The Grove Street Inn

ylvia burst through the kitchen door. She didn’t stop moving to introduce herself, just rushed from pantry to closet, gathering supplies. “You know how to make fried chicken, baby?” she asked . I told her I wasn’t much of a cook, but that I’d help out in any way I could. “I hope you don’t mind me calling you ‘Baby’,” she added. “That’s just how I address people.”

Hurrying around the kitchen, Sylvia shed her windbreaker and covered her hair with a blue bandanna. No sooner had she put in her Motown mix tape than a mangy old tabby cat sat down in front of its dish and begin whining for attention. Sylvia found a fork and stirred up the cat's food .“That’s Minu,” Sylvia told me. “This is her house; we all just guests in it.” Finally Sylvia came to a halt in front of the partitioned sink, which was full of thighs and drumsticks, thawing and waiting to be separated.

Sylvia’s press-on fingernails were so long she couldn’t hold an onion to slice it, so I got the job. “This is gonna be one of my last nights cooking,” she said. “Hopefully I’ll be moving out next Thursday. I’m supposed to get me this place in Florence. But I dunno. Originally I was supposed to leave on the first, but when the first came around the landlord over there told me the fourth, and when the fourth came around he told me the fourteenth.”

Drug dealers had burned Sylvia’s house down the year before. They had been tenants of hers whom she’d recently evicted. She managed to escape with her eight pit bulls before the whole house caught.Everything inside was lost. The arsonists were arrested shortly after the fire, but the court proceedings ended in a mistrial.

“It’s hard to start over at forty,” Sylvia said. “Usually by forty you’re established. I am starting over again, literally from scratch. It’s something I never had to do before, ’cause I was always handed everything I had. After the fire, I was in shock – literally in shock – for like two days. I don’t remember much from that time. It felt like a dream, and I couldn’t wake up.”

Eventually, Sylvia moved into a shelter in Springfield. “It was hard, because I wasn’t accustomed to sleeping in a room with a bunch of people I didn’t know,” she said. “And at times, if you didn’t get there early enough, you had to sleep on a mattress on the floor. Carrying your belongings around, whatever you had that you didn’t want stolen. Having to wait in line for a shower. Having to eat at the soup kitchen, and not knowing where your next meal’s gonna come from. Just about everybody in there, they were drug-related. There were drugs everywhere, even inside the shelter.” The director of the shelter was a drug abuser himself, Sylvia claimed; and she said the rest of the staff only cared about collecting their paychecks.

Soon she was able to leave Springfield for another shelter in Westfield. This was a step up; but one night when Sylvia came in half an hour late, she found that her bed had been given away.

“That’s when I came to Northampton, to Grove Street,” Sylvia said. “They said I could stay on the couch for three nights, and I’m like ‘So what happens after three nights?’ And they said, ‘Don’t worry about that right now, just get up here now, come on.’ So I came up. A girl was there who had slipped up and started using drugs again. It happened to be a Wednesday, which is house meeting day. And I guess they realized she was high, so they told her she had to leave. Luck changed for me – I happened to get her bed right away.”

Just as we were dipping the first batch of drumsticks into the boiling grease, Phil rolled into the kitchen to ask Sylvia for a cigarette. His feet dangled limply into the stirrups of his wheelchair, and his socks dangled from his feet. He was fresh out of the shower, and hadn’t pulled them up all the way yet. The Grove Street Inn was the only shelter in the area with a handicap-accessible shower, so Phil had to ride over from Florence every day on a PVTA van to use it. Today he wore a wool sweater with a bejeweled, feather-fedora’d, blunt-smoking pimp embroidered on the front. He also wore a gold necklace, gold rings, and two gold bracelets of his own.

Phil asked me, “Sylvia showing you how to make fried chicken? Now you can cook that for your girl, and when you add that Sazón spice she’ll be like, ‘Daaaaaamn, I didn’t know you was half Puerto Rican’.”

