I’ve put up two posts about the shelter: Life in the Homeless Shelter and Life in the Homeless Shelter, Part 2.
@Dogjustice asked on Twitter for an update.
I am still living at the homeless shelter.
Life continues as it has since I’ve gotten there (and probably as it has since the beginning of homeless shelter time). We get up, we have devotion (which is a short, inspirational reading followed by a prayer), some eat some breakfast, and then we do some chores.
Breakfast at the shelter usually consists of some oatmeal or Malt-O-Meal. Sometimes there are old donuts donated by one of the local grocery stores. Infrequently there is milk and on those days people can have some cereal.
On Sunday, things are a little different. We get up and we do chores. At 8:00 we go next door to the church part of the building an a hot breakfast is offered including biscuits and sausage gravy and some fruit. Then we have a Sunday school lesson and a regular church service.
Church at the Salvation Army usually includes some singing. I didn’t know it, but there are hand gestures to a lot of the songs. Usually, one or two songs are included that the little kids can sing. Jesus loves them, yes they know.
Nothing happens at the shelter in the middle of the day. The doors are locked.
At 6pm, lots of people in need line up for the “soup kitchen” dinner. A prayer is said and many people pay attention to the prayer. The meal is usually served by volunteers from another local church or by kids from the Southern Baptist University.
Many of the “people in need” of dinner are in need because they spent all their money on necessities like alcohol or white rocks or white powder or sticky plant flowers. Some are in need because they lost their job and the electric company still seems to demand payment.
Dinner is almost a balanced meal. There is always a meat, a starch, bread, a vegetable, and salad. Sometimes Mr. Dairy rides in on cheese. Rarely is there fruit.
I don’t know what it is about fruit that it’s not provided. Perhaps it’s the cost.
Dan, George, and Bob are still in the shelter with me. I’m glad they’re with me, but I wish they were on their own and happier.
Dan suggested the other day that the three of us (Dan, George, and I) get a “pad” together.
I really want to live alone, but perhaps it would help Dan to have me around. Dan has a tendency to think negatively. Perhaps some positive energy would help. Of course, there’s always the danger of falling into that sort of thinking.
This last Saturday night I was in a terrible mood. My daughter had turned 13 the day before and I’m not allowed to see her and I got through Friday I think by ignoring it and then spent a bunch of time alone on Saturday and started to have problems.
Anyway, the point of bringing it up is that Dan was the only person who noticed something was wrong and asked me about it. Of course I lied and said everything was alright, but I was sure to do it in a way to indicate that nothing was alright. I really appreciated his notice though.
George sometimes gets frustrated with Dan’s negativity. George can be pretty negative too, though.
Dan is a music aficionado. He knows everything about the music he likes and the people who made it.
George and Dan’s musical tastes do not intersect.
George has a Beck DVD of which Dan approves and a Deep Purple DVD of which Dan does not. “Who put on this crap?” I hear Dan say.
So, while George was out of the lounge, the DVD was changed to Beck.
This pissed George off.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette and found George standing by his car looking through a book of CD’s and laughing. I asked about it and George asked if he thought Dan would like a little Mötley Crüe on the way to work that morning. I thought it was pretty funny, too. Dan hated it, by the way – you should have seen his face when I asked about it.
Bob is really getting sick of not doing anything. His day consists of groups at the nearby mental health clinic, watching TV, and cooking dinner for his mother. Then his mom gives him a ride back to the shelter in time for cleanup after the soup kitchen dinner.
Bob told me he has a job in the oil field lined up for next month. It starts at $17.50 an hour and he could not be happier. He has been talking about weed more and more lately.
Bob and I had a discussion about women on Sunday morning. Our conclusion was that never again will either of us be lead into a relationship by sex. We think it’s a good policy to find someone we can stand being around first. I’ve actually been pretty lucky with numbers 1, 2, and 3, but I didn’t tell him that… it’s still a good policy.
Wait, some might say my luck has not been good because there are three instead of one.
Bob is 40 (I’m 41), but Bob has three grandchildren. One of them turned two the other day. His son picked him up and took him to the party.
Recently in the shelter was Troy. Troy is a computer nut who brought in a brand new laptop with him. Troy also has a car, but the tag was expired, so he rarely drove anywhere.
