I could have been at a Labor Day party, chowing down on tacos and making underwater movies with my daughter. God bless waterproof cameras.
Instead I’m spending the weekend at a homeless shelter in Hollywood, Florida, drinking sugar with a splash of coffee. Toilet paper is sticking to my shoe, and I’m wondering if the tickle in my throat is MRSA.
That’s pronounced “mersa.” Because it sounds more evil that way. More vile — like you could die from it. Which I suppose you could if you contract it in a homeless shelter. And if you don’t wash your hands before taking that next sip of …
Tell you what … why don’t I just go scrub up again … scrub like I’m going into surgery.
MRSA is a staph infection that is resistant to most antibiotics. And I’m told it’s one of the risks in the shelter. One of many. I’m learning about all the risks this weekend. About the need to wash my hands after I touch anything. About how grateful I should feel to have my own bed to sleep in, which I will sleep in, if I ever get out of here.
I’m not sleeping here. I’m not a resident at the Johnny McCormick Homeless Shelter.
I’m told the shelter was once a seedy hotel that had mirrors on the ceilings. (It’s South Florida … you figure it out.) Now it has some 150 residents in dark, musty rooms that empty onto darker interior hallways where the air is too tired to move.
It’s stuffy and stale.
I smile as I walk and pass people, because it’s a good way to fake that this place isn’t getting to me. Isn’t making me uncomfortable, which it clearly is, and I don’t want the nervous college journalist who’s with me to see that. Better to smile. A big, fake, plastic smile.
I’m with a college journalist because of all things, this homeless shelter also has a homeless newspaper. The second largest in the country, and they sell it on street corners and busy intersections in South Florida to raise funds.
I’m at a program called Will Write for Food. Some guy I know — a college newspaper adviser at Florida Atlantic University named Michael Koretzky — has actually convinced 20 college students to give up their Labor Day weekend to come here and put out the 20-page newspaper. They have 36 hours to do it (which includes coffee breaks and smoke breaks and frequent bouts of hand-washing.)
They’ve come from as far as Alaska — like the guy I’m walking with — and two of them are my students from Flagler College.
Koretzky has convinced me to come, too. And I accepted, lured by little more than the promise of free sandwiches and supermarket-brand soda. (He never mentioned MRSA over the phone.)
When not exploring the shelter and talking to residents, we’re crammed in a little room where people type stories on laptops like they’re banging away at Whack-a-mole.
It takes me back to the days of my own journalism career. When chronic cursing was encouraged — and not a sign of Tourette’s syndrome. It’s nostalgic.
Back to that hallway … we’re going to see what they call the “room at the end of the hall.” It sounds like MRSA to me. I am fascinated and I am also terrified. In my mind, this room is a concrete-block bogeyman. I’m told it’s where they put residents who don’t quite “fit in” with everyone else.
Maybe they’re troublemakers and start fights. Maybe they’re prone to psychotic episodes or they’re dealing with heavy addiction problems. It’s a way station for the truly troubled and clearly despondent. The shelter worker who is going to take us there laughs when he hears where we’re heading. “You WANT to go there?” he asks.
I wonder why I didn’t go on the story about religion or the one about how the ice cream shop down the street hates the shelter.
But something happens in the room down the hall. Something while I’m listening to this guy from Brooklyn. Other residents call him “Rain Man.” He remembers everything … yet fumbles his own birthday. It is here — in of all places! — that I forget about MRSA and crack addiction and HIV.
I realize something important: that all around me is humanity. Poor. Sad. Tragic. Down-on-their-luck. But people. People struggling — many because of their own mistakes — but people all the same. And suddenly homelessness isn’t just an issue for me — it has a face.
I feel a connection.
There is meaning and purpose to the weekend, and I’m no longer sorry I gave it up. Not even to come to a dark place like this … not even for all the hand-washing.