October 5, 2011
2. Newblog2011: 10/05/11 Abuse
My tape recorder is working fine. I'm going to need more time to publish what's on it.
I have not had a chance to write about even half of what I need to write about, and that’s been going on for days and days. Maybe I can sum it up; I have pages that are all handwritten, describing everything that happened.
--I got bed bugs from a shelter that I stayed at for one night. It was nice that I was able to stay there, because it’s always helpful to have a place to stay at night. I only needed it for one night because, also helpfully, I had been able to get into a shelter that lets people stay there for 6 nights in a row. Most likely, I got the bed bugs from the place where another homeless woman threatened to bite my ear off. If readers remember, I wrote that I slept on the couch in the lobby that night, in front of the desk where there’s always staff. Maybe the beds don’t have bed bugs, but my guess is that the couch does; it’s out in the common area, where a lot of people spend time. My guess also is that the couch doesn’t get cleaned the way the sheets on the beds get cleaned; how could it? It’s not the kind of couch that has cushions with covers that you can take off and throw in the laundry every day or every couple of days. It’s the kind of couch that you’d have to get special tools to clean, or get a professional to do it, and what shelter has the money to get its couch professionally cleaned every day or every week?
I noticed the one itchy place on my chest, (not my boobs, I am so not in love with being harassed and feeling like I have to say that), the afternoon after I’d been at the shelter. Finally, when I realized that more bites were showing their presence, I realized that I must have been bitten the night before. I told the staff at the shelter that I was supposed to stay at
I was supposed to spend my first night at the shelter where the guests get 6 nights in a row. I told the staffpeople there “I can’t stay here tonight; I can’t stay anywhere until I find out if I was bitten by bed bugs and have a chance to wash or throw out everything I have with me.”
They were reasonable about it; you’re not supposed to be able to leave once you’re in the place which is called, unfortunately, Harbor Lights. It’s a Salvation Army shelter. They told me that I could return and stay the remaining 5 nights if I brought something from the hospital I was going to that would prove that I’d been seen at the emergency room and that I had a good reason for not being able to stay in the shelter when I was supposed to be there. The emergency room was the only place I could go at that hour; it was getting late at night.
The trip to Boston Medical Center was an experience in itself. I tried to ask an employee who was standing outside to please go into the emergency room and ask the nurse if it were ok for me to go into the hospital at all. Bed bugs are contagious (there’s no other word for it) and I didn’t want the hospital to get them. She yelled at me “You have to go talk to the nurse and sign in!” I tried to tell her “I’m worried that I have bed bugs, and I don’t want to go into the building unless a nurse says it’s ok.” She yelled at me “You have to go talk to the nurse and sign in!” a few more times before she went into the building, walked back out after a few minutes and yelled “You have to go talk to the nurse and sign in!”
I went into the building. First I went past the front desk, where there are office-type employees and security guards. I walked through a couple of halls so that I could use the restroom.
When I got out of the restroom, there was a Latino guy using a big, blue broom to sweep the entrance of the hallway through which I’d just walked to get to the restroom. He was a few feet away from the door of the restroom.
I said “You’ve got to be kidding me. I’m here because I don’t feel well. Can’t you leave me alone?”
I went back through the hallways and, as I was about halfway past the front desk, a tall, fat black woman gave a loud cough.
I HADN’T DONE ANYTHING TO HER! I HADN’T DONE ANYTHING TO ANYONE IN THAT BUILDING! THERE ARE CAUTION ROAD SIGNS SEEMINGLY PERMANENTLY OUT IN FRONT OF THE PLACE. THERE HAVE BEEN WET FLOOR SIGNS ALL OVER THE PLACE, TOO. THE NIGHT, A FEW WEEKS AGO, WHEN I WENT THERE BECAUSE THE STRESS OF WHAT I’VE BEEN GOING THROUGH WAS TOO MUCH FOR ME AND I WAS FEELING SUICIDAL, THE GUY WHO TOOK MY VITAL SIGNS TOLD ME THAT THE FINGER-TEMPERATURE-TAKER LOOKS LIKE “A DUCK’S BILL.” IT’S NOT AS IF HE DIDN’T KNOW WHO I WAS OR DIDN’T KNOW THAT I WAS THERE BECAUSE OF STRESS; YOU HAVE TO GIVE YOUR REASON FOR BEING IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM WHEN YOU GET THERE. That previous trip to the emergency room eventually worked out ok; I got signed to see a therapist, but I wonder what that’s going to be like.
