mess yourself.
Johnny takes a step toward me, trips, regains his balance. I hope something will distract him. People coming in for lunch. Something. To think that only a few months ago, I lied my way to hell to get Johnny the shelter supervisor job. At the time, the supervisor had been a guy from Texas we all called Tex. He seemed as normal and middle class as a bank teller, until one day he decided to resume his crack habit and I never saw him again. That created a job opening. I wanted Johnny to fill it.
However, I had hoops to jump through. My contract with the city doesn’t allow me to appoint people to administrative jobs. Johnny and anyone else interested in the supervisor position had to appear before a three-member hiring committee made up of homeless men and women elected by people in the shelter to, according to the contract, give the homeless served by the agency a say in staffing. That in turn, or so the thinking went, would teach them responsibility. They’d be, in contract-speak, invested in the program and their own outcomes. The contract emphasized that the director could in no way influence the committee. I could sit in on interviews and help facilitate but I could not participate in discussions about the applicants or vote.
I posted the position and asked a homeless volunteer, a guy named Ross Hitchcock, to coordinate the election of a hiring committee. Ross grew up in Boston and has a thick New England accent. He had no teeth and when he wasn’t talking, his mouth flattened into a thin line above his chin. He schemed and had a racket unique to anyone I knew. For several hours a day, he’d stand beside a parking meter and flag drivers searching for a parking space. He’d then offer to get them an hour on the meter in exchange for a quarter. If they agreed, he’d withdraw a popsicle stick from his pocket, jam it in the meter, crank it up and down, and watch the numbers flip until they reached sixty minutes. Pleased and amused by his ingenuity, drivers would often give Ross additional change. Within a few hours, he’d make a few bucks.
Ross announced the election that night at the shelter. Whoever wanted to run wrote their name on a piece of paper tacked by the front door. More than a few people thought the candidate sheet was the sign-in list for a bed. As a result, we had many clients unaware they were running for the committee. Three days later, I left ballots with the names of dozens of candidates by the front desk. Completed ballots were put in a box. The three candidates who received the most votes moved on. If they showed up for the interviews, we had a hiring committee. If they didn’t, we held another election.
The day of the vote, I called Johnny into my office and told him I wanted him to be the new super.
You can’t go before the hiring committee with alcohol on your breath, I warned him.
I don’t drink when I’m working.
You drink and everyone knows it, period. If you want the job, don’t come here smelling of booze.
At first, only Johnny put in for the job. Then the day before the application deadline, one other staffer applied. Billy White. He had come to the shelter about the same time as Johnny. He had a wide, open face with a mole on his right eyelid that seemed not to bother him, but always distracted me whenever we spoke. Guys would hit him up for money and he’d give them what little he had and then act surprised when no one paid him back. If someone said, Hey, Billy, I like that sweater, he’d lend it to them, but of course he never got it back, and I’d see him at night in line waiting for the shelter to open, his arms crossed, shivering, the hurt expression of a child who knew he had been taken advantage of but didn’t understand how or why writ large across his face. I hired Billy to get him away from the piranhas feeding off him.
He did not make my life easy. He never got to work on time, because he insisted on standing up to the indignities of his life, as if, now with a job, he could finally assert himself against those who had abused his trust. One time, he blamed his tardiness on his landlord. That morning, he refused to pay rent after he had complained about the halls being dirty, and nothing was done about it. The landlord threatened to evict him. Billy then called lawyers to sue the owner. Then he asked other lawyers to sue those lawyers for not taking his case. When they refused, he walked to the San Francisco Chronicle to ask a reporter to write about the dirty halls. He demanded a meeting with the editor. He waited a long time before his request was denied. Had they not made him wait, he explained, he wouldn’t have been late.
I kept him. Firing Billy would have been like kicking a puppy. Fresh Start existed for the Billys of the world, and the Johnnys and Texes too; people who, we should concede, will never fit into the five-day workweek. Unless, of course, our work ethic changes and allows for people who talk to other people none of us can see, people with twenty-four-seven drinking and drug problems, people like Billy who obsess on the smallest slight, people with college degrees who look good on paper, but have troubles too, and have ended up on the street among all the other dispossessed in an equal-opportunity smorgasbord of triaged men and women, unable to get past the gated entrance to the American Dream.
About two weeks after Tex vanished, Johnny and Billy appeared before a hiring committee made up of clients I knew well:
Charles, a speed freak, a tall, lean man in his late thirties, was on one of his periodic sober runs. He could sing like nothing else mattered in a voice that should have had Berry Gordy knocking at our door.
Gill Harlee, a barrel-chested guy with a huge laugh; a round, bowling-ball stomach; and an explosive temper. A meaningless disagreement on something as simple as the weather could set him off and lead to fights. Good mood or bad, he always shouted as if he was trying to make himself heard above insurmountable noise.
Marcela Brooks, a woman who came in every morning for coffee, who we all called Granny because of her age. Depending on the day, she’d tell us she was seventy-eight or ninety. She wrapped herself in at least three coats and used a wheelchair like a walker, hobbling behind it and pausing every so often to catch her breath, her lined face canyoned with exhaustion.
On a Wednesday afternoon, the committee interviewed Johnny first. We sat in a circle by a closet where we stored the mats. We held a list of ten questions. The sun shone and I could see seagulls circling above a YMCA at the corner of Golden Gate and Leavenworth. Johnny took a chair next to mine. I smelled the alcohol on his breath.
First question:
Charles: What would you do if the shelter was full and someone needed a place to stay at two in the morning? Would you turn them away?
No, Johnny answered. He’d find them a spot even if it meant sitting in a chair. Granny asked a similar question about a family that showed up in the middle of the night. Johnny said he wouldn’t bother calling other shelters. He understood we weren’t a family shelter, but at that hour a family would need rest, especially the kids. He’d take them in too.
God bless the children, Granny said, and then launched into a story about how she was denied shelter by the Salvation Army because she refused to take a shower.
That wasn’t right, she said. A shelter’s not supposed to turn people away. I’m an old woman.
After we finish here, Granny, you and I will talk about it, I said.
It wasn’t right what happened to me, Granny insisted.