While Sylvia and Will were outside, smoking, a round little old man named Lloyd came into the kitchen for a coffee mug and nodded to me. “You a new guest here?” he asked. “No,” I told him, surprised that he would think I was. “I’m a volunteer.” “Oh,” he said. “Nothin’ wrong with that. We can always use those.” He spoke quickly and with a bit of Southern accent, like a kind of docile Yosemite Sam.

Sylvia returned to inspect my first attempt at fried chicken and approved. She set three pieces aside for Phil, one of which he ate right away. The other two Sylvia wrapped in tin foil. Phil tucked the package inside his wheelchair just in time – for a second later, Margie, the Case Advocate on duty that night, walked in to see how things were going.

******

I met Margie on November 1, 2002 – the day the Grove Street Inn’s new hours went into effect. Recent state budget cuts had made it impossible to keep the shelter staffed twenty-four hours a day; so now, except on Sundays, guests were forced to leave the shelter at 8 a.m. and weren’t allowed to return until 4:30 p.m. Margie and I cooked chicken cacciatore that night. “I thought I’d make something to warm the cockles of your hearts,” she told the guests as they came in.

Margie wore wire-rimmed glasses; her long blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. A little cross hung around her neck. Whenever she wasn’t at the shelter, she told me, she and her husband were busy building their new house in Leverett. The director of Grove Street, Bill, whom she met at her church, had asked her to take over after one of the original Case Advocates quit three years earlier. Since then she’d been working with the guests of Grove Street, helping them to find work, counseling, and housing. But with the shelter closed during the daytime, she said, that work has become very difficult.

“There’ve been a lot of changes for the people in the shelter, obviously. But in terms of my job, it’s become nearly impossible to do what I did before,” Margie said. “The people we need to contact are only available during the day. For instance, I’ve had three people come into this shelter who are veterans, and need to talk with the Veterans’ Outreach person. I left a message for him, and he got back to me today during the day. But of course, by the time I can call him at night, he’s gone. At some point I’m going to figure out how to make the connections I need to make in the time I have available. Which isn’t much, because it’s very busy here. A lot of people have a lot of needs, so we’re busy a lot – most of the night.”

Many guests had found jobs since coming to Grove Street, but they weren’t always day jobs. One man drove a taxi, but he barely had enough time every night to stop in and eat supper before he had to leave again. Now that Grove Street was locked up during the day, a lot of the guests – employed or unemployed – had nowhere to go except the sidewalks of Main Street. All they could do is loiter and panhandle.

“So what did everybody do today?” Margie asked. Five or six of the guests had congregated around the kitchen table, under a mural that read “GROVE STREET IS A SAFE HAVEN.” The letters encircled an image of the Inn bordered by a rainbow; and, next to it, a white hand and a black hand reaching for each other.

A large woman with several teeth missing said she went to a couple of job interviews and saw her therapist. A man with a graying beard said he washed dishes in a restaurant during the afternoon. And a wiry older man named Les said he just sat in Starbucks all day.

“They let you do that?” Margie asked.

“I asked the manager about it,” Les said. “He didn’t care, as long as I had a cup of coffee in front of me. Lots of people hang around in there. Students doing their studies. One of them was even in there with her computer. Lots of people in there for a long time – I seen ’em.”

In his absence, Les was often the topic of discussion among the other guests. I remember Phil muttering something about the “fucking old man,” one afternoon as he rolled past the kitchen. One Friday night, when Les hadn’t returned to Grove Street in time for supper, Lloyd speculated that he must have been out with his girlfriend. “Les has a girlfriend?” I asked. “He thinks he does,” Lloyd said with a grin, “but she don’t know about it.”

******

Earlier that night, while Phil was in the shower, I had asked Margie if there was another bathroom in the house. She had pointed me up the stairs, but said that she had to wait at the landing until I came back. After we finished cooking, I asked her why. “Well, it’s for their protection and yours,” she said. “If something were to be stolen from one of the rooms, then we have a witness to say you didn’t do it. We wouldn’t want anybody to say ‘Well, I saw Jim walking around up there...’.”