AND WHAT WAS THAT GUY DOING MAKING YET ANOTHER HARASSING REFERENCE WHEN I’D WALKED INTO THE PLACE SAYING, IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS “I CAN’T TAKE THIS ANYMORE?”
On the night of my second trip to the emergency room, for the bed bugs, I stopped when I heard the woman’s cough. I turned back and said this:
“What makes you think I need it from you? What makes you think that I need your abuse, when I already get abused all the time? I need it like I need a f---ing hole in my head.”
She might have said something to the effect that she didn’t know what I was talking about, and I might have said something to the effect that the f--- she didn’t know what I was talking about.
I walked almost entirely away from the front desk, toward the waiting room. I turned back to say “I’ve never even met you.”
After I’d been in the waiting room for a few minutes, a white, young, female security guard who I remember as having a slight appearance walked over to me and said:
“I don’t know what your outburst was about, but you can’t act like that here. “
She said a few more things, all in service of the lie that I’m not being abused and that my reactions to being abused are out of nowhere.
There was no talking to her about it; I saw that right away.
She turned to walk away and I said “It’s good to know that the hospital doesn’t allow people to be abused here; maybe you should inform the staff of that policy.”
She turned back toward me and said “I am staff.”
She and at least 2 other security guards gathered in the hallway outside the waiting room, outside the door where eventually someone walked out and called my name to be seen.
When the person who took my vital signs and looked me up in the hospital computer asked me if domestic violence were a problem for me, if I felt safe where I lived, I paused for a minute and then I said this:
“No, I don’t feel safe. I get abused every day, in the shelters and all over Boston, and everybody knows it, and everybody’s lying about it. No, I don’t feel safe.”
There’s more to this story but I can’t tell it now; I have to go.
I didn’t have bed bugs past the time it took me to be at the closest day shelter in the morning, to get an emergency shower and an emergency laundry time, in which I washed and dried on high heat not only my clothes but my backpack, also. That was what the doctor told me to do, and I did it, and it’s over.
Short notes:
--Trash got strewn all around my bed at Harbor Lights for days in a row. When that happened, a book whose cover said its author’s name was Traylor also got left on my bed. A black umbrella got left under my bed, which was a bottom bunk, and under the bottom bunk of the bunkbed closest to mine, a young Hispanic woman.
When the occupant of that bed and I both went to the front desk to ask staff to look at the garbage and dirty clothes that had been strewn around where were supposed to sleep, the (black, older, female) staffperson didn’t looked surprised and said she’d send the other staffperson back into the dorm to look at the problem.
2 hours passed, and nothing happened. I was in the common area, out of the dorm, for most of those 2 hours, not being able to stand even sitting on my own bed with all of the garbage and dirty clothes around it, not to mention the black umbrella and the book and my knowing that it had been done on purpose.
When I went back into the room, I saw that someone had put a pair of nice sneakers next to my plastic bin under the bed. Each bunk bed has 2 plastic bins under it, one for the use of each occupant of the bunkbed.
That’s the only shelter where things have happened such as somebody putting things on or around my bed; it happened the last time I stayed there weeks ago, and it was the same girl who did it. Weeks ago, she had put something on my bed and, when I saw it there, she said “It’s yours. You got it this morning. It was a donation; don’t you remember?” She was lying; she was trying to get me accused of stealing. I took one look at the label, mentioned that I never would have taken it as a donation because it was least 2 sizes too big for me, and went to the office with it, saying “That was not good,” and described that someone had been trying to tell me that something that had appeared on my bed was something I had taken. I didn’t say, at that time “Someone is trying to set me up to look like I stole,” but I implied it to the staffperson I spoke to, and it didn’t happen again during that stay.
It happened again during this most recent stay, along with the garbage; a coat left on my bed on the first day of less blatant garbage. The coat got taken back without my saying anything, and the next day, the garbage and dirty clothes were all over the place and the shoes were planted next to my bin.
I finally took a garbage bag, put all of the dirty things in it, and brought the bag and the shoes to the front desk. All the staffperson said was “I’ll try to find out whose shoes they are.”
I wrote most of this out by hand the day after it happened, and didn’t have a chance to put it online.
That night, when I got back to the shelter, the same staffperson said “Can I speak to you for a minute?” She asked me to go to the front desk, where I saw the (black, maybe in her twenties or still a teenage) girl who was in the top bunk of my bed, who is also the same girl who accused me of not remembering a donated item the last time I was at that shelter, and also the Latina girl who was in the bunk across from mine.
