• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Guests may do their laundry at the discretion of the staff and their ability to monitor the laundry/cubby room.

Lights are turned off at 10:00 P.M. Television is turned off at 11:30 P.M.

* * *

When Sarge returned, he took me on the promised tour of the grounds. We started outside so we could “save the best for last.” Behind the Men’s Shelter, to the left of the shelter for women and children, he pointed out two crack houses that were operating in full force. He showed me the line not to cross—out of bounds for all shelter residents.

“If I catch you on the other side of this line, you are evicted from the shelter for three days,” he scolded, respectful yet stern.

He used his electronic passkey to gain reentry to the building through the back door, which took us through the Transitional Dormitory. It was very nice, elegant, almost. This was the suburb of the shelter, the “Hamptons” to the inner-city lifestyle of the shelter on the other side of the wall. Just as the name would suggest, it reminded me of life in my college dorm with an added European youth hostel feel. There were fourteen cubicles in one huge room, each cubicle complete with a bed, a chest of drawers, and plenty of storage space. There was a TV area with sofas and two computers sitting on top of black wooden desks lining the back wall. A mini-fridge stood next to the TV with a microwave on top. What struck me as particularly odd was how clean and tidy everything was. The floor was not dusty, the magazines on the coffee table were not flung all over the place, and it didn’t smell anything like what I had anticipated. Sarge explained that through a graduated program I could work my way up to live in the Trans-Dorm, although I later learned that veterans of the military are given preferential treatment, so, regardless of my rank on the waiting list, my chances of being accepted to live in the Trans-Dorm were slim.

And then we walked through a back door and into the general population section of the shelter.

Disgusting. Reaching the immediate conclusion that daily showers were not enforced, my first instinct was to pull my shirt over my nose in order to extinguish the reeking stale body odor, but I didn’t want to give off the impression that I was a softy before I even truly began my journey. Nonetheless, I was nauseated.

The expansive room was noticeably plain, with its white walls and white tile floors. No pictures; no decorations; no furnishings. The floor was lined with two rows of mattresses on each side of a four-foot divider wall that split the room in half. It was nearly 1:30 A.M., so nobody was awake, although a few people rolled and moaned in their sleep. And the snoring. Oh, God, the snoring. There’s nothing harmonious about the chorus of a room full of men snoring in unison. My college roommate snored like a warthog choking on his tonsils, so you could say I was used to it, but ninety-plus roommates added a different dimension.

Sarge walked me through the dining area, which was also jam-packed with sleepers. Now I knew why there was always room for one more at Crisis Ministries: if there’s no room over here, then there’s probably room over there.

We tiptoed through a back corridor, dodging more sleepers en route to the bathroom.

The repulsive appearance of the bathroom sparked initial thoughts of seeking alternate methods of maintaining my hygiene. My nostrils were still filled with the stench of the sleeping area, but it didn’t block an entirely different odor from seeping in. There was no way I could use those facilities. A thin layer of grime lined the already green walls, and the floor was spotted with patches of filth. Open stalls meant we were forced to endure the humiliation of relieving ourselves in front of our shelter mates. Two of the toilets, in fact, were covered in plastic (thus deemed unusable), and the other two didn’t even have seats. No seats? Where am I supposed to sit?

The sinks were the cleanest part of the bathroom, although you couldn