Homeless Is Where The Hatred Is

Things are cooling down and I'm struggling against a lack of will to do anything. The joys of watching corruption burn have given way to disgust as white extremists of the right and left become the focus of the Black Lives Matter movement, at least as far as the media dictates. On a smaller scale, our personal problems are far from over. These things only happened a few weeks back and the only thing that seems to have changed is a drop in the temperature:

The other day I helped revive a duster named Ernesto. He was passed out in front of a narrow candy store in this blistering heat wave — the second in under a month. Two young women with stunning long cornrows and floor length sun dresses were trying to get him up by pouring a bottle of water over his rotund bare midsection. One of them half muttered something about her mother knowing him and not being happy if she caught him like this. I wondered what Ernesto’s relationship was to her mother.

I didn’t know what to do about the dust I’d been told he was on but I knew it wasn’t good to be unconscious and sweating like that on a metal grate in a heat wave, so I went in the candy store and got another water bottle and cup of ice. Actually, Eric got the ice, it being 50 cents more than I had on me since disability payments had been switched to cards and the surly bodega man not willing to spare one cube. I wrapped the ice in a paper towel and applied it to the sweaty man’s pulse points — wrists, temples, insides of elbows — -to quickly bring down his overall body temperature. It worked enough to get him to sit up and lap haphazardly at the water bottle. At this point some older teenage boys on bikes came by who also knew him and were willing to get whoever he lived with that I guess kinda looked after the guy. So there was that, about 5 blocks over from where we were staying.

I hope he turned out ok. I have a feeling he did. I got a sense from the boys that this wasn’t the first time this happened with him, from the way they knew who to go get. But I felt this whole sense of people on the street looking out for each other. It was a big contrast to how I’d been feeling the rest of the week. The Post, the Rupert Murdoch rag or journalism more yellow than what your un-housebroken dog pissed on, has been on a vendetta against “homeless hotels” — at least the ones on the Upper West Side. For non-New Yorkers — the UWS is one of the wealthiest parts of the city. The big fancy penthouse building in “Ghostbusters” is there. And due to the pandemic meaning no one could really travel here, plus homeless people were at risk, the city killed two birds with one stone by putting homeless people in some of the unused rooms in hotels, cuz it fucking makes sense. To everyone except a bunch of rich snots who don’t like having to be near poor people of course.

And of course the Post backs them up with alarmist, dog-whistling articles that sound like Trump’s campaign announcement speech. “They’re drug addicts, they’re rapists, they’re very bad” you know the one. It was as full of misinformation and exaggeration as the hatchet piece they did on BRC in 2013 when I was going to the program there. What was more stunning to me wasn’t the Post lying and acting like lying dicks, that’s typical. It was people who I know at least USED TO know better, sharing these articles on their media and some of the comments underneath them, duplicitous phonies who used to say they wished they lived through NYC in the 70’s and 80’s blah blah blah (I did, even if I was small. I look at those listicles of of “photo’s of Time’s Square when it was seedy” and spot relatives and neighbors.) In the months since we haven’t all been able to get together has everyone become a yuppie-lover? Stopped believing housing was a human right? Eventually I got tired of explaining over and over how these articles were full of coded racism and how the city prioritized who was placed in hotels…Tier 1 — on the street, Tier 2 — -in the shelter system, Tier 3 — -moving between friends/relatives etc. and REMINDING them that we’re classified as Tier 3 since we sleep on floors and shower at people we know’s places…I began to mistrust people more and more.

Then I got into a fight with my counselor when all she could say was “It’s complicated” and siding with the rich and the article and saying it was “their right “ because they had the money and I asked “What about homeless poor’s right to have a space where the city put them?” and she started going on about children not having to see people using crack. I asked “what about kids when I was little off of Time’s Square, some of the kids I used to play doubles on Pac Man with had it even worse than me and were selling their ass. What about the kids up here who see people with crack?” and she tells me “Those kids are different, they don’t have the choice.” So suddenly it’s not bad to see??? Seems like a really arbitrary argument.

The overwhelming and unrelenting hatred for people like us — and that includes us makes the air taste like aluminum. I don’t want us to be “the exception” to my friends when it’s far to easy for anybody to end up in a mess. There was too much hatred in the media, from those who’d turned their backs on us from already broken city services ground to a halt by COVID-19. Grinding teeth in my ears made me realize the Nazi C****s who'd hounded me prior to me last long-term hospitalization had made a breakthrough. They’re no longer simply interested in me just offing myself for their personal amusement. They want a mass genocide on the poor and they’ve figured out how to latch on to hosts who might not ordinarily go for it.

I told the psychiatrist at my clinic about this, including that I think my counselor may have been controlled. He gave me the generic version of xanax.