I immediately realized that I was going to be attacked; I took out my tape recorder, showed it to the staffperson (the older, black woman) and said “Do you like my tape recorder?”
The conversation didn’t escalate to my being thrown out; the staffperson and the black girl changed their plan, I watched it happen. I doubt the staffperson threw the garbage around my bed, but I bet she knows that the other girl did it.
The Latina girl was on my side at the beginning, but she quit that later that night.
I got yelled at by another staffperson for a good 20 minutes, until, confronted with the tape recorder, she finally yelled herself out and quit hassling me for the night.
I got harassed by other guests of the shelter all night. Without the ear protection, I wouldn’t have gotten any sleep at all, and probably would have gotten into an argument that got me kicked out much sooner in the middle of the night, instead of in the morning when that argument did happen.
I got kicked out a few minutes after the young, Latina woman had been standing a foot away from me, with her repeating “Why are you scared? Why are you scared?” while I yelled, repeatedly, in the direction of the front desk “Get her out of my face.” It was a duet: “Why are you scared?” and “Get her out of my face.”
I wasn’t scared, but I thought that calling for staff’s help was a better way to handle it than other things I could have said or done.
Another black staffperson, a woman, showed up in the hallway. The Latina woman walked away from me. The black staffperson started yelling at me, and wouldn’t let me complete a sentence to tell her what had happened. I said “She was threatening me,” and the staffperson said “All I heard was you yelling.” The front desk is right around the corner of an open hallway from the common area; she absolutely heard it all and lied about it.
I tried to say “She kept saying “Why are you scared?” from a foot away from me.”
The staffperson wouldn’t even let me talk at all. She said “I didn’t hear her; I only heard you,” and told me she was going to kick me out if I kept up my bad behavior.
I finally lost my temper and said “Why, because she’s black and I’m white?”
She said “She’s not black, she’s Latina.”
That was true; I’d made a mistake in the midst of how angry I was and said the wrong thing. I went on to make another error, tactically speaking. I said to the staffperson
“Why, then, because YOU’RE black?”
I got kicked out. It was the first time that an obvious and ongoing issue has been brought to the surface.
There have been plenty of white people who have abused me throughout this ordeal. There have also been some black people who have been very nice to me, throughout the same ordeal. However, I now need to expect that at every shelter I go to, there’s going to be one if not more women of color, both guests and staff, who are both vicious and merciless, and that if I complain at all, I will be called a racist and thrown out.
I called my (white) case manager at the Boston Public Health Commission shelter in Quincy last week and told her that I had to stay at Harbor Lights (the Salvation Army shelter) for 6 consecutive nights. I knew that that was going to bring me into October and I was worried about being able to get out to the shelter and pay my locker rent, which is something like a dollar or 2 dollars. My case manager called back and said she’d spoken to someone at the Quincy shelter and not to worry about my locker, to get there as soon as I could.
I went there last night, specifically to pay my locker fee.
My locker was empty; all of the clothes I had in my other bag, including the only sweater I had, 2 pair or pants, other shirts, other underwear, socks, everything, the shampoo and conditioner I’d bought that were the cheapest I could find when I got my last paycheck from the housekeeping job in Vermont.
(By the way, when I did finally get that paycheck, a 25 dollar fee had been taken out of it because I’d had to ask that my first copy of the check be negated and replaced. The first copy of the check had been mailed to the shelter in Lynn, MA, where I was also harassed and kicked out, and which I contacted several times afterward about my check and never received an answer.)
The harassment of me by homeless people and by staff continued last night. In the morning, a homeless, white, middle-aged woman sat behind me in the TV room and did loud coughing until I told her to shut up. She yelled “NO!” and called me a psycho. I called her a moron. She lunged at the back of the bench I had been sitting on and was now standing up on the other side of, and started yelling at me, her eyes bulging. I saw that she wanted to fight, so I walked out of the room and to the office, with her following me and yelling at me.
My voice was raised, also, when I got to the front desk and said “Is she going to beat me up in front of you? Is that going to happen now?”
A couple of staffpeople told us to go, both of us, into the office. I pulled out my tape recorder, which got rid of the woman after she claimed that I was crazy and that she had asthma. However, it got me barred from the shelter; the black, male staffperson and the black, female staffperson told me that it was illegal to tape record them without their permission , that I had to take the next bus back to town, and that I was barred from the shelter. The black, female staffperson twirled her finger near her head to indicate that she thought I was crazy.
