Circumstances have smiled upon me
and I found myself with new and more gainful employment. I made the move from
journalism to “the dark side” of public relations. My days are still filled
trying to understand the minutia of financial terms and technological jargon,
I’m just writing for a different audience.
The new job is a shorter commute and
is in the
Flatiron district of New York. It’s less than two blocks from
Madison Square Park and only one block away from the 6 train. The office is in
a small building on 24
th Street. It’s convenient to both a 7-Eleven
and a deli, and near a Baruch College building.
The new office is also only a few
doors down from some kind of halfway house or rehab center. There’s no sign on
the building indicating this, and a cursory web search of the address revealed
nothing about its current use. You can tell what it is by the people who
congregate outside and can be seen coming and going. Even before I discovered
its location, I knew there was some sort of facility in the area because of the
skels I would see on the street.
Skel is an antiquated term meaning
street criminal but it’s a catch-all word that is used to include any kind of
troubled sort given to criminality, and the homeless and mentally ill seemingly
fit into this category.
It’s easy to
pick out the skels on the street.
They are dirty and wrinkled. They are not homeless-level dirty and don’t have
the mile-away stink that typical street bums do. They do not carry around
excessive luggage or tons of crap in shopping carts; they have a place to live.
But street people have a way of standing out, at least in today’s less
crime-ridden city. Twenty years ago things were different and many parts of the
city were blanketed with homeless and other skels. Today Manhattan does not
have too many poverty pastures. There’s still plenty of poor people in New
York, but the space allowed for skels has diminished significantly.
When I worked in the lower part of
midtown Manhattan about 12 years ago, the area was populated with a lot of
street people. There was a methadone clinic across the street from the building
where I worked and some kind of halfway house was not far either. One time I
was on my way out of a Duane Reade drug store after buying a few things when a
man and woman rushed up to the counter. The man was holding a $10 bill.
“I need change right away! I have
to pay the taxi!”
“They’re going to send him to jail
if he doesn’t pay!” his female companion said.
The clerks behind the counter shook
their heads lazily.
There was no cab outside with an
angry driver waiting.
Another time I was walking around on
my lunch break and I saw a two men approach a man from behind, one flashed a
badge and the two plainclothes cops took the man by the arms and pinned him
against the building where I worked.
“Where’s the weed?” one of the cops
asked him. I didn’t bother to stick around to see how this encounter ended.
When I returned from my lunch break, they were gone.
There is both a Taco Bell and a
White Castle on that block of 8
th Ave. and 36
th Street, which is heavenly unless you are
so poor you really can’t afford either. I was coming off of more than a year of
unemployment and I was so poor that my lunch sometimes consisted of the free
snacks that the failing company offered. Still, the kinds of human abominations
that frequented the area were seemingly from a different era. A woman
complained to her friends about not getting what she needed from the methadone
clinic. Random
skels shouted their opinions for
the world to hear.
Despite the
improved conditions in the Big Apple over the last 20-plus years, New York is
still famous for its seedy element. Before it was populated with fancy hotels
and trendy restaurants, The Bowery was famous for its many flop houses, where
people paid low rent to live in rooms no bigger than a jail cell. It was a
world-famous refuge for drunks, drug addicts and criminals and there are still
some homeless charities left on The Bowery, which is also known for its stores
that providing lighting and restaurant supplies.
The residents of
the nearby halfway house are easy to spot. They are dirty and disheveled. But
even if you cleaned them up and dressed them in tuxedos and ball gowns, they
would still stand out because they’ve acquired such gaunt features and acquired
the mannerisms of the permanently destitute.
People often wear
their desperation outwardly, and for the lifelong criminal and drug addict
these are impossible to hide. Despite all of their efforts, you can hear the
junkie quavering in their voice, sense the hurting shiftiness in their eyes,
and know to avoid them.
Sometimes you can
get fooled, but not for long. One time a man in a suit waved to me and held out
his hand to shake mine. He looked a lot like someone I knew so I assumed I knew
him and that I had forgotten his name, which I do all the time. Once he started
talking though, he started blathering on about his wife being somewhere and he
needed money for a cab etc. Damn, I got suckered into listening to a
panhandler. I didn’t give him any money but felt like a sucker anyway.
No matter how
real or sincerely someone may seem, you’re a damn fool if you give one cent to
a panhandler. Even the most bleeding-hearted skel lover admits that the
overwhelming majority of
money you give to panhandlers goes to purchasing drugs and/or alcohol.
For some reason
we allow people to live worse than animals on the streets and subways. If a dog
looked and smelled like that, they’d be taken away and given shelter. Somehow
it’s deemed liberating to watch people wallow in their own filth, but there’s
nothing progressive or enlightening about it at all.
Eventually
gentrification will continue and the city and private charities will realize
they can generate more revenue for their cause by selling the valuable real
estate they hold in Manhattan and move their services to less expensive
neighborhoods.
There’s a belief
among many artists and poets that the destitute and poor some kind of unique
insight or soulful legitimacy. Since they are not blessed with American success
they are not cursed by it, or so the logic goes. But you’ll find that most bums
on the street are just that: bums. They’re every bit as shallow and ignorant as
the
douchebag financier or the
fashionable hipsters we love to hate.
The world will
never be rid of street people. New York’s dwindling clans of them are still
around, but their roaming grounds have been sharply reduced and can’t support
as large a population.