The fat man in the baseball cap overheard us as he served himself a piece of the chicken cacciatore. “I hope they find out whoever’s stealing, because that is not good,” he said. “If it keeps going on, it’s going to show up in the papers. Then people will think everyone here is a bunch of crooks. That’s how you get a reputation.”

As I was putting on my coat to leave, one of the guests asked me if I could give him a ride downtown. He was a large man in his thirties named Tim, wearing shorts despite the freezing weather. He seemed very friendly, and Margie did not object.

Tim loaded a bicycle into the trunk of my car so he could ride back to Grove Street when he was done. When he got in, he noticed my box of cassette tapes. “You like music?” he asked. “Man, I like all kinds of music. I don’t limit myself. I’ve got a collection of about five hundred CD’s. I’d really like to be a DJ one of these days. I’d mix it up a lot, you know. I’d play a little Pantera one minute, then maybe some Grateful Dead….”

“What’s going on downtown?” I asked him.

“Oh, it’s my AA meeting,” Tim said. “Yeah, my parents kicked me out a couple of weeks ago because of my drinking problem. But I’m doing a lot better. I’m trying to get into Harris House. It’s a halfway house for recovering alcoholics and drug abusers. You have to pay for your food, but they help you out with counseling and stuff.”

I remembered Tim apologizing profusely to Margie for having been rude the night before. “It was late. I just wanted to go to bed. It won’t happen again,” he had said. And Margie had said, “I know it won’t.”

A week later, Sylvia opened the Daily Hampshire Gazette to the police logs and read a report to Phil and me. It said that Tim had been dragged out of Grove Street by eight police officers two nights earlier. Before they finally got him into a cruiser, he had managed to smash the staircase railing and to punch one of the policemen. Margie told me that Tim had recently gotten three written warnings and finally been told to leave because he had continued to come in drunk.

“He was always such a nice guy… except when he was drunk,” Margie said. “Then he became a completely different person. That’s why, when he asked you for a ride, I didn’t say anything. If I had known then that he sometimes had these outbursts, I would have said, ‘Well, James, maybe not’.

“I try not to write people off,” she went on. “But it’s sort of like, ‘Okay, this person has been doing this their entire life.’ And the likelihood that they’re going to change is small. There have been times when I’ve been so frustrated with one person that I’d say, ‘I can’t deal with him anymore. If it’s left up to me, he can leave.’ But part of what’s good about Grove Street is that there are several of us, and if one of us ever got so frustrated or just couldn’t deal with that person, he could be passed onto someone else who had a fresh attitude about it.”

But Tim had broken the rules, and gotten kicked out, so now none of them could try to help him. A second Case Advocate on duty that night said that Tim’s parents had bailed him out of jail for five hundred dollars. Margie was surprised he got off so easily after striking a police officer. How long his parents would keep him this time was anyone’s guess. He couldn’t come back to Grove Street for at least a year though, and he would also be barred from the two other nearby shelters. He might go to look for a bed in Springfield or Greenfield; but Margie speculated that he was now out on the street again.

*******

I arrived at Grove Street on the early side one afternoon, and so had Phil. A number of staff people were inside having a meeting, so there was nobody to let us in.

“You in school?” Phil asked me. “What you do there?” Writing, I told him. “Damn, I wish I could write,” he said. “That’s my weakness. I graduated high school and I couldn’t even read or spell. They didn’t give a shit.” He told me he used to copy passages of the original text in papers or on tests, and that his teachers commended his work. “Where you go to school?” he asked. I told him “Damn, there’s a lot of girls over there. They party their asses off. I used to go to parties over there all the time. I’d go with one girl and leave with another. Sometimes I didn’t even know their names! They’d take me down in the basement…. Wooo! I had a ball.”

Finally, Trudy, one of the Case Advocates, let us in. Someone had cleaned the oven the day before and left it in pieces. Trudy struggled with it for a moment, but couldn’t seem to reattach the burners. “Shit,” she muttered, flinging one of the iron coils onto the counter, “I can’t do this. You figure it out.” She retreated into the office.

