Читать книгу Inhabited - Charlie Quimby - Страница 16

It’s easy to form a bad impression of a good neighborhood.

—“Home” with Meg Mogrin, Grand Junction Style

Promoting the potential of spaces, the beauty of landscapes and the vitality of communities was Meg’s livelihood. Homelessness didn’t exactly fit her brand. It didn’t fit anyone’s brand, unless you were Catholic Outreach. But Eve had told her, You’ll be fine. For a time, she had been. Not a cause she would have chosen except as a favor for a friend, the Homeless Coalition was just another civic duty that might someday pay her back. Oh, she felt sorry for the people who had to scramble for shelter and food each day. She was proud of the town’s efforts to help them find housing. But the coalition’s charge was to end homelessness in ten years. End it here in Grand Junction, as if no tentacles of hardship could ever again penetrate this happy valley once the magic spell had been cast. Ten years was a lifetime in the business cycle. Even presidents weren’t expected to serve that long. New construction had showed its cracks by then. In that span, newlyweds went searching for bigger houses and first graders started driving to school. It was foolhardy to believe thousands of lives would change for the better and none would change for the worse.

But the unreachable goal was not what burdened Meg’s climb to the second-floor conference room. The sight of Amy Hostetter on the ground in the tamarisk had rendered suspect her instincts about familiar places. Her hometown’s darker fringes became foreground. If squatters could appear at the Reiner house, where else might they lurk? A week ago, Yoga Man’s sugar packet forest would have enchanted her; now it struck her as a symptom of downtown littering. Meg had even sensed something sinister about Pandora’s boyfriend waiting for her in his truck. This was not how she wanted to think or feel about her town.

The coalition met in a former church cinder-blocked and subdivided into a hive for secular do-gooders. The groups listed in the office directory were homegrown and locally funded, at levels ranging from a bootstrap to a shoestring. Their building served as neutral territory, away from the outsized authority of city politics, government human services agencies and the Catholic Church—although not beyond the influence of Sister Rose Lavelle, director of Catholic Outreach and chair of the coalition.

Sister Rose appeared, sparrow-like, next to Meg as if alighting from some higher branch. Her eyes were bright and penetrating. “I always enjoy your articles in the magazine. What will you be writing about next?”

Her close-cropped grey head inclined toward the answer.

It had never occurred to Meg that Sister might read her “Home” column. Grand Junction Style did not target those who’d taken a vow of poverty.

“It’s about ways to expand your home without major remodeling—multiuse rooms, taking advantage of outdoor spaces, that less-is-more kind of thing.” It sounded so trivial when she said it to a nun. Maybe she should add a few lines about being content with what you have.

“I look forward to it.” A half bow and Sister Rose resumed her glide of inquiry around the room.

Not a bird, Meg thought, a queen who had renounced her crown.

Sister Rose settled in a chair at the large conference table. As if a bell had rung, the pre-meeting shuffling halted and Meg joined the committee members finding their places: mental health and social case workers, social justice advocates, shelter and housing officials, representatives from the library, the school district, the hospitals, legal services and veterans affairs. No members of the City Council’s Vagrancy Committee appeared this time, and Meg sensed a growing void between them and the rest of the coalition. Two visitors, neither of whom Meg recognized, occupied the outer ring of chairs against the wall. Meg felt a new affinity with Zack Nicolai after their experience on the river, and she took a seat between him and Tony Martin, Amy Hostetter’s partner on the police outreach team. Sister Rose unclasped her hands, and without further declaration, the meeting came to order.

Tony Martin offered a brief update on his partner’s condition. Amy was ready to go home, he said, still annoyed at herself for missing the tripwire and eager to start rehab. So mild and considerate, he scarely seemed like a cop, even in uniform. He would make an excellent undercover officer, should the department ever have to investigate an accounting firm or a ring of flight attendants.

Sister Rose introduced one of the guests, co-founder of a group called Rescue Our Parks. Jennifer Barnes appeared capable of rescuing parks all on her own. Probably a business major who’d aced her courses, found the right man and planned to resume playing professional beach volleyball after her kids started school. When Jennifer stepped to the front of the room she seemed to Meg prepared to spike something.

Jennifer began by acknowledging that the Rescue Our Parks Facebook page featuring a fake homeless man and his bottle sprawled next to a playground reinforced an unfair stereotype, and she promised to take down the image. “Our group is not anti-homeless. The name Rescue Our Parks is meant to provoke discussion about objectionable activities in the parks.”

“Great!” Zack Nicolai didn’t speak for the coalition but the others at the table were happy to let him take the lead here. “Let’s start with a discussion about this statement: Our parks are being used as personal living rooms by people who scorn society. You realize that people who live in a shelter don’t have personal living rooms—so they sort of have to do their personal living in public.”

Jennifer retained her cool. “I get that this is a tough, multidimensional issue. We have nothing against those who are homeless through no fault of their own. My heart breaks for people who don’t deserve to be in that situation.”

