When I was a wee 24 years old I worked in Sussex County, New Jersey as a Case Manager at the Samaritan Inn. The Samaritan Inn was a program for homeless in Northern Jersey. We had about 16 transitional housing apartments for homeless families, The Sober House, which was transitional housing for homeless men in recovery from alcohol and drug abuse, a food pantry, a 24 hour helpline, and funding for emergency assistance. And three full-time staff. It was Anna (the Director), Pam (another Case Manager), and myself. I got paid a whopping $24k a year. There were many days where I questioned why on earth I was working there, but my co-workers were fantastic and every day was interesting, to say the least.
The other day I came across the following journal entry from March 20, 1998, documenting a typical day at The Samaritan Inn.
Today's 40 minute drive to work was fairly typical. I cruised down Route 80, sipped coffee, and listened to Howard Stern. While I was completely intrigued by Howard's interview with George Clooney, I couldn't shake the following thought: "Today is gonna suck." Anna was going to be at a meeting all day. A group of UPS employees were coming the next day to paint some of the shelter apartments, which meant that Pam and I had to move the zillion dressers that were donated the day before into the individual apartments. We also had to pick up a month's worth of food pantry food and unpack it, because the anal CCD teacher who used the building on Sundays, went bezerk if there was anything left in the kitchen.
I got to my desk, which was in the corner of the room on the top floor of an old house. Kind of quaint if the entire house wasn't packed with random donations of God knows what. For every usable item there were 12 things that needed to be taken to the dump. Thanks for your bag of mostly used make-up, but even homeless people don't want that shit. I checked the voicemail and the first message was from Pam. "Mary Beth...(my co-workers called me Mary Beth, a name usually reserved for family members, because when I first started at Samaritan Inn, there was another Mary working there)you're gonna kill me. I'm really sick. I can't come in today." Day is sucking already! I returned a few phone calls that I didn't get to from the day before, one of which involved a "Who's on first" conversation with Joseph, the owner of the hotel where we put up people on an emergency basis. I was trying to confirm the arrangements I made for the Connor family but I hung up more confused then when I started.
Anna took the van to her meeting, so I had no way of picking up the food for the pantry. I also noticed that the brown pick-up truck was no longer in the parking lot. It was out of commission with leaking brakes, so it's disappearance was particularly odd. I talked to Pam and she said she could just go pick up the food in her truck and then drop it off at the office. I called the Sober House, to tell Bob and Rick, who were planning to come help unload the food, that they could wait another hour. As the phone was ringing, I saw them walking up to the building.
Both Bob and Rick were completely fed up because they'd been pounding the pavement looking for jobs and couldn't find anything. Bob's a burly, friendly, hilarious, recovering alcoholic. DUIs and some jail time left him without a job, money or place to live. Rick is in recovery for drug addictions. You name the drug- Rick has tried it. Rick is kind and helpful and looks positively beaten up by life. He's trying so hard to get his life on track but his shoddy job history and burned bridges are making it difficult.
We decided we could use the extra time to have our weekly case management meetings, in which we reviewed the week's goals and set some new ones for the following week. Bob updated me on Ralph, the weird guy from his AA meetings. For some reason that was completely unclear to me, Bob was convinced that Ralph was stalking him. I asked Bob if he'd gone to his counseling appointment.
"Yeah, but I can't go back there. That counselor is so lame. It's such a waste of my time."
"Well, it was court ordered. Unfortunately, there was no provision for you thinking it was lame. Besides, you're homeless and unemployed and a recovering alcoholic. Don't you think counseling might be helpful?"
"Maybe. But not with this chick. I can't do it."
"I get it but the court has ordered it and that's the only person you can see for free. Why not just bring a magazine and get through it? What are you gonna do if they throw you back in jail?"
"I'll have to tape a frying pan to my ass and hope for the best."
"Perfect. Stellar plan, Bob. Let's just update your goals. We'll replace "Go to counseling appointment" with "Tape frying pan to ass."
Bob said he'd left a few messages with Joan from Workforce Development, but she hadn't called him back. I told him he could use my phone if he wanted to try her again. So he called and left a message. "Joan! It's Bob! AGAIN. You can run but you can't hide, Joan! CALL ME!" Joan called back a couple minutes later.
While Bob was talking to Joan, I tried to calm down Rick, who was in the midst of a "I have no money" freak out. I whipped up a verification of his address and suggested that he walk down the block to the Hamburg Municipal Welfare office and sign up for emergency assistance. He got right on it.
As soon as Rick left, Frank the irritating man with no personality waltzed in. Frank had called weeks before and told me that he, his wife and two kids were being evicted. Frank said that he was receiving unemployment but had been getting blank checks in the mail. Instead of trying to iron that out with unemployment, Frank called The Samaritan Inn. The whole situation sounded completely fishy to me. I gave him a few places to call and told him to get back to me as soon as possible with what he found out. I never heard from him. So here it was weeks later when Frank strolled into my office and said, "I'm gonna be evicted on Sunday." After giving Frank a short speech about how annoying it was that he didn't get back to me, particularly given the fact that it's putting his kids at risk for homelessness, I made arrangements for his family to stay at a motel from Sunday until Wednesday, when he'd be receiving his next unemployment check. Didn't even get a thank you from Frank. His only response was, "What about my storage?"
