Jeff Herman sits on the front desk of the Shalom Community Center's dining room and hands out the laundry detergent that guests use to do their laundry. He's excited because today he'll have his first job interview in the past four years.
He met the manager of a fast-food restaurant at an AA meeting (although, he tells me, he doesn't drink -- he has a different weakness). "If he gives me a chance, I'll do everything I can to hold on to it," he says.
Jeff has been homeless for a few years now. He camps out in a tent about a mile and a half from Shalom. He served in the military for nine years and received three honors, he says. For Jeff, homeless life is not that bad. "It's as good as you make it or as bad as you make it."
The Shalom Community Center is a place that provides basic services for the homeless and the poor during the day, from free meals to social security planning, bus tickets and creative writing classes.
Life at the Shalom Community Center revolves around the dining room. In the basement of the First United Methodist Church on Fourth Street, brightly painted in yellow and orange, the room almost always buzzes with activity. Even after the doughnuts, bagels and cereal are cleared from the breakfast table, there's always warm, fresh and surprisingly good coffee in the thermal jars.
The Shalom dining room is a place where people from countless walks of life converge. It's a place of hope and despair, where the choices of the past reflect onto the uncertainty of the future, where the present is at once promise and purgatory.
A young man sits by himself, drawing imaginary lines on a blue cloth napkin. A hoodie covers his head and he's facing straight down. When I sit down in front of him, he raises his eyes just slightly. He has shaggy brown hair, a scruffy beard, bright green eyes, and stained teeth. He looks to be in his 20s.
I thought he was going to ignore me at first, but when I started talking him he became warm and eager to talk. He tells me his name is Lao - he picked that name for himself a little over a year ago. He's been coming to Shalom for meals for about six months now.
Lao is fascinated with China and its culture and has strong opinions about socialism and communism. He's also religious. "I woke up to God and felt it was time for a change." He says he likes Buddhism as well, and that he's a Taoist by thought. "I'm walking the path of the sages, of wise men," he tells me. But he doesn't see himself as a wanderer. "I'd rather not be a wanderer. I don't choose to be homeless - that's where I am right now," he says.
Breakfast is over, and an old man sits by himself at one of the dining room tables, waiting for his turn with the Veteran Affairs consultant, who comes to Shalom from time to time to advise veterans, who make up a large number of the homeless population. William Vaught has milky white skin and matching hair. He has been coming to Shalom for a couple of months.
"They take real good care of you here," he says. Vaught is a retired driver for the Disabled American Veterans. He says the food at Shalom is good, the place is nice and clean, and everyone is friendly. "There's lots of ladies, and black people," he says, lowering his voice and widening his eyes a bit. "It's like a big happy family."
He smiles broadly. But then his smile fades, and he tells me why he's been coming to Shalom. "I was married 53 years, and my wife passed away. She took care of everything. I'm lost without her."
Outside the dining room, a bulky man with short blond hair is sitting by the door of a storage-room-made-barber shop, where a man gives haircuts every other week. The man waiting for the haircut, Tim, tells me he eats breakfast and lunch at Shalom every time he can - when he's not doing odd labor jobs. He occasionally volunteers in the kitchen. He's been coming to Shalom for a couple of years. "We'd be lost without it," he says.
He says the food is occasionally really good, but all the time it's free, and he chuckles. When it comes to people, he says Shalom has a bit of everything.
"It reminds me of the circus," he says. "There's no telling what you'll see in this place."
A small, dark-skinned man enters the center, looking lost. His English is not that bad, but he's looking for information on how to get a library card, and asks me if I speak Spanish. When I tell him I do, he looks relieved and excited.
His name is Leon Saenz and he is originally from Lima, Peru, but he has Italian and Spanish ancestry. He's been living in a small town near Bloomington since 1994, when he married an American missionary he met in his home country. Two years ago, his wife died of breast cancer. He was a doctor in Peru but hasn't been able to obtain a license to work as a physician in the U.S., he tells me. He says people also discriminate against him when he looks for jobs, because he looks Hispanic.
