On Being Homeless, but Not Without Hope in North Philadelphia

In a defining experience of my life, I was homeless in North Philadelphia for three months, from November 2015 to February 2016. I was in an unfamiliar city, thrown in with people I had never met. This period of my life was terrifying, yet often exhilarating. I stayed at two homeless shelters; the first was Our Sunday Breakfast, just north of Center City Philadelphia; the second was the Station House in North Philadelphia's Glenwood neighborhood. It was an uncomfortable mode of existence, though there were inspirational things that I will remember for the rest of my life. Philadelphia can be rough, gritty and dangerous, but it welcomed and nurtured me during my three-month ordeal on its cold, gray winter streets.

I first became homeless due to a horrible home situation, in which I was partly to blame. My parents and I have had a rocky relationship since I was nineteen. I have long sought adult autonomy for myself, and for years I've felt that my parents have fought me on this. My parents are very upset that I rejected the strict religious upbringing that they pushed on me, including their ultra-conservative political views. When I was in my twenties, my parents vehemently opposed my going out to bars to drink and socialize with friends, despite the fact that everyone my age was doing the same thing.

They believed that I would be condemned to Hell because a night of drinking with friends was viewed as a mortal sin by the Catholic Church. Our frequent arguments led my parents to avoid me for days on end, especially when I came home at 2 or 3 in the morning after a night out. I always took a cab home, so I really didn't see the problem; I didn't appreciate the crushing Catholic guilt. I would go out two or three nights a week, not every night like some hardcore alcoholic. My parents also didn't provide the emotional support for me to tackle some minor mental health issues at the time.

When I reached my early thirties, my parents became even nastier about the fact that I had rejected their conservative values and very strict rules; they refused to let me grow up and to become my own individual person. I started cutting down on my partying, but occasionally when conflicts with my parents really came to a head - about once every year or two - I would spend a night abusing alcohol in order to get back at mom and dad, due to lingering resentments. This never accomplished anything, and I have since learned to avoid this self-destructive behavior. In the autumn of 2015, however, all of these factors came together to create the perfect storm that tempted me to make one of the worst mistakes of my life.

So, on the first Sunday in November 2015, I put a few personal belongings into my black book bag, which I took everywhere; it was perfect for a dirty urban vagabond. Being that it was November, I took two coats, along with a winter hat and a pair of gloves. I definitely needed those items! I believed that my parents had filed a missing person's report with the police, since I left without letting them know where I was going and because of my mental health issues; my family had used my mental health issues against me in the past. When I fled the family home, I therefore sought a remote place where the police would have trouble locating me.

I decided that Philadelphia would be the perfect place for a newly minted transient such as myself, that a large city would have more hiding places and an entire network of underground drifters with which to settle, communicate and exchange resources. I figured that surveillance videos of bus stations would be turned over to police, so I decided to spend a few days walking to Philadelphia from Bethlehem, a distance of over seventy miles on the Delaware & Lehigh Canal Trail. My ATM card provided some cash to purchase cookies and sodas at convenience stores along the way. I avoided sleep, so as to avoid dying of hypothermia, even though this made me very tired and irritable as time went on and I continued stumbling along in the rain.

When I got to Morrisville, I took a SEPTA bus into the Frankford section of North Philly, where I bought an all-day pass and traveled SEPTA trains and subways around the city, getting a feel for the Philadelphia cityscape. Sleeping on the streets in the bone-chilling dampness would either get me killed or arrested, so I made an extra effort to get accepted into a homeless shelter. I found one listed on informational sheets obtained from the Philadelphia library. In the meantime, I spent a few nights sleeping in train stations and subway platforms. After those harrowing experiences, a weekend in the Station House, a shelter in North Philly, felt like a stay in the Waldorf Astoria.

By that point, I was very dirty, smelly and unkempt-looking. I was only allowed to stay at the Station House for three nights, so that on Monday I had to meet with a person at a social services office to be placed in a new shelter. Because I had refused to provide a previous address to social workers, I got sent to a private, Christian homeless shelter, called Our Sunday Breakfast, for 30 days. It ended up being a smelly, dirty, cramped experience, but one which was highly educational for me. I saw up close and personal the social injustices heaped upon many Philadelphia residents, as well as the relentless scourge of the American criminal justice system.

I very quickly adjusted to my chaotic, difficult life in Philadelphia homeless shelters. I learned to score toiletries and supplies at Love Park, and through social contacts within the shelter system. At Our Sunday Breakfast, the Christian homeless shelter run by black ministers and funded by private charities, we slept with the lights on all night, cameras trained on us from the ceiling. This was to prevent shootings, drug use or homosexual activity, which was explicitly and emphatically prohibited by the critical, homophobic clergy. We were two hundred dirty, smelly men forced to sleep in one large room overlooking Philadelphia's Center City skyline. It was most unsanitary and disgusting, but I learned to cope with it, and was glad to have some time away from my family.

One of the hardest things was finding activities to occupy my time. When I was staying at Our Sunday Breakfast, near Center City Philadelphia, we were only allowed in the facility at night, so we had to find things to do in the city during the day, without any money! I would spend the morning hours walking around Philadelphia, exploring the city on foot. In the late-morning, I would enter the Free Library of Philadelphia when it opened, part of a large crowd of homeless people that would ascend the stone steps to an enormous building reminiscent of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. I would read books in every section of the library, staying active and trying my best to appear as a nerdy, urbane bibliophile, instead of the lonely vagrant that I was.