By this point, Rick had come back from the welfare office, where they gave him a phone number and told him to go home, call, and make an appointment. Chances were good that because he was homeless after being released from jail, Rick would be denied emergency assistance and given the reason: "You've caused your own homelessness." That was just one of the many examples of how our criminal justice system is not set up to rehabilitate people. Rick slumped down in the chair at Pam's desk, totally frustrated and dejected.
I told Frank that we couldn't pay for storage but that he was welcome to use our phone to call storage places. If that didn't work, he'd have to work something out with family or friends. He stared at me and said nothing.
Bob said, "Well...sounds like we need to let our fingers do the walkin!" He looked up storage in the yellow pages. "Hey Rick...dial this number." Rick picked up the phone and dialed. So now Rick and Bob were managing Frank's life for him. I'd had enough of Frank and his uselessness so I told him to go find somewhere else to not deal with his own responsibilities.
Bob left to attend to his many appointments for the day. Rick and I were shooting the shit, and waiting for Pam to drop off the food. The phone rang. "Uh, are you guys coming to pick up the food or what?" It was the truck driver at the food drop-off location. I told him that my co-worker should've been there by that point and I had no idea what happened. He said he'd have to go once the last group was unloaded. Crap. A month without food in our food pantry would create major chaos. And I was worried about Pam. After leaving a message for Pam at her house, Rick and I determined that we couldn't do much else but wait.
Rick and I got to talking about his driving record. "I have a lot of points, but it's mostly for stupid stuff. Not speeding."
"What kind of stuff?" I asked him.
"Well, I got pulled over once because I slowed down to go to a deli, so I had my blinker on. I realized the place was closed, so I turned off my blinker and kept going. A cop pulled me over for failure to turn. Then he wound up finding drugs in my car."
"Had you been driving crazy?"
"No."
"Were you drunk?"
"No. I was high on crack."
"Well there you have it, Rick! Maybe something about your driving indicated that you might have been high on crack!"
It was quiet for a minute and then Rick asked, "Is this your career?"
"Dammit, Rick. That's a mighty fine question."
As Rick and I tried to figure out my career goals, Pam showed up with the food. It turned out that her son was sick too, so she had to pick him up from school. Then, because they were both sick, she had to pull over a few times on the way to get the food. This day was sucking for everyone.
Rick and I put the food away and then I gave him $20 out of petty cash so he'd have something to help him get by until his meeting at the welfare office.
"I feel so guilty taking this. I didn't work for it. It's so weird." Rick said as he was breaking down boxes.
"You called storage places for Frank, you just unloaded and unpacked all that food and you fixed our truck last week."
"That's not work. That's just favors."
"Take the freaking money, Rick. You can repay us by not smoking crack."
"Ok, it's a deal."
After scarfing down my lunch, I left the office and drove over to the Sussex Street shelter apartments to deal with those dressers. Kim, one of the residents, took a dresser and she and I both brought one up to Stephanie's apartment. I enlisted Bill, another resident, to help me move the rest of them into the back room so they were out of the way. When I was just about done and had everything cleaned up, Stephanie came down in one of her typical frenzies. I had a soft spot for Stephanie. She tried really hard but some mental illness made it really difficult for her to hold down a job. She was a great mom to her three year old daughter and deserved a better lot in life than she was getting. One of my favorite things about Stephanie was her honesty. She was turned down for SSI because of her extensive job history. Stephanie said to the SSI worker, "Yeah, I'm 27 and I've had 20 jobs. You figure it out!"
The SSI worker asked Stephanie for her diagnosis, so Stephanie told her, "I'm neurologically impaired."
"Could you spell that please?" asked the worker.
"I'm neurologically impaired! DUH! Just sound it out!"
Whenever I start to lose patience with Stephanie's constant chatter, I remember that little anecdote. Today's mile a minute panic from Stephanie began. "Uh...Mary Beth...when you get a chance could you come upstairs to my apartment?"
"Sure, Stephanie. Is it an emergency?"
"Well...I opened up the cabinet to put Kelly's toys in there and well...it smells funny. So I want you to come upstairs and tell me if you think it smells funny. K? Oh, and something's wrong with my shower curtain."
"Sure, I'll smell your cabinets. And we can get you a new shower curtain."
I went upstairs and sniffed the cabinets. Smelled like typical musty wood to me. Stephanie said she felt much better and thanked me profusely.
I went to the other shelter apartment building at Union Place, just to remind everyone to clean their apartments cause those UPS people would be coming by that weekend. I wound up getting sucked into the drama at Union Place, which led to me actually say out loud, in the middle of the courtyard, "Contrary to popular belief...this is Union Place, not Melrose Place. Can we all just focus on ourselves already?!" With that I bid everyone a lovely weekend, and headed home.
Seriously....is this my career?
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