"'We will call,' they say," he complains. But he says he likes coming to Shalom, where people are humble, just like him. "Son almas preciosas," he says - they're precious souls.
Joel Rekas, the always pleasant, calm and soft-spoken director of Shalom, says the agency tries to provide a nonjudgmental environment where everyone is welcomed and accepted, no questions asked. "It's a gathering spot, but beyond that... relationship development doesn't know socioeconomic bounds," he says.
Patti Kraus, a caseworker at Shalom, says the place is completely run by the guests. "We're not invasive. ... We don't ask anything in return." She says there is only one rule: guests cannot show up under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Other than that, she says, it's a "safe haven" - anyone can eat and use the services, regardless of proof of income.
At Shalom, not everyone is homeless. One client, a tall black man who looks absolutely regal in his Eastern-looking robes, comes in every morning with his laptop. One morning, he also has a huge and very old-looking book, which he later tells me is an Arabic dictionary from the 60s. He goes back and forth from old book to laptop as he studied the language.
Not everyone is friendly, either, and many keep to themselves. Sitting next to the Arabic student is a man with silver rings on every one of his fingers and a couple of tattoos. I ask him how he's doing. He frowns at me and said, "I don't like people asking me that. People don't usually give a shit. I don't ask, 'cause I don't give a shit." And that's the end of that.
And then you meet people like Al Salas. Al is one of the nicest people you'll ever meet. He's a bit shy, but still gets along well with everyone. And it's hard to find anyone more grateful to Shalom than Al.
"If it weren't for this place, I'd be lost," he says. He takes advantage of many of Shalom's services, from laundry to shower to long-term storage, where he keeps whatever's left of his belongings after he was robbed.
"That's pretty bad, when people steal from the homeless," he says. They took some of his most precious belongings - pictures of his kids and of his mom's wedding, his military papers, his diabetes prescriptions.
Al had lived in Bloomington for some six years in the 80s, but has been back for only eight months now. He's from Corpus Christi and was tired of it. He says he lost everything after his divorce. His son just got back from Iraq and his daughter is an RN, but he doesn't want to live with them.
"This is my mess," he says. "I don't like to impose on people." He lives in a sort of teepee he built for himself in the woods about an hour's walk south of the shelter. But he doesn't want to live like that all of his life. "I'm gonna be rich one of these days," he says.
"Did you know I was a professional boxer?" He asks me. "My whole family was. We used to box onions, tomatoes..." He chuckles at himself. ("Did you write that down? You should write that down," he tells me.)
As I talk to Al, an old man sitting next to him starts talking to us out of the blue about something on the newspaper he is reading. He looks to be in his 80s (but he's actually 75); his face is covered by a thin gray beard, and he wears a large, furry, Russian-style hat with a Soviet red star pin on the front.
I cannot understand him very well because he has no teeth and a pretty thick accent. But I only have to turn to him and ask him one question, and he ends up telling me his whole life history. He's from North Salem, Indiana. "That town never changes," he tells me. "My entire family is buried there."
He says he hasn't been back to see his great-great-niece, and that his sister's son hung himself. I eventually ask him about his hat. He says he got it in Moscow, during his 2000 trip to Russia. He also tells me he visited Mexico City, Peru, Tokyo in 1981, and Cairo, Egypt in 1982 - in the latter, he tells me, he had to stay inside his room all night because of martial law, and soldiers with gun surrounded his plane as he was boarding.
He also says he's been to the Fiji Islands, but only for a couple of hours for the plane to gas up on his way back from Australia (where he put his arms around a kangaroo). I ask him how he got the money to travel the world, and he just tells me, "I love traveling." When I ask him if it was with the military, he tells me he'd never joined the army. "I wouldn't shoot a man," he says. "I wouldn't be a coward, but I'd be afraid to die. A coward's better than a dead hero anyway."
His brother followed a different fate, and ended up paralyzed from the waist down in Vietnam, he says.
