LIFE/HOMELESSNESS
Revealing The Forgotten, Unsheltered, Displaced, Homeless, Hungry, Made Invisible
The olfactory onslaught surged by these unfortunates is substantiated in some straightforward physical realities
Often, I receive many reminders of my particular good circumstances, of my having scored big in life’s sweepstakes: I have a good life–a good husband, a lovely family, and good health.
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If you live here, you encounter homeless people daily. On the subway, on the street, in parks. Because I live in New York, these reminders are sometimes distinctly pungent and putrid. I am referring to the definite aroma of the homeless. I am not unfamiliar when it comes to foul miasmas. I have been to many public restrooms from hell; I have tossed out rotting foodstuff. But the smell of the homeless is something else altogether.
All around me, displaced Americans sleep on floors and even trash cans as I go about my daily life, while some are tucked up modestly on benches and at food hall dining tables.
Most regular riders of the New York City subway will have seen someone who lives on a train or in a station, sometimes asking for money. The homeless have become part of the subway experience.
The subway is the safest place to sleep for many homeless people in New York City. Trains and stations afford shelter, but the streets do not. Many are brutally murdered while they sleep on the sidewalk.
Last Saturday, my husband and I were on our way to see an off-Broadway play. We entered the E train and were immediately assaulted by a foul smell. Most of the car was empty, and the few remaining riders were sitting on the far end of the car, holding hands over their noses. My husband and I immediately assessed the origin of the smell.
Two homeless men were each sprawled, sleeping on a bench. Another man with white hair and torn clothing lay on the floor of the E train, blinking in the fluorescent light of the car. My husband and I concurred quickly and decided to get off as soon as the subway stopped at the next stop and move to another car, which we did, followed by the rest of the riders.
Some straightforward physical realities substantiate the olfactory onslaught surged by these unfortunates.
They are unwashed and have been so for some time; archaic sweat and grime blended into a poisonous compound, and those mentally and physically unable to take care of their most rudimentary needs have let urine and solid excrement linger on their bodies.
Sleeping homeless is nothing new to New Yorkers. Sometimes, we experience it as we step into a suspiciously non-crowded subway car; sometimes, when we step off a train and walk by a bundle of rags lying on the ground; sometimes, when we walk under scaffolding on a sidewalk and spot a pair of cardboard boxes thrown together to fashion a makeshift shelter, I am reminded of an apocalyptic scene reminds me of Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road.
The characters in The Road are homeless folk. They might initially seem unfamiliar to us because the world illustrated in the novel–devastated by an unspecified catastrophe–looks comfortably distant from our everyday reality.
But the homeless among us live in such a post-apocalyptic existence: an apocalypse has already occurred in their lives. They are without homes, hungry, dirty, on the edge of starvation, reduced to scavenging for bits and pieces, smothered in their waste, reeking to high heaven, perpetually in danger of being set on, assaulted, set on fire, or murdered. There is little hopefulness in their lives, little to drive them onwards except the brute desire to stay alive.
But what makes this odor entirely offensive is the knowledge that it is amalgamated with a human being, that a fellow creature is the source of it and is packaged up in it, and that their survival is inseparable from it. A sensory battering that we find intolerable for more than a second or two, that makes us want to distance ourselves from it, to switch subway cars at the next subway station, that makes us quicken our pace to the exit stairs of subway stations is, for that person, a vapor that hovers over their every daily moment.
Packaged in that smell is a whole account of things gone wrong, of unfortunate eventualities that ended in disaster. It possibly began with a misfortune–a lost job, a broken home, a mental illness–that overturned an otherwise fortunate life, or perhaps things started poorly and progressively became more rotten.
Whatever its derivation, no other sensory input I encounter in my movements through this great city reiterates as unpleasantly how fortunate I have been and remain so; nothing else instigates both the wrinkled nose and the shudder down my spine.
May the sun be shining its brightness upon you!!!
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