When Trudy came back into the kitchen the stove was in working order again. I was washing dishes and waiting for tonight’s cook to appear. “Oh yeah,” she said, “There was somebody signed up to cook tonight, but she just called and backed out. Looks like you’re on your own.”

Lloyd arrived shortly afterward and lent a hand. I noticed the words LOVE and HATE tattooed across his knuckles as we sat at the kitchen table, peeling and slicing potatoes and onions. “I got those in a hay loft in Missouri back in 1967,” he explained. “You know, Charles Manson had tattoos like this, except where he had ‘hate’ I got ‘love,’ and where he had ‘love’ I got ‘hate’.”

Beans and hotdogs were to be the main course that evening, but we didn't have a pot big enough for all the ingredients. Luckily, Lloyd was full of ideas. “Well, we could cut up some of them hot dogs and put them in this big pan with the beans and put them in the oven, then people can eat the rest of the hot dogs like regular hot dogs but we don’t have any hot dog buns so I guess people could just use regular bread nothing wrong with that,” he suggested.

Most of the guests ate in the living room so they could watch TV. But tonight Les and two other guests stayed in the kitchen. Les sat on a bucket in front of a counter, with his back to the people at the table.

“Boy, this place is like a prison these days,” said one of the guests, a very overweight man in a baseball cap. “All these rules now. Get up at this time, leave by eight, meeting every Wednesday. Didn’t used to be like that.”

Every Grove Street guest was required to sign a two-page rule sheet. Residents were subject to random drug screenings and searches of their personal belongings – a staff member had only to suspect that a resident was using drugs or carrying weapons. Each resident was required to do two household chores per week, and to “shower and use soap at least twice weekly.” There were even rules prohibiting the possession of pornography, as well as “sexual touching, cuddling, petting, or other physical intimacy.”

“I’ve been in some other places that were a lot worse than this,” said a slightly cross-eyed woman leaning over a nursing textbook. “You wanna talk about rules? This place is no prison.”

Les spoke up, though he didn’t turn around to face them. “If they didn’t have any rules,” he said, “this place would be a madhouse. Everybody’d be fighting all the time.”
It wasn’t much later that I heard Les shouting at one of the other guests

“You don’t touch that with your fingers, that’s dirty. Other people gotta eat that too, you know. You oughta get a warning.”

“Jesus Christ, Les, leave me alone,” the culprit said, and stormed out of the kitchen.
Les turned to Trudy. “She oughta get written up for that,” he said. “That’s how people get sick. The germs.” He waited. “You ain’t gonna write her up, are you?

“No, Les, I’m not,” Trudy told him.

When Phil came out of the shower, he started talking to Lloyd about the apartment he hoped to get. “They want me to put a thousand dollars down – a grand. Damn. It’s worth it though. Anything’s better than where I am now. I’d kill myself before I went through this again. The apartment isn’t even handicap-accessible, but it’s on the first floor, so I don’t care. I’ll fuckin’ crawl to the bathroom if I have to. Ain’t nobody gonna see me. I’ll have the place all to myself.”

Lloyd had plans for getting out too. “I bought my bus ticket last week,” he bragged. “Come Tuesday ,I’m outa here. And boy, I’m ready to go. I’m gonna ride the bus down to Springfield, then New York, and then it’s a straight shot down to Florida. I got in touch with a friend my brother used to have before he passed away, so he’s gonna try to find me a job down there in Key Largo. But if that don’t work, I’ll just pick up and go someplace else. As long as I got my backpack, I can go anywheres I want. I just hop on a bus. But I tell you one thing, I am not gonna deal with that – pardon my French – dyke-bitch woman at the Greyhound ticket counter again. I am not gonna put up with her shit.”

Later, Lloyd mentioned his plans to Trudy. “I wanna talk to Bill about it before I’m gone,” he said. “Just so he knows it’s nothing personal. Everybody here treats me all right, all you folks, and all the other guests too. Except for this one fella – who shall remain nameless. I tell you, I just have to look at him and he pisses me off.”