Last night, an older, black woman was being tormented near and in the TV room by a group of homeless people. It started with some women, all of whom seemed young and black, telling her that she smelled. It escalated to something that went on for more than half an hour, with the group getting larger and larger, until it was a group of homeless people of all races and ages and both genders, jeering at her.
I went to the front desk. The staffperson who was available to talk to me was an older, black woman. She said she’d take care of it. I didn’t see what happened after that.
This morning, before I got barred, an hour or more before the argument with the white woman who harassed me had even started, I saw the woman who’d been getting tormented the night before. I said “Hello” and asked her how she was. She said “Leave me alone!”
My guess is that the staff didn’t help her last night and probably made things worse.
I can’t edit this. I don’t know how I’m going to get back to the Pine Street Inn in time for the lottery by walking; I might have to spend a couple of dollars on the T or on a bus. That was another thing about not having food stamps for weeks that was bad; there were times when I couldn’t get to a place that was serving a free meal, or ended up at a shelter too late for the meal, and had to spend money from what was left of my last paycheck from the hotel housekeeping job in Vermont, from July. A couple of dollars in the vending machine, or at an overpriced convenience store, is a lot when you have one $20 bill left, some quarters, and a couple of other coins to your name.
Last thoughts for the day:
The harassing conglomerate and individual celebrities already knew I’d gotten bed bugs. They’ve had it on their blog posts ever since it went into the computer at Boston Medical Center. Witness Leonardo DiCaprio’s recent “critter” blog. References to bugs and disease have been all over President Obama’s blogs.
I’ve seen some stores in Boston that had allusions to bugs, too, that occurred after I’d had them for that one, 24-hour episode. It’s impressive that Boston shelters don’t seem infested with them; I’ve only had them the one time since I’ve been here; I got to Boston at the end of July, 2011.
When I went back to Boston Medical Center after I’d been to the emergency room for the second time, there were Wet Floor signs back up and a wall had signs all over it that said “Wet Paint.”
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, October 5, 2011 @ 2:57 p.m.
2. Newblog2011: 10/05/11 Abuse
My tape recorder is working fine. I'm going to need more time to publish what's on it.
I have not had a chance to write about even half of what I need to write about, and that’s been going on for days and days. Maybe I can sum it up; I have pages that are all handwritten, describing everything that happened.
--I got bed bugs from a shelter that I stayed at for one night. It was nice that I was able to stay there, because it’s always helpful to have a place to stay at night. I only needed it for one night because, also helpfully, I had been able to get into a shelter that lets people stay there for 6 nights in a row. Most likely, I got the bed bugs from the place where another homeless woman threatened to bite my ear off. If readers remember, I wrote that I slept on the couch in the lobby that night, in front of the desk where there’s always staff. Maybe the beds don’t have bed bugs, but my guess is that the couch does; it’s out in the common area, where a lot of people spend time. My guess also is that the couch doesn’t get cleaned the way the sheets on the beds get cleaned; how could it? It’s not the kind of couch that has cushions with covers that you can take off and throw in the laundry every day or every couple of days. It’s the kind of couch that you’d have to get special tools to clean, or get a professional to do it, and what shelter has the money to get its couch professionally cleaned every day or every week?
I noticed the one itchy place on my chest, (not my boobs, I am so not in love with being harassed and feeling like I have to say that), the afternoon after I’d been at the shelter. Finally, when I realized that more bites were showing their presence, I realized that I must have been bitten the night before. I told the staff at the shelter that I was supposed to stay at
I was supposed to spend my first night at the shelter where the guests get 6 nights in a row. I told the staffpeople there “I can’t stay here tonight; I can’t stay anywhere until I find out if I was bitten by bed bugs and have a chance to wash or throw out everything I have with me.”
They were reasonable about it; you’re not supposed to be able to leave once you’re in the place which is called, unfortunately, Harbor Lights. It’s a Salvation Army shelter. They told me that I could return and stay the remaining 5 nights if I brought something from the hospital I was going to that would prove that I’d been seen at the emergency room and that I had a good reason for not being able to stay in the shelter when I was supposed to be there. The emergency room was the only place I could go at that hour; it was getting late at night.