The next day, I walk into the dining room as breakfast is starting to be served, and Jeff's sitting at his usual spot at the front desk. He's holding his head, leaning on the desk, and looking down at nowhere in particular, gloomily. I'm afraid to ask, but I do anyway.
"How was your interview?"
He looks at me, sighs, and shakes his head. "They didn't hire me 'cause of my voice," he says. "Said it wasn't loud enough." Only after Jeff tells me this, I notice his raspy voice, which had thus far been loud enough for our conversations. "Tracheotomy," he tells me, showing the round scar in the middle of his neck. "This is all the voice I've got left."
It seems that, to flip burgers at a fast-food restaurant, one is also required to be able to yell loudly enough to be heard during rush hour. "It's kind of a lame excuse," Jeff tells me. He says he's tired of being discriminated against because he's homeless. "If they hire me they find the tiniest little thing to let me go," he says.
At least for the holidays, though, Jeff has a backup plan. He'll be ringing the bell for the Salvation Army, like he did for most of last season (he didn't finish, because he ended up being incarcerated for a while). "The hardest part is staying out in the cold," he says. But at least he'll get to make a little money.
Still, Jeff is clearly disappointed he won't have a full-time job; he had told me that he was hoping to get it so that maybe after a while he could afford a room somewhere and get off the street.
A young man sitting next to me drinks a cup of Starbucks coffee and is dressed rather more preppily than the others. But John Howard is here almost every day for the same reason everyone else is - to get a free meal. He tells me he's short on money - and, as for the Starbucks coffee, he has a friend who works there and "hooks him up" for free.
Howard is an independent major slowly working towards a degree in community media at Indiana University, is a volunteer at WFHB, the community radio station, and is trying to start his own business as a Web developer - he's working on a site that will market rental properties in college towns.
He's been having a great time hanging out at Shalom. "Meeting a lot of people from different walks of life has increased my sensitivity to issues such as poverty," he says. "It made me less judgmental of people."
"What's to eat?" I ask Jeff and Al, as they return to the dining room just before lunch. "Depends on what gets delivered," Jeff says. "Wednesday's usually spaghetti... Ron can cook pretty good chicken. There's pizza every now and then." On the menu today is macaroni and cheese with ham, corn and green beans, salad, bread and butter, pumpkin cake, caramelized apples and tiny squares of cheesecake for dessert, and sweet ice tea to drink. There's plenty for everyone. Not bad.
Jeff is annoyed whenever guests complain about the food. "I don't question what they have to eat down here," he says, adding two proverbs in a row for good measure: "Beggars are not choosers. Don't bite the hand that feeds you."
A few of the guests sit with their coffee mugs browsing local newspapers as they wait for lunch to be served. Today happens to be municipal elections day. Jeff's not interested. "I'm 45 years old and I have yet to vote," he says. "I've never had the desire to. What difference is it going to make? They're full of empty promises. It's all bullshit."
Al joins in on the chorus. "I've never voted in my life," he says. "They don't put food on my table." What about the recent mayoral debate held at Shalom, when the candidates talked about the ways in which they would address homelessness? Al was there. "They're a bunch of liars. It was a waste of time," he says.
"JFK is the only president I would have voted for," Jeff reflects. "I've always wondered what would have been like if he had not been killed. I think it was the mafia and the government. I think it was because of 'Nam... and Bob Kennedy, he got killed because he would have followed after John... Marilyn Monroe, she died because she was screwing everybody. I think they killed her 'cause she knew too much."
The conversation proceeds with everyone regretting the wretched state the country's in. "I don't mind being homeless so much, because gas is going over $3 a gallon, and I don't have to worry about that," Jeff says. Al says he'd prefer to ride horses everywhere, and there's a horse he's been eyeing, and if only he had the courage to steal it, he adds with a smirk.
The topic of discussion moves from horses to Indians, to nature, to global warming, to what's happened to romance and families and respect for one's elders and spanking children. Every once in a while, someone sits down by our table and chimes in with a sentence or two, then goes back to their reading and coffee or whatever they're doing.