Lloyd would be gone before my next night at Grove Street, so I shook his hand and wished him luck. As I was headed out the door, I heard Trudy joking some of the guests. “All you people leaving,” she said. “What about me?”

******

When I showed up to cook one afternoon, one of the guests told me that Sylvia had moved out. But just as I was setting supper out on the counter, she appeared. “Hey, baby, whatcha got cookin’?” she asked as she rushed by. “I forgot a few things this morning,” she explained.
Trudy invited Sylvia to stay and eat, and Sylvia accepted. She filled a plate and sat down at the table, and, before she began to eat, quickly whispered Grace.

Saying goodbye to everyone the night before, Sylvia told me, she had gotten tearful. Bill had asked her why, and she told him it was because she didn’t want to go. “And you know what he said? He said I could stay! I could stay until I felt more comfortable, or until I found a better place to move into. I had heard all kinds of bad things about this place in Florence, like it’s all full of alcoholics and drugs. But I decided not to stay because I knew there was another woman out there who needed Grove Street more than I did. So I moved out.”

Sylvia had stayed at Grove Street for a little over three months. “Things have been really good since I got to Grove Street,” she said. “With the assistance they gave for housing and therapy, it definitely helped. Emotionally and mentally I was just totally wiped out. But it’s getting better.

“Little things still trigger a reminder, though. Like, I don’t know what’s up with Florence, but I have never heard so many fire trucks go by in one day! I’m always hearing sirens. And then to top it off, two days ago I was blow-drying my hair – I opened the door and then all of the sudden the smoke alarm goes off. And it’s just like that was a reminder, and it kind of put me in a little depressed state for a minute. When I get depressed, I just think about – I’m here. ’Cause I could have been killed when they burned my house. I just thank the Lord that I made it out, and look forward to rebuilding."

Sylvia told me about the life she'd lived: it was a circuitous one. She'd enlisted in the Army for six years, and earned degrees in nursing and computer programming. Three weeks after she graduated from programming school, she suffered a serious back injury. “After that,” she said, “the doctor told me not to take a job that’s gonna require sitting for long hours. Programming does. So yeah, that was twenty-eight thousand dollars out the window. That was the onset of my depression right there.

“What I’d really like to do? I would love to go and get my degree in law. I know I’m forty years old, but I have so much confidence in myself. I had a 4.0 average in school – in all those different classes I took in college I was never below 3.95. I know that I could do it, I just wish I could find someone to back me up financially to get me through. It’s been a dream of mine all my life, but other things just happened to jump in between.” Sylvia doubted she'd be able to return school any time soon: she was still trying to pay off student loans from her last two degrees. The six hundred dollars she receives in disability pay every month only goes so far.

“I would like to go back to work,” she said, “but it would have to be something that I enjoy, and not just a job. And what I enjoy most is dogs. I love animals. So I was thinking about maybe going over to the Northampton Shelter and asking if I could volunteer, you know, to help with the feedings. It’s nurturing for me, because dogs have been my life. I have no kids, I’ve always had dogs.

“I think that’s what I want to do, try to volunteer, even at the soup kitchens. Things like that. I am so appreciative of the shelters for what they have done. I’m gonna try to get with Saint Mary’s and Edward’s Church, ’cause they do a lot for the cot shelter, they provide the meals there. Maybe even volunteer my time at the cot shelter to help with the meals."

Sylvia and I finished eating, and got up to wash our dishes. “I didn’t know what it was like to be homeless,” Sylvia said. “I’d never-- in my life-- known it for anything. My aunt always took care of me; I always had everything I wanted. I never could imagine myself being homeless. Ever. I mean, it’s just something I never even thought about. I used to see homeless people and buy them a cup of coffee, give them a couple dollars, because, like I said, I didn’t have to want for anything growing up. And I see how it is now, being on this side.”

As Sylvia got ready to leave, she stopped and looked around. “I miss this place already,"she said. Suddenly, we heard a familiar-- and obnoxious-- yowling. Sylvia's eyes lit up. “I miss you too, Minu!” Sylvia set down her belongings and bent over to stir the cat’s food, one last time.