Haunted

I had never really paid that much attention to him. He was always standing in the middle of Grand Street, yelling, “Does anyone have time for the homeless?!” He does this every day. He stands there and waves poverty awareness magazines, trying hard to raise awareness.  When he is not yelling, he looks like a normal man. He is an African American man that is about my height – pretty short – and he always has a black beanie glued to his head with shaded glasses covering his eyes. He is homeless, a word he allows me to call him, and his name is Paul Jackson. He won’t leave me alone.

No, I don’t mean he is stalking me. I don’t want to file a restraining order. He has done nothing wrong to me. I mean that his life, his situation, haunts me. It won’t leave me alone.

I’ve talked to him multiple times before I really got to know him. I bought a copy of his magazine, simply because I was curious, and I asked him a little about it. He sells them for a dollar, seventy five cents of that is pure profit for him, but it isn’t enough. He’s only able to get about seventy dollars per month from the magazines, and I know that is not a lot because I can spend the same amount on a night out. I know, poor me. Every once in a while, after our initial conversation, I would hand him a dollar or two, maybe a hot chocolate. No big deal.

A couple of weeks passed this way, and I never realized the significance of my small gifts. I only realized their significance after I got to know Paul a little better. Because of a school project on poverty, I had to interview Paul and actually have a conversation or two with him. After multiple interviews and non-formal conversations, I learned that Paul was a felon. I learned that he is a God-fearing man.

Paul was a felon because he became a product of his environment when he was young. He grew up in the Projects. Since he was the only half-white kid in the neighborhood, he often got picked on. To deal with this, he befriended lots of older friends. Most of them were in their twenties when he was only sixteen. To fit in, to survive, he needed to befriend them. This was easily done. To remain friends with them though, he had to drink, do drugs, and engage in petty theft. Eventually, he dropped out of high school and ended up in prison, having to serve over twenty five years.

Paul is a God-fearing man because he found God in prison. He explained to me that he was tired of not having control over his life, and his youth became a big blur because of it. After he came back into the real world, he was determined to change that. He was determined to be a valuable part of society.

This is the part that haunts me: he can’t. He has tried. With his lack of education and his felony, no one will hire him. He has been trying for over a decade. So now he’s stuck on the streets. He’s stuck without a home, when all he’s ever wanted to do was get a job and have a place to call his own. This is the same man that blesses people when they walk by. This is the same man that stands on the street every day and tries to raise awareness for people like him. This is the same God fearing man.

On cold December nights like these, he haunts me. I look outside the window and suddenly become aware of everything around me. I’m sitting here in front of my laptop with a refreshing glass of orange juice. I’m dressed in an overpriced, warm SLU hoodie, fly as hell Nike Shoes, and I’m stuffed from midnight omelets.  Where is Paul? I can’t imagine. Perhaps he’s on a street. Perhaps he’s huddled under a building. Perhaps he’s found a temporary shelter. All I know is, he’s probably cold. All I know is, the clothes on my body are worth more than what he makes in a month. All I know is, that’s not fair. And, it haunts me.

Every time I walk back from the library, every time I’m stuffing my face with a fat bacon-cheese burger, every time I curl up in bed, I think, what is Paul up to? Then I get the feeling that I’m getting now. My stomach burns as if a rat is slowly gnawing its way through my stomach. As if it’s trying to scratch through all the white connective tissue and break through the skin. No one deserves to find poverty after finding God. No one deserves to have concrete as their mattress. No one deserves to be deemed worthless by a society that created them.

That feeling is horrible. Sometimes, I can’t escape it. But, I think that feeling is also a blessing. I’m blessed with the knowledge that the less fortunate are simply that – less fortunate. Behind their circumstances, I believe each person has a deep pool of history, ambition, and integrity. My relationship with Paul gives me clarity in my life: I realize how lucky I am, and how much I don’t deserve it. If I was blessed with the amount of determination Paul has, I’d already be in Harvard.  But, I’m not. For some reason, I am here, while he is out there. This feeling, this clarity, is why I find small gifts, an apple, a hot chocolate, a dollar, so much more valuable now. They may not get Paul out of the streets. They may only help him temporarily, but I know that if Paul and I switched places, I would really appreciate a cup of hot chocolate every now and then.

 

 

Photo Credit: weliveoneworld.org