Soon, my thirty-day stay at Our Sunday Breakfast was up and I had to find another shelter to call home, so I got myself assigned to the Station House indefinitely by the City of Philadelphia. It total, I had two months residing there, with a reasonable degree of safety and security, at least for a while. I spent many of my nights reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac, which was the perfect novel for my situation. In this North Philadelphia shelter, I was housed with five other men in a small, relatively private room with a cleaner, more accessible bathroom. There was also a common room where many of us would socialize and watch TV, though we sat on butt-numbing benches, attached to the tables on which we ate our horrible meals.

As I took comfort in the warmth and increasing familiarity of the Station House, I solved internal issues by examining my life, my situation and my personal relationships. With each day, I began to think more about my family back home, though I was still very angry with them. By that time, I was back in communication with a few of my cousins on social media, met up with one of them, and then was informed that no police report was filed, so I felt more at ease and more free to rethink my complicated feelings about my family. I started to read more at both the Temple University library and at the Free Library of Philadelphia, definitely feeling better about myself.

Things took a turn for the worse at the Station House in late January 2016, however. During the pre-dawn hours of Sunday, January 17th, a disgruntled former resident of the shelter, John Brock, who had been expelled for drug use at the facility, returned with a gun and shot two members of the shelter's security staff. The one security man, Lamont Barham, survived the shooting. The other man, Edward Barksdale, a good, caring man, was brutally killed in what was a very grisly scene; one of my newfound friends, Bobby, witnessed the whole thing, to his horror. I slept through the incident, but I heard a metallic sound like a mental chair being dragged across the floor; it was incorporated in my dream, which was abruptly ended when Bobby came stumbling into the room, clearly very distraught.

After the shooting, conditions at the shelter deteriorated very quickly. The director, a sadistic former official of the Philadelphia prison system, started bearing down hard on us. In February, my case manager at the shelter also started asking probative questions about my background, not trusting the fantastical script I had stuck to for three months, which inevitably contained a few falsehoods. I also feared being expelled from the shelter, which would indirectly lead to my incarceration in Philadelphia County Prison, an extremely violent, overcrowded jail that many didn't survive. Living through a shooting and facing future imprisonment prompted me to mend fences with my family and move back home for a while. My cousins were urging me to do just that in mid-February 2016, so I did the reasonable thing, swallowing my pride in order to create the best life possible for myself under the circumstances.

I finally returned home on February 15, 2016, Presidents' Day, and was very happy to sleep in a regular bed in a private bedroom and to be spending time again with my parents, whom I realized that I deeply loved, despite our not seeing eye to eye on many issues. My cousins had been informing my parents that I was alive and healthy for the preceding two months of my absence, but they were glad to have me back in the home and in their lives. It was a pleasure to be able to visit my favorite coffee shops again, and to reconnect with friends, whom I greatly missed. I felt like a normal person once again!

I learned a great deal about life and society from my experience of homelessness on the streets of Philadelphia. The two worst men that I encountered during my ordeal were registered sex offenders just released from prison after many years behind bars. One man, Jerry, was a repeat child molester who was my assigned bunkmate at the Station House; the other guy, Steve, was a convicted rapist. The other three men in the room were sociable, caring individuals, quickly becoming friends of mine. Bobby was my best friend of all, providing me with clothing and moral support, in contrast to the cocky nastiness of the two sex offenders. Jerry and Steve had created their own hell through their horrible decisions, whereas the others were merely good men down on their luck.

I learned that we still have Apartheid in this country, despite the fact that state-sanctioned segregation ended in 1964. I saw firsthand how many African-American men born into poverty live a vicious cycle of addiction, incarceration and living in other punitive institutions. On a personal level, I learned to enjoy the simple pleasures of life and to rely upon a positive mental attitude to get me through life. I learned that I had to rely on myself in this world, and that nothing given is actually free. You have to pay for it one way or another, even when money doesn't change hands. By remaining positive, you create a better environment for yourself and everyone around you, affecting beneficial social change as you focus on the big picture, looking at some of the problems that lead to homelessness.

Solving the problem of homelessness is an important social issue that we need to tackle. When society incarcerates its rapidly increasing homeless population it spends much more taxpayer money than it would to provide meals and rudimentary shelter. This is true in both the immediate term and in the long-term. The City of Philadelphia is providing more homes for qualified homeless individuals, but it still relies heavily upon a model of incarceration, institutionalization, and then re-incarceration. This vicious cycle is greatly aided by a violent, repressive police department, with the very worst officers assigned to the poorest neighborhoods, which are overwhelmingly African-American.

In conclusion, homelessness is a worsening problem in America, but it will abate in the post-Trump era, when people stop demonizing the many individuals who are down on their luck, targeted by a broken criminal justice system or victimized by the forces of growing economic inequality in the United States. Seeing first-hand how homelessness actually works teaches you much more than a book or online article. It has led me to reorder my life and see the larger picture, how our destinies are all interconnected, but are all put in peril when we ignore individuals that we are taught to view as "undesirable." The trials and tribulations of our current social and political climate will create a new social awareness once we reach the springtime of the new era.