The trip to Boston Medical Center was an experience in itself. I tried to ask an employee who was standing outside to please go into the emergency room and ask the nurse if it were ok for me to go into the hospital at all. Bed bugs are contagious (there’s no other word for it) and I didn’t want the hospital to get them. She yelled at me “You have to go talk to the nurse and sign in!” I tried to tell her “I’m worried that I have bed bugs, and I don’t want to go into the building unless a nurse says it’s ok.” She yelled at me “You have to go talk to the nurse and sign in!” a few more times before she went into the building, walked back out after a few minutes and yelled “You have to go talk to the nurse and sign in!”
I went into the building. First I went past the front desk, where there are office-type employees and security guards. I walked through a couple of halls so that I could use the restroom.
When I got out of the restroom, there was a Latino guy using a big, blue broom to sweep the entrance of the hallway through which I’d just walked to get to the restroom. He was a few feet away from the door of the restroom.
I said “You’ve got to be kidding me. I’m here because I don’t feel well. Can’t you leave me alone?”
I went back through the hallways and, as I was about halfway past the front desk, a tall, fat black woman gave a loud cough.
I HADN’T DONE ANYTHING TO HER! I HADN’T DONE ANYTHING TO ANYONE IN THAT BUILDING! THERE ARE CAUTION ROAD SIGNS SEEMINGLY PERMANENTLY OUT IN FRONT OF THE PLACE. THERE HAVE BEEN WET FLOOR SIGNS ALL OVER THE PLACE, TOO. THE NIGHT, A FEW WEEKS AGO, WHEN I WENT THERE BECAUSE THE STRESS OF WHAT I’VE BEEN GOING THROUGH WAS TOO MUCH FOR ME AND I WAS FEELING SUICIDAL, THE GUY WHO TOOK MY VITAL SIGNS TOLD ME THAT THE FINGER-TEMPERATURE-TAKER LOOKS LIKE “A DUCK’S BILL.” IT’S NOT AS IF HE DIDN’T KNOW WHO I WAS OR DIDN’T KNOW THAT I WAS THERE BECAUSE OF STRESS; YOU HAVE TO GIVE YOUR REASON FOR BEING IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM WHEN YOU GET THERE. That previous trip to the emergency room eventually worked out ok; I got signed to see a therapist, but I wonder what that’s going to be like.
AND WHAT WAS THAT GUY DOING MAKING YET ANOTHER HARASSING REFERENCE WHEN I’D WALKED INTO THE PLACE SAYING, IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS “I CAN’T TAKE THIS ANYMORE?”
On the night of my second trip to the emergency room, for the bed bugs, I stopped when I heard the woman’s cough. I turned back and said this:
“What makes you think I need it from you? What makes you think that I need your abuse, when I already get abused all the time? I need it like I need a f---ing hole in my head.”
She might have said something to the effect that she didn’t know what I was talking about, and I might have said something to the effect that the f--- she didn’t know what I was talking about.
I walked almost entirely away from the front desk, toward the waiting room. I turned back to say “I’ve never even met you.”
After I’d been in the waiting room for a few minutes, a white, young, female security guard who I remember as having a slight appearance walked over to me and said:
“I don’t know what your outburst was about, but you can’t act like that here. “
She said a few more things, all in service of the lie that I’m not being abused and that my reactions to being abused are out of nowhere.
There was no talking to her about it; I saw that right away.
She turned to walk away and I said “It’s good to know that the hospital doesn’t allow people to be abused here; maybe you should inform the staff of that policy.”
She turned back toward me and said “I am staff.”
She and at least 2 other security guards gathered in the hallway outside the waiting room, outside the door where eventually someone walked out and called my name to be seen.
When the person who took my vital signs and looked me up in the hospital computer asked me if domestic violence were a problem for me, if I felt safe where I lived, I paused for a minute and then I said this:
“No, I don’t feel safe. I get abused every day, in the shelters and all over Boston, and everybody knows it, and everybody’s lying about it. No, I don’t feel safe.”
There’s more to this story but I can’t tell it now; I have to go.
I didn’t have bed bugs past the time it took me to be at the closest day shelter in the morning, to get an emergency shower and an emergency laundry time, in which I washed and dried on high heat not only my clothes but my backpack, also. That was what the doctor told me to do, and I did it, and it’s over.
Short notes:
--Trash got strewn all around my bed at Harbor Lights for days in a row. When that happened, a book whose cover said its author’s name was Traylor also got left on my bed. A black umbrella got left under my bed, which was a bottom bunk, and under the bottom bunk of the bunkbed closest to mine, a young Hispanic woman.