The workers and more than 100 volunteers at Shalom are also active participants in the social life of the center; they eat their meals here many times, and take time to sit and talk to the guests. "I enjoy learning their stories," says Mary Andrus-Overley, director of programs. "It's a privilege to help them. We see people who maybe didn't make the wisest decisions in their lives, but they're people with a lot of courage who have survived a lot of hardship."
Lao asks me if he can sit next to me. He has a battered copy of George Orwell's Animal Farm in his hand. We talk for a long time about politics, Iraq, sustainability and books; he's obviously intelligent, although sometimes he rambles and does not make much sense. I finally ask him what he wants from life. He looks at me with melancholy. "I was on a spiritual pilgrimage. I'm stuck. I don't have a place to go. I'm like a fallen angel; I have no family, no friends. I can't work at the moment, I'm too weak, too exhausted, I don't have a home to sleep in.... I feel wasted. I'm trying to make a big move. I'm too damn talented."
Lao tells me he's an artist, and pulls out several pieces of paper from his coat pocket. They're drawings with Asian motifs - mostly sketches of Asian women and Chinese characters. He tells me he can speak Chinese, that maybe he could teach, but he doesn't know what to do. "I'm waiting for God to throw me a life boat. I'm upset because He forgot about me. For four years, I did nothing but be a monk. I devoted my life completely to God and now I'm stuck here. God's a mean old man."
Back in the hallway, Will, the Shalom guest who did the paintings hanging in the dining room, is painting an impressionist landscape. He makes thick strokes of green, blue, brown and black against the salmon-colored background. "I think it's Yosemite," he says. "I was looking at pictures of it earlier."
Gregory Homburg tells me he's seven-eighths German and one-eighth Scottish. There's a town in Germany with his family name - not Hamburg, the big city, but Homburg, a small town, which is where his ancestors are from. He's a janitor at the Bluebird nightclub, but he wants to find a better job. He's 54 years old and his head is shaved clean. He's been in Bloomington for six years and used to live outside a lot, but now he has a little room to live in.
Homburg lived in Indianapolis with his mother and took care of her until she died in 1994. "I got mad with the world when she died," he says. That's when he decided to stick his thumb out and hitchhike across the country for seven years. He says it's not that hard to get a ride, "if you stay clean and sober, and you're honest... America is still the land of the free."
He says he's no holy man, but Jesus has kept him healthy. "I used to be a very grave sinner. ... I used to crave women all the time, but I stopped. But every couple of years, I mess up. ... If it's not serious, it's a sin."
He tells me, if I have a boyfriend I love, to marry him and go to bed with him and have babies, because that's what God and Jesus and the Virgin Mary would want me to do. (Maybe he and I could have babies, he says, but alas, I'm too young for him.)
On my third day at Shalom, I run into Al again. He's in a particularly good mood. He looks elegant, wearing a red sweater over a crisp buttoned-up shirt and a houndstooth checkered scarf. Al tells me he just took a shower and did his laundry, as he does every day (Monday through Friday, when Shalom is open - "How hard it is to go through the weekend without a shower!" he says). He says he loves the feeling of being clean. "I'm in heaven right now," he says.
When he finishes his coffee, Al is headed for the public library - another one of his daily habits. He says he reads the Bible a lot, and then just looks for something he finds interesting. He's big into history. The other day, he didn't know what to read, he says, so he just pulled out a thick, heavy encyclopedia from the shelf and started reading at random. "There's just so much history," he says. "There's so much to know."
As I bundle up and prepare to go out into the cold, Al shouts at me from across the room, "You stay warm, now." As the icy wind greets me outside, I feel a wave of warmth coming from inside me. I realize that for Al, for many of the guests at Shalom, this phrase has a much greater significance than it's ever had for me - I, who've literally been sheltered all my life. Staying warm is not something Al takes for granted, and that's why he's so grateful for Shalom.
Walking away from the center, I marvel at the fact that a place that provided external warmth for so many had given me such a warm feeling within. Without realizing it, I, too, was given something I lacked.
And I was thankful.
Joice Biazoto can be reached at joicecris@hotmail.com.