“That’s wonderful. My question is how you can tell the difference between a person who scorns society and a person society scorns? Or does your ability to detect undeserving homeless people only work in the park?”

“Excuse me?”

“If I get laid off and lose my apartment, it sounds like I’m a deserving homeless person. What if I’m drinking because I got laid off and lost my apartment?”

“All right, Zack, you’ve made your point,” Sister Rose said.

“The last time I took my daughter to the playground at Hawthorne Park, a woman was asleep wedged in the bottom of the slide tube. When I asked her to leave the play area, she became belligerent. This is only one in a string of threatening experiences in the parks and on river trails—people relieving themselves, unleashed dogs, demands for money. People shouldn’t be afraid to use public places or take their trash into their alley. We love our neighborhood because it’s near a park but it’s gotten so we’re about ready to move.”

Liz, the shelter manager, scrunched her face as if seized by a toothache. “I believe you’re sincere when you say you’re not anti-homeless. At the shelter we enforce rules against drinking and throw people out based on their behavior. But as a community we don’t judge whose suffering is most worthy. We should recognize why people need the park, for good or bad reasons. Exclude them and the issues just surface somewhere else. Help people in crisis and maybe the parks won’t need rescuing.”

“I wonder if some of the fear comes from criminalizing more of the poor’s turf,” said Eric from legal services. “Once you define resting in public as loitering, the public’s more likely to regard someone who’s tired as being dangerous. It’s perception.”

Meg was only beginning to learn the continuum between discomfort, perceived threat and actual danger. She knew from Officer Martin’s reports that the outreach team spent most of its day dealing with homeless people in distress, disorderly conduct that caused alarm in others and petty theft. Actual crimes against the general public were very low, compared to the cases where the homeless were victims, often of each other. She understood how Jennifer Barnes felt; she’d been in the same place only a few months ago, and as a woman, would never be able to fully let down her guard.

Sister Rose made the clasping gesture again and addressed Jennifer. “Your family is rightly your first priority. And your love for them naturally provides all kinds of nurturing and support beyond food and shelter. If only everyone had loving and intact family ties. To help the dispossessed of the community, we must enlarge the boundaries of kinship.”

Jennifer Barnes’s eyes flashed. “If you’re saying the solution is for my family to form relationships with alcoholics and mentally unstable individuals, I must tell you that is not going to fly.”

Meg felt embarrassed for everyone. Jennifer had come with concerns about protecting her children only to be lectured for her insensitivity. It seemed a potential ally was about to slip away, perhaps to join more extreme adversaries. Meg caught Jennifer at the door.

“We should talk later. Maybe I can help.”

Jennifer looked at the card Meg had thrust in her hand, shook her head and kept walking.

“Communities can get tired of dysfunction the way families do,” said Sally, a mental health caseworker. “That’s when you start to see support for more severe measures. Some pressure’s good for nudging the hard cases but making them criminals doesn’t produce change.”

Tony Martin bristled. “That’s not what we’re doing.”

Zack held up his hands. “We don’t mean you, Tony. But the police department’s outreach team used to be three and now it’s just you. I don’t see the city’s commitment there anymore.”

“We’re short-staffed. The department’s holding Amy’s slot open.”

“See how it works? Every turn of the dial has a rationale. Not filling the outreach position is a budget and headcount problem. Crack down on panhandling—it’s all about traffic safety. Tear out the camping habitat—river beautification. And now the library, for cripes sake!”

“Banning backpacks was not my idea,” said the library’s representative.

Zack crossed his arms and rolled his eyes heavenward. “Right, it’s never anyone. Nobody’s anti-homeless. The library isn’t banning people. It’s only banning the backpacks holding the valuable stuff carried by people who have no safe place to leave it! Look at the big picture. More and more resources are going from helping people to pushing them around and nobody wants to call it oppression.”

This was where Meg was supposed to speak up and back Zack down, tell him that if he wanted more resources, he should stop treating the business community like robber barons and browbeating mothers worried about their kids. It was like no one was allowed to pursue their own interests as long as Zack perceived injustice. Everyone at the table was there because they believed the town could be better. He didn’t have a monopoly on virtue.

As if drawing a curtain closed, Sister Rose lifted her hands and pressed them together. “Some of you have met Wesley Chambers. He has proposed establishing an official, sanctioned tent city as an alternative to the current situation. He’s here to give a progress report.”

Wesley Chambers stood and tucked in the tail of his blue cotton check dress shirt. He had likely found it in the free store and didn’t know that it originally cost at least a hundred dollars. The two men in town who had shared that shirt had no awareness of each other, Meg thought, and I might know both of them.

Stepping before the room’s chalkboard, Wesley crossed his thick arms and adopted the glower of a football coach about to conduct a health class for indifferent teens.

“This town thinks it has a problem with transients. I wish that lady had stuck around so I could say this: Please don’t call me a transient. Everything is transient. Everyone is. Some of us know it sooner than others.”