Troy was in the shelter because his electricity was turned off. After about two weeks, it started to look like he was going to get a job as a security guard. I guess he had enough of the finer things, so he pawned his computer and got his electric turned back on. Back home!
Troy was seen the next day by his friend and a shelter resident, Ray. Ray said Troy was so drunk that he couldn’t make it into his own house.
Ray is an ex-con who recently got out of a Missouri prison. He was sentenced to 15 years for being an accessory to armed robbery.
Ray says that he had no idea there was going to be a robbery. In fact, he was passed out in the truck. He says there are a dozen witnesses who confirmed his story.
The two guys who actually went into the store were given a lighter sentence. They fingered him as the mastermind and the judge said he was going to make an example out of Ray.
Ray served a year and a half and then applied for early parole which was granted.
Cory is another ex-con staying at the lodge. He says he’s been in prison three times and never got into a fight. I don’t know what he was in for. Cory is very helpful with everything and very polite. Cory was excited to find a pair of sweat-bottoms that fit him in a sack of donated clothes.
He was wearing them this morning.
One child-woman named Tammy was staying at the shelter. A few days after she came in, her boyfriend Fred came in to stay.
Tammy lost her kids due to drugs and problems with the law because of drugs. Tammy never takes responsibility for anything. Tammy bugs people for attention. Tammy is constantly testing Fred and making him do things just to see if he loves her. “If you loved me, you’d stick your finger in your eye.”
Tammy got on everyone’s nerves.
I’m usually in the crew washing dishes after dinner. One night I was drying. We have this problem sometimes: very few large and medium sized towels for drying dishes. There are lots of washcloths in the closet, but they’re not very useful for drying.
Tammy waltzed into the kitchen spewing nonsense loudly and grabbed one of our towels. Then she proceeded to dip the towel into the water so she could go wipe off tables.
Okay. First, I should be happy that she was going to do any work at all. Her favorite thing is to find ways to do nothing, loudly. If she can’t get out of work, she whines, loudly.
But, it really made me angry.
Here we were, a bunch of guys on a job, with an inadequate supply of important tools lying before us and this girl-woman-thing comes in and grabs one without asking.
I actually said something. This is not like me. I was as nice as I could be (which is how I try to be), but I’m sure anger was burning in my eyes. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t apologize. Luckily, she didn’t cry. Also luckily, she didn’t beat me up (she’s large). She was pretty nice to me after that, though.
Anyway, one Friday night neither Tammy nor Fred came back for dinner. They missed cleanup. They both missed the Christ-centered 12-Step meeting, Recovery in Grace (don’t get me started).
At around 7:30 Tammy came in and said she had been at Wal-Mart and lost track of time.
At 8:30, I went out to smoke a cigarette and noticed some strange lady writing on a notepad in the office and there was a police car outside.
Later I heard that Tammy accused Fred of raping her on the railroad tracks and had called the cops.
She did not press any charges.
Fred never did come in that night, but I found him out near the smoke-hole the next morning. We talked for a while and then I told him that I don’t like to spread rumors, but since what I heard involved him that I would tell him. He said that was “messed up.” They did have sex, but it wasn’t rape. He wasn’t worried.
That night, I saw Fred again and he told me the whole thing had been a misunderstanding. She was raped, but she mistook someone else for him.
Okie dokie, that made perfect sense to me.
Fred was not allowed to come back to the shelter because he spent all night out.
That next week, the shelter manager called some of the places at which Tammy had claimed to apply for work. None of them had applications from her and they didn’t remember her. Tammy was asked to leave.
We also have two 18-year-old identical twin man-boys living there, Tim and Tom. They both have mustaches and pointy red beards. I can tell the difference between them by their beards. One kid keeps his longer than the other. And they argue about it frequently. The boys are pretty rude, but I’m chalking that up to being young and not being raised to have good manners.
Last night the twins were watching WWE. That’s wrestling. No, it’s professional wrestling.
They put up a slide up during the show last night saying that WWE is seen in like 450 million homes around the world which is more than the NFL, NBA, and MLB, combined.
What WWE needs is a split screen so you can watch a NASCAR race at the same time. I’m a genius.
Ok, I did see women wrestle… professionally. And I saw a turkey. It was a woman in a turkey costume.
That bird turned out to have lots of white meat. I’m sure it was the hormones.
Leave a Reply