Watching over Intox in the afternoon and I hear vomiting in the women’s section. I go over and Sara is knelt alone on the floor vomiting into a garbage bag. A coworker told me she used to be a model. She still carries around a couple portfolio photos. Now she’s a serious drug addict, wears the same clothes every day, covered in dirt. There’s a scar on the bridge of her nose. She always gives me a look like “I know what you’re thinking.”
I ask her if she needs anything. She shakes her head no. I give her a new garbage bag in case she needs to be sick again. I briefly ponder whether we should call them utility bags instead of garbage bags because it would be more dignifying for the homeless who carry all their possessions around in these bags and the contents of their lives shouldn’t necessarily be referred to as ‘garbage.’ Her vomit is totally undigested chicken soup. I put the garbage bag into another garbage bag. I also wonder if there’s a more appropriate place for a garbage bag full of drug addict vomit, like some sort of hospital bio-chemical bin. But if it exists I’ve never seen it. We only have very small yellow buckets under the desks for needles, and there’s no way it’s appropriate to shove the vomit bag into a little bucket under the desk. So I take it to the trash compactor outside with all the other garbage bags. Sara seems fine after that, or as fine as she gets. She has a nap and eventually leaves.
In the evening, I’m on the fourth floor. There’s a volunteer up there. It’s her first day and she asks me what my ‘craziest story’ is. It’s a question I’m starting to get a little weary of, even if it’s a fair question. I tell her about the guy who threatened suicide in my first couple weeks, only because it is the fastest story to tell.
The next time someone asks me to tell them ‘my craziest story’, I’ll tell them this: All the agencies that help the homeless in this city work in direct competition with each other. They slag, badmouth, demean, trample, and suppress each other at every opportunity as they compete for funding from the government and private donors. An agency that helps put people in homes might not accept people from our shelter. Our shelter might tell clients to stay away from that agency because they’ll only get screwed over; we don’t want to give those agencies any freebies. Another agency might turn away anyone who needs a little extra help because they want their numbers looking perfect when the time comes to ask for more money. Furthermore, agencies come up with programs that are attractive to donors, not ones that are necessarily needed. So while our lobbies are full of aboriginal people with severe Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, administration thinks of things like Basketball Programs for Single Dads because funding agencies get all teary eyed at the idea.
That would have made her squirm.