Meg noted Wesley’s lace-up boots, not so different from the pair she had seen on the island. Amy Hostetter had said Wesley was on the river for a reason but not what had happened to him. Maybe she didn’t know. At some point the reasons for things didn’t matter any more.

“You all know what a weed is. A weed is a plant that pops up where it’s not wanted, like a camper is a person, like a person becomes this transient.” He enunciated the word with an arched brow. “Now, if the City considers me a weed, they’re going to chop me down and mulch my butt. Naturally, that tends to make me less enthusiastic about participating in your community affairs. But I do care about where I live. I have friends here. I enjoy the natural surroundings. How I live is not who I am. Living in a tent doesn’t make me a scumbag.”

And living in a big house didn’t make someone a model citizen. Meg knew that but she had never heard the other side put so plainly.

“Sorry. You know that stuff. The town’s solution to its camping problem is to get rid of the so-called transients. My solution is a lot simpler—allow it. Treat camping as a form of self-reliance instead of a crime. Don’t make it illegal to consume less.”

He took a half step back and thrust his hands into his pockets.

“A tent city won’t solve the law’s problems with troublemakers, but it will stop making troublemakers out of people who don’t cause problems. The camp I’m calling Thistletown will offer some security and dignity to folks who need a break, who don’t have money and don’t like walls, who want to set their own rules and act like adults. So where do we start?”

He scanned the chalkboard tray. “Looks like somebody stole your chalk.”

Wesley clapped an eraser on the green surface, creating a dusting of yellow. With his finger, he traced three words. Land. Location. Legal.

“Land’s the obvious requirement. An acre is about minimum. Some communities like this are on five acres or more, but if you get too big it starts to be a crowd. I don’t think you want to go more than about twenty tents or thirty people per camp, so everybody knows each other. The ideal would be a place with utilities, sewer and water access where you were allowed to put a finished ten-by-ten structure on the tent platform. Do we own, lease or occupy with owner permission? That’s a whole topic in itself.

“Location matters, too. For the most part, our work and services are in town, where residents and merchants don’t want us. Locating out in the country makes it harder for us to get around without transportation. That’s why the river worked so good—out of sight and close by. It doesn’t have to be parkland. We could do okay in a semi-industrial area.

“Legal. Right now it’s illegal to live in non-permanent structures within the city. Even if we got a camping permit of some kind, under the ordinance we’d still have to move periodically. So we need a change that allows a tent city to stay put. Then there’s zoning, health regulations, liability. I’m kind of sorry I even turned over that rock. Zack, you want to take it?”

Zack said, “I researched how other tent cities do the self-management. Most of them have a non-profit sponsor—the city, a church, a veterans’ organization that assumes liability and fiscal administration. The residents raise the money and run the place.”

Zack had to know it wasn’t that simple. This was all about the politics and organizing community support. Maybe that’s why he was involved.

“You know she’s going to ask you to help,” Zack said after the meeting adjourned.

Meg looked over her shoulder for Sister Rose. “Oh, don’t encourage her.”

“See anyone else here who could do it?”

“It’s not a winner, Zack.”

“It’s better than what’s happening now. People are going to die this winter.”

“Wesley’s ideas might make sense in these meetings, but not to the rest of the community. You think Jennifer Barnes is going to say, oh goodie, a tent city?”

“Oh, man, I feel bad about beating up on her. She should be able to take her kids to the park. I probably know the woman she was afraid of. I should’ve given Jennifer my number and told her I’d come down there next time to help work out any misunderstanding.”

Zack held open the front door and Meg stepped through. “You seem like an agitator and then suddenly you don’t,” she said.

“I can’t yell all the time. People get tired of the world’s on fire! shit. But it is. Maybe not their house, but it is somewhere, and they only notice the fire when I’m obnoxious. I tried toning it down with the City Council and being factual and respectful. You know, to show I was a serious person. Then they’d thank me and go on with their same-old, same-old. Facts and reason don’t produce action. They barely produce new thoughts. Discomfort is the only thing that moves authority. So I provoke.”

“Right. You and Jennifer Barnes.”

“But she aims it at the powerless. Her interest is her own comfort and to hell with everybody else.”

Meg couldn’t let Zack get away with it. “Her interest is her kids. She’s a mother, not a hater. The coalition needs the support of people like her.”

“My interest is the downtrodden, not the coalition members and their business dealings.” He looked in the direction of Hawthorne Park, two blocks away, then turned back to Meg. “You chased down Jennifer Barnes like you couldn’t wait for a shot at selling her house.”

That was so wrong and unfair! A burning rose from her gut into her chest, then shot down the veins to her wrists and flushed her face. Jennifer must have thought the same thing. Mortification at the unjust impression loomed over the rest of her day, but she knew it was half true. Everything Meg Mogrin touched was perfumed with an artful trace of promotion.