September 17, 2011
2. Newblog2011: 09/17/11 The Boston Public Health Commission shelter in Quincy; more abuse.
Yesterday, a homeless man wearing a Mickey Mouse baseball hat threatened me on the shuttle bus out to the Boston Public Health Commission shelter in Quincy. He said “I’m going to take Axe deodorant and spray it right up your ass.”
There was also other harassment on the shuttle yesterday, and at the shelter, as there has been since the first day I was there.
That shelter has had Wet Floor signs where there is no wet floor since the first day I was there, also. It seems to me that the shelter is responsible for the fact that the man threatened me, because the shelter itself is harassing me.
When the bus got to the shelter, I told the supervisor about it, and he said he would find the guy and talk to him.
Something else happened at the shelter last night.
In addition to the fact that there are still no blankets or pillows, I’ve mentioned before that the mattresses could easily be 30 years old and are in terrible condition. You get assigned a bed when you get to the shelter; they take your shelter ID card, assign you a bed that has a number, and keep a record of that in the computer.
A few nights ago, I was given a top bunk. The mattress was horrible; the stuffing of it was completely distorted. In some places it was a foot high, and in other places, you could put your hand on the top of it, press slightly and feel the bottom of the mattress and the metal springs of the bed frame, through the mattress.
The top bunk of the bed next to it, which, as I’ve said about a lot of the beds at that and the other Boston Public Health Commission shelter, Woods Mullen, was only a few inches away, seemed to have a much better mattress. I went to the office and asked the staffperson behind the counter if I could have that bed. He said “Fine; tell me what number it is.” I went back and saw that it was bed number 42.
I asked for that bed again the next night, because when I got up in the morning my back didn’t hurt.
I told all of this to the New York Times in a voicemail to its reader comment line last night. I said, too, that I might ask for that bed again, and I was very emphatic about how difficult it is to go without enough sleep under ordinary conditions, but that when you’re homeless it’s even worse. Sleep is important and you can’t go without it. A bed is a bed; there are a lot of things in my life that I can’t control right now, and the numbers on beds in a shelter is one of those things.
I said everything else that I’m going to say about beds to the New York Times last night, also.
One of the reasons that I called the New York Times last night to tell them anything is that I’ve been assigned the bed number 58 before, I know that everything I do electronically gets watched, and I DON’T want to be associated with anyone or anything that promotes the issues that I’m against, if I can help it.
Even though I defended the fact that I’d asked for bed 42 a second night, the night before last, yesterday evening I did look around the dorm for another bed. It seemed to me that the bottom bunk for bed #59 was ok. Bed #58 is a few feet away from bed #59, and I noticed that the bottom bunk for bed #58 had nothing on it but a blue umbrella, but I figured that meant that someone had been assigned the bed already and had put her umbrella there.
I went out to the office and asked the lady behind the desk if I could have the bottom bunk for bed #59. She looked at me and said “Bed 58 is the next bed.” She took my shelter card and assigned me the bottom bunk for bed 58.
There were a lot of other empty beds in the female dorm when I had that conversation with the staffperson at the shelter. Not only that, but a lot of those empty beds had numbers that were lower than 58.
Then I understood.
I went and got the umbrella off the bottom bunk of bed 58. I brought it to the office and I said to the woman “Someone must have left this umbrella there.” She said, “Bring it back and put it on the top bunk of bed 58. If it belongs to someone, she’ll go back and get it.”
I said “No. When you find a lost object, you bring it to the office and turn it in.”
She insisted that I put the umbrella back, which meant that she wanted me to leave the umbrella on the empty top bunk of bed 58, where I was going to be sleeping in the bottom bunk, in a room full of homeless women, many of whom have been harassing toward me.
I refused to bring the umbrella back into the dorm. She took it and went into the dorm with it.
I went to the supervisor, for the second time that night. I told him what had happened. He said “Let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill.” I told him that I had been reasonable enough, that everybody knows what’s going on and that when you find a lost object, you bring it to the office and put it in the lost and found.
The lady walked back out of the dorm as I was talking to the supervisor. She said “I didn’t put it back on your bunk.”
I went into the dorm and saw that she’d put it on the empty, top bunk of bed #60. I took it and brought it back out to the office, and showed it to the supervisor. He said “I’ll take it; I think maybe I could use it.”
This morning, I saw that on the floor next to the bottom bunk of bed 58, which is close to the wall, there was an empty Cheez-its bag and an empty peanut M & M’s bag.
Also this morning, on the other side of my bed, on the floor between my bed and the bottom bunk for bed # 59, someone had left a large piece of crumpled toilet paper with something smeared on it.
I'm going to get logged off this computer in a few minutes; I need to save this now so I don't lose all the work I did on it. If there are typos in it, I'll have to edit them later, if I get a chance to do that. There are other things I need to write about today.
All I told the NYT last night was about the beds and that I got threatened. I didn't go into specifics about the threat.
Copyright, L. Kochman, September 17, 2011 @ 9:59 a.m./addition @ 10:02 a.m.