When the occupant of that bed and I both went to the front desk to ask staff to look at the garbage and dirty clothes that had been strewn around where were supposed to sleep, the (black, older, female) staffperson didn’t looked surprised and said she’d send the other staffperson back into the dorm to look at the problem.
2 hours passed, and nothing happened. I was in the common area, out of the dorm, for most of those 2 hours, not being able to stand even sitting on my own bed with all of the garbage and dirty clothes around it, not to mention the black umbrella and the book and my knowing that it had been done on purpose.
When I went back into the room, I saw that someone had put a pair of nice sneakers next to my plastic bin under the bed. Each bunk bed has 2 plastic bins under it, one for the use of each occupant of the bunkbed.
That’s the only shelter where things have happened such as somebody putting things on or around my bed; it happened the last time I stayed there weeks ago, and it was the same girl who did it. Weeks ago, she had put something on my bed and, when I saw it there, she said “It’s yours. You got it this morning. It was a donation; don’t you remember?” She was lying; she was trying to get me accused of stealing. I took one look at the label, mentioned that I never would have taken it as a donation because it was least 2 sizes too big for me, and went to the office with it, saying “That was not good,” and described that someone had been trying to tell me that something that had appeared on my bed was something I had taken. I didn’t say, at that time “Someone is trying to set me up to look like I stole,” but I implied it to the staffperson I spoke to, and it didn’t happen again during that stay.
It happened again during this most recent stay, along with the garbage; a coat left on my bed on the first day of less blatant garbage. The coat got taken back without my saying anything, and the next day, the garbage and dirty clothes were all over the place and the shoes were planted next to my bin.
I finally took a garbage bag, put all of the dirty things in it, and brought the bag and the shoes to the front desk. All the staffperson said was “I’ll try to find out whose shoes they are.”
I wrote most of this out by hand the day after it happened, and didn’t have a chance to put it online.
That night, when I got back to the shelter, the same staffperson said “Can I speak to you for a minute?” She asked me to go to the front desk, where I saw the (black, maybe in her twenties or still a teenage) girl who was in the top bunk of my bed, who is also the same girl who accused me of not remembering a donated item the last time I was at that shelter, and also the Latina girl who was in the bunk across from mine.
I immediately realized that I was going to be attacked; I took out my tape recorder, showed it to the staffperson (the older, black woman) and said “Do you like my tape recorder?”
The conversation didn’t escalate to my being thrown out; the staffperson and the black girl changed their plan, I watched it happen. I doubt the staffperson threw the garbage around my bed, but I bet she knows that the other girl did it.
The Latina girl was on my side at the beginning, but she quit that later that night.
I got yelled at by another staffperson for a good 20 minutes, until, confronted with the tape recorder, she finally yelled herself out and quit hassling me for the night.
I got harassed by other guests of the shelter all night. Without the ear protection, I wouldn’t have gotten any sleep at all, and probably would have gotten into an argument that got me kicked out much sooner in the middle of the night, instead of in the morning when that argument did happen.
I got kicked out a few minutes after the young, Latina woman had been standing a foot away from me, with her repeating “Why are you scared? Why are you scared?” while I yelled, repeatedly, in the direction of the front desk “Get her out of my face.” It was a duet: “Why are you scared?” and “Get her out of my face.”
I wasn’t scared, but I thought that calling for staff’s help was a better way to handle it than other things I could have said or done.
Another black staffperson, a woman, showed up in the hallway. The Latina woman walked away from me. The black staffperson started yelling at me, and wouldn’t let me complete a sentence to tell her what had happened. I said “She was threatening me,” and the staffperson said “All I heard was you yelling.” The front desk is right around the corner of an open hallway from the common area; she absolutely heard it all and lied about it.
I tried to say “She kept saying “Why are you scared?” from a foot away from me.”
The staffperson wouldn’t even let me talk at all. She said “I didn’t hear her; I only heard you,” and told me she was going to kick me out if I kept up my bad behavior.
I finally lost my temper and said “Why, because she’s black and I’m white?”
She said “She’s not black, she’s Latina.”
That was true; I’d made a mistake in the midst of how angry I was and said the wrong thing. I went on to make another error, tactically speaking. I said to the staffperson
“Why, then, because YOU’RE black?”
