Perspective of Ilusion and Hunger.

I  am late. I was late that day as well: the first day I knew what being homeless was all about. The first day I learned how to spell "hunger."  I think I made exuses back then too. But I have learned how to better forgive myself since then, or at least, I would like to think so.

When I remember hunger and homelessness,  I remember always wondering why I never "fit" in anywhere. In another story for another time,  I'm going to look at that, again. For now,  I'm thinking about Royal Oak, somewhere in the early eighties. This was a time long before my diagnosis of Autism: long before  a lot of things actually.

I had just left Ferris State College: back then, it was a college, nowadays, they are a state university. I was mad at everyone and everything at that  time. Everyone from my Mom and Dad who had recently divorced to the Israeli treatment of the Palestine. I need to say that I didn't graduate from Ferris State. When Christmas break came around and all us kids were told to go home, "have fun, enjoy yourselves," I had every intention of January of the coming New Year being the next time I would see the place. Yet, as I sat in Greg Barrett's Firebird, that long ride home from Big Rapids gave me time to think about and wonder just who was I going home to.

So began  a series of adventures and lessons about lonlieness, homelessness and hunger. But not everything that happened was necessarily bad, nor was anything that happened back then, a good enough reason to hold a grudge today. I did stay with my brother and sister-in-law for a time until I told the wrong person to kiss my ass. Then I stayed with my Father, his new wife and her kids for a brief time: until I smoked a joint in the house when I thought no one was looking. Someone was, and I was taken to and dropped off a The Palms Motel.

Everyone at the time knew I couldn't stay with my Mom. She and my sister had recently moved to Oklahoma and no one was willing to put up the money for bus fare. During this time of course, Christmas Break was pretty much over and for some reason, it never occurred to anyone, including and especially myself, that just maybe I should go back to school. Looking back, this was doubly ironic because I originally had gone to Ferris with a full athletic scholarship. The most important person this should have mattered to was me, I can't remember thinking too much about it and to this day, I still can't explain why I did what I guess, I chose to do.

From the Palms Hotel, then, I guess it was sometime just after New Years Day, I started looking for a job and found one: but not before running out of money and food and obviously, a home.

So, the first time I was hungry, I was homeless, lost and thoroughly confused as how and why all this happened in so short a space of time. I wish I could say this was the first and last time I would ever be hungry and homeless. I wish I could say that I ultimately found a calling or at least some close friends  I could count on.

Unfortunately, I can't say any of those things yet.

The funny thing is, the day the Palms Motel "kicked" me out,  I had found a job as a dishwasher at the Clawson Troy Elks on what used to be Big Beaver Road on the boarder between two neighborhoods: one rich and the other, working class. But even though it was among other things, a restaurant,  I remember there being something like a two week "break in" period where you might get some food "if" someone had the time to make it for you and you had the time to eat it. Getting those two schedules to match up was always difficult, especially for a new guy like me.

Consequently, there was almost a week and half when I went hungry. I would eat a few extra biscuits here and there: usually a meal no one else wanted. And after work, I would go across the street behind a warehouse where there was this ditch and in that ditch there was a slab of concrete overhanging a slowly moving drainage sewer.

Some nights I had day old cheese sandwiches I had found at work, but most nights after work, I would just cross the street, hunker down and wait for the sun to go down and the stars to come out.

In retrospect, I was fortunate it only rained twice in those two weeks and that it was early fall. I was also fortunate when Betty, an accountant working at the Elks Club, followed me one day and discovered what I was doing. I think the first thing she did was to get me some food, yet the only thing I honestly remember, was looking up from that ditch that early evening in October and seeing that ruddy faced blonde woman, climbing out of her car and  walking over.

"What are you doing down here?" she asked.
I didn't say anything at first. I remembered being nervous and afraid that she would call the police. After looking at the muddy green water flowing beneath me for a moment, I looked back at her. "This is where I live," I said. "This is where I stay."
"Not anymore," she said while gesturing me to come up to her. " Are you hungry?"
I nodded.  Although I had leaned how to push that constant grumbling that always comes from a perpetually empty stomach, out of my head, I remember thinking I was indeed really hungry.

And I was.

These days when I see someone on the street who I know, as if by instinct, that person has not eaten, I can't wait to get home and look in my cupboards, put together whatever I can and take that down to The Peoples' Food Coop here in town. There, as you come through the door on the left is a barrel that patrons are encouraged to place whatever foodstuff, canned goods, boxed meals: whatever they can.

Whenever I pass that barrel and look in, I always see my reflection: just like my reflection in that flowing sewer behind that warehouse across from the Clawson-Troy Elks all those years ago.

I look and I remember.

A Few Thoughts from
Tom