• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Welcoming me at the front door was a large white sign with red and black lettering designating my location: Crisis Ministries, 573 Meeting Street. I rang the doorbell.

No answer.

I rang again and waited. Still no answer.

I knocked gently on the door and steadily increased to a full-force pounding. A lady yelled from across the street that they were closed.

Closed? I couldn’t even think of a witty response. How could the shelter close?

“They stop taking people at nine. You gotta show up at seven thirty if you wanna get in.” For $10 she said I could stay the night at her place. Once again, an intriguing offer for inexpensive lodging that I quickly refused. On the streets, confrontations were in the open. Behind closed doors, anything could happen and nobody would know.

Shortly after I had begun to make myself comfortable on one of the two benches outside the shelter door, I spotted someone coming around the corner of the side of the building. Police officer number two for the evening slowly made his way toward me.

Sergeant Mendoza, his badge read, stood five and a half feet off the ground with an additional two inches as he boasted about his role in serving the guests of Crisis Ministries. I could tell immediately from his demeanor and the austere look on his face that he took his job very seriously. Clean-cut with the walk of someone on a mission—someone with important dealings to tend to—I couldn’t tell if he was thirty-five or sixty, but his body was built like he was twenty. He had retired as an officer in the army, he explained, and was presently the only officer in the Charleston police force who enjoyed the beat at the shelter.

“Excuse me, can I help you?” he asked, concerned.

“Well, uh, uh, yessir. I’m looking for a place to sleep.”

“Well, uh, uh, do you think you would be more comfortable inside as opposed to sleeping on that four-foot wooden bench?” His wisecrack lightened the mood.

“Yessir, but I was beating on the door, and the lady across the street told me the shelter was closed.”

Sergeant Mendoza, who I later discovered was addressed by everyone—his wife included—as “Sarge,” went on to echo the same thing she had told me. Residents are processed from 7:30 to 9:00 unless they have a late worker’s pass. But they had room that evening for one more.

“You’re on the wrong side of town to be sleeping outside,” he explained. “You won’t make it through the night out here.”

He led me inside the shelter, into the place that I would call home for the next seventy days.

After double-checking with Harold, the front desk clerk, to make sure there was room enough for one more person, Sarge gave me the okay that we would find a place for me to sleep. If I had known about the sleeping arrangements at that moment, I would have known what a joke that was. There’s always room for one more at Crisis Ministries.

After the initial registration process (“Fill this out,” “Sign here,” etc.) and a background check that returned no outstanding warrants, Sarge led me to a back room for part one of my orientation. What could have easily been a fifteen-minute crash course on How to Survive in a Homeless Shelter was stretched into an hour-and-a-half seminar that included an overview of the shelter, facts, statistics, a bathroom break, and even a one-man skit on how to let somebody cut me in line. “You might be called a sissy,” I was informed, “but being a sissy is better than seeing a fight break out in here. Please, we don’t need any more heroes in here.” I was beginning to think that Sergeant Mendoza was extending our late-night session in an effort to relieve his own boredom, but I didn’t care. I was mesmerized by my current situation, my entrance into a world saturated with dormancy, druggies, and deadbeat dads. A world loaded with potential but short on ambition. A world of independence—free from responsibility—where each day would be mine to seize, or, if I chose, to squander. High hopes for someone with only $23.27 left.

Sarge continued his spiel, detailing