Us and Him

Splayed out under a lamp post, I pulled a loaf of bread from my black plastic bag. Crunch, crunch. It crumbled. Sighing, I wrapped the blanket tighter around my shoulders, and looked across the street to Sabrina, sleeping on a cardboard box under a fire station. A man with a cane creaked across the street, back and forth, back and forth. He stopped in front of me to massage his knee. My fingers curled around the beer bottle moldering in the dirt, but no need. I was of the street-invisible.

Each year the city conducts a count of the homeless. To check its accuracy, it needs faux homeless, acting as foils. Implemented by an organization called Shadow Count, it sends hundreds of students and young professionals out into the street to pretend to be homeless. Depending on how many of the Shadow Count participants are found, the city can estimate the accuracy of its number. For example, if half of the Shadow Count participants are found, the city can conclude it undercounted its homeless by half. In preparation for my night dressed as a street person, I swaddled myself with T-shirts and sweatpants, tying a long sleeve shirt around my neck as a scarf. At 8:30 p.m., six friends and I ventured off to Staten Island in sweatpants and plastic bags, stoked. Oh, and we got paid one hundred dollars for doing so.

None of us did it for the money. But I do not want to sound like I experienced any hardship in my time on the street. I did not. I was out in the cold for 60 minutes. A man with a jagged voice offered crack to a passerby or two. I read four pages of D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love. Policemen's radios crackled in the distance. I learned two things that evening: that it is cold outside in the winter, and that I know nothing of generosity.

One in the morning, Sabrina has to use the bathroom, and I feel like walking. We bundle down the street to the only open store, a 24-hour bodega filled with potato chips and garbanzo beans. Sabrina asks to use the bathroom. I chat with the clerk, a youngish immigrant with growth on his face and curious eyes.

"How long have you been homeless for?" he asks.

"Oh, actually, I'm not homeless," I say, fingering my green sweatshirt, and pulling the bandana farther up on my forehead. "I'm part of an organization that helps count the city's homeless people."

"Oh. Do you have a place to sleep tonight?" he asks, not understanding me. I decide to stay on task.

"Not tonight, it's just been bad for a few days."

"Do you have one of those cards? All the black people on the street, they show me these cards, for which to get cheaper prices."

"I'm fine... I'll be fine in a few days." He looks at me, frowns, then builds up a smile. Silence for a few minutes. Then:

"My family is still in Iraq. I send them money when I can, you know, but it's hard." He stares deep into my eyes, then reaches his hand into his pants and retrieves his wallet. "Let me give you something," he offers. He pulls out a twenty-dollar bill.

"No, I don't need this, really, I don't," I say, trembling, as flashes of pathos and mirth dance in his eyes.

"Please, take it. This is between me and society, me and God. I know. Please take it."

I sigh, and place the money gingerly in my pocket. Sabrina emerges from the bathroom, and we exit the store. There on the street we meet the counters, who immediately realize that we are not homeless. We congratulate them for finding us, and they mark us down on their clipboard. Sabrina hands them her hand warmers, and they take them with appreciation as it begins to snow. I call the shelter to come pick us up. The shopkeeper comes out on the street and sees me on my phone. After I hang up, I again offer to return the money, but he just smiles and says, "Me and God."

Back at the homeless shelter where we started, I give the money to the front desk. I unwrap a sweet potato I carried in my garbage pack, peel it, and eat it.

On the Staten Island ferry, three of us stand outside in front, swigging wine and trading poems and memories. Passing the Statue of Liberty, we try to remember the lines emblazoned on her base by Emma Lazarus, the pampered Jewish intellectual turned social thinker. "Give me your tired, your poor," and our words drift off. In the distance, Lazarus' line, "The wretched refuse of your teeming shore" melds, melting-pot style, with a vision of equality.

Isaac Stone Fish is a Columbia College senior majoring in EALAC. The Sounds of Isaac runs alternate Thursdays.