I got kicked out. It was the first time that an obvious and ongoing issue has been brought to the surface.
There have been plenty of white people who have abused me throughout this ordeal. There have also been some black people who have been very nice to me, throughout the same ordeal. However, I now need to expect that at every shelter I go to, there’s going to be one if not more women of color, both guests and staff, who are both vicious and merciless, and that if I complain at all, I will be called a racist and thrown out.
I called my (white) case manager at the Boston Public Health Commission shelter in Quincy last week and told her that I had to stay at Harbor Lights (the Salvation Army shelter) for 6 consecutive nights. I knew that that was going to bring me into October and I was worried about being able to get out to the shelter and pay my locker rent, which is something like a dollar or 2 dollars. My case manager called back and said she’d spoken to someone at the Quincy shelter and not to worry about my locker, to get there as soon as I could.
I went there last night, specifically to pay my locker fee.
My locker was empty; all of the clothes I had in my other bag, including the only sweater I had, 2 pair or pants, other shirts, other underwear, socks, everything, the shampoo and conditioner I’d bought that were the cheapest I could find when I got my last paycheck from the housekeeping job in Vermont.
(By the way, when I did finally get that paycheck, a 25 dollar fee had been taken out of it because I’d had to ask that my first copy of the check be negated and replaced. The first copy of the check had been mailed to the shelter in Lynn, MA, where I was also harassed and kicked out, and which I contacted several times afterward about my check and never received an answer.)
The harassment of me by homeless people and by staff continued last night. In the morning, a homeless, white, middle-aged woman sat behind me in the TV room and did loud coughing until I told her to shut up. She yelled “NO!” and called me a psycho. I called her a moron. She lunged at the back of the bench I had been sitting on and was now standing up on the other side of, and started yelling at me, her eyes bulging. I saw that she wanted to fight, so I walked out of the room and to the office, with her following me and yelling at me.
My voice was raised, also, when I got to the front desk and said “Is she going to beat me up in front of you? Is that going to happen now?”
A couple of staffpeople told us to go, both of us, into the office. I pulled out my tape recorder, which got rid of the woman after she claimed that I was crazy and that she had asthma. However, it got me barred from the shelter; the black, male staffperson and the black, female staffperson told me that it was illegal to tape record them without their permission , that I had to take the next bus back to town, and that I was barred from the shelter. The black, female staffperson twirled her finger near her head to indicate that she thought I was crazy.
Last night, an older, black woman was being tormented near and in the TV room by a group of homeless people. It started with some women, all of whom seemed young and black, telling her that she smelled. It escalated to something that went on for more than half an hour, with the group getting larger and larger, until it was a group of homeless people of all races and ages and both genders, jeering at her.
I went to the front desk. The staffperson who was available to talk to me was an older, black woman. She said she’d take care of it. I didn’t see what happened after that.
This morning, before I got barred, an hour or more before the argument with the white woman who harassed me had even started, I saw the woman who’d been getting tormented the night before. I said “Hello” and asked her how she was. She said “Leave me alone!”
My guess is that the staff didn’t help her last night and probably made things worse.
I can’t edit this. I don’t know how I’m going to get back to the Pine Street Inn in time for the lottery by walking; I might have to spend a couple of dollars on the T or on a bus. That was another thing about not having food stamps for weeks that was bad; there were times when I couldn’t get to a place that was serving a free meal, or ended up at a shelter too late for the meal, and had to spend money from what was left of my last paycheck from the hotel housekeeping job in Vermont, from July. A couple of dollars in the vending machine, or at an overpriced convenience store, is a lot when you have one $20 bill left, some quarters, and a couple of other coins to your name.
Last thoughts for the day:
The harassing conglomerate and individual celebrities already knew I’d gotten bed bugs. They’ve had it on their blog posts ever since it went into the computer at Boston Medical Center. Witness Leonardo DiCaprio’s recent “critter” blog. References to bugs and disease have been all over President Obama’s blogs.
I’ve seen some stores in Boston that had allusions to bugs, too, that occurred after I’d had them for that one, 24-hour episode. It’s impressive that Boston shelters don’t seem infested with them; I’ve only had them the one time since I’ve been here; I got to Boston at the end of July, 2011.
When I went back to Boston Medical Center after I’d been to the emergency room for the second time, there were Wet Floor signs back up and a wall had signs all over it that said “Wet Paint.”
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, October 5, 2011 @ 2:57 p.m.