Tag Archives: homeless

Smelly People I Have Known, Part Three: Eddie (Eddie Part One)

15 Jan

January 15, 2013

Part One: Audrey
Part Two: Marvin Ming

This was a weird time at the store. It was bound to be weird with both Marvin Ming and Audrey working together, but there were other reasons too. This store had a history of hiring good people. The employees were diverse: male and female, black and white and Hispanic and Asian, but one thing all of us had in common was that we all had good character. We were all good employees and good workers. We could all be trusted. But that changed almost overnight.

A new manager came in named Carolyn. For whatever reason, almost immediately, the new hires changed. You could see it right away. While none of us were rich or high-class, the newer employees looked like they came, at best, from the fabled “wrong side of the tracks.” And while there is no shame in where you come from, they acted like the stereotypical denizens of “the wrong side of the tracks.” One of them was an outright thief who stole straight out of the pockets of coats employees hung in the break room. Another was a thug who always started fights. Others were obvious drug addicts. All were lazy and untrustworthy. I was in charge of the stockroom and flat-out refused to give the keys to some of them, knowing that I would never get them back. (In one case, one worker had no nefarious plans for the keys, she was such a burnout she totally forgot 1- where she left them, 2- what she needed them for in the first place, and 3- if I even gave them to her at all. Long story short- the keys to the stockroom were right where she left them, hanging from a display rack on the sales floor.

And then there was Eddie.

Eddie worked in my department and we were all convinced that he was homeless. He dressed like he was homeless, smelled like he was homeless, and acted like he was homeless. When asked where he lived, Eddie would only say “Coney Island.” Eddie was hired by the same manager who not long before had tried to gently change Audrey’s hygienic ways, but those days were long gone. This new group brought hygiene to a new low.  But that was the least of our worries.

There was strong speculation, never confirmed or denied, that these new hires came from some program that placed the homeless, recovering addicts, and criminals into decent jobs and in return the store got some financial consideration. I happen to believe it since at least one of these folks had a social worker who checked on her from time to time.

As this same time the store joined a program in which people with mild mental disorders would come to the store three times a week to do some of the easier tasks, like sweeping or doing basic merchandise stocking. It was occupational therapy and I am happy and oddly proud to say that I worked with them. To a person they were all dedicated and happy workers and I’d happily work with them again. And this group put the thugs, thieves, and Eddies to shame.

I have three Eddie stories to tell. They are all funny and odd but I’ll start with the shortest.

Marc and I were sitting in the break room for lunch. Marc and I had walked across the parking lot to a pizzeria and he bought a chicken sandwich. (Marc has been a vegetarian for so long that Marc eating a chicken sandwich now seems almost apocryphal.) Marc and I were sitting at one table, and the only other person in the room was Eddie, sitting across from us.

schematic 2

(Yes, I made a floor plan.)

Marc was eating is sandwich while Eddie stared at it from across the room in the same exact way the two starving shipwreck survivors looked at each other in the old Bugs bunny cartoon, Wackiki Wabbit. (The one where one sees his friend as a hamburger and then tries to eat his own foot.)

Eddie: “That sure is a good-looking sandwich.”
Marc: “Thanks.”
Eddie: “Where did you get it?”
Marc: “The pizza place.”
Eddie: “Does it taste good?”
Marc: “It does.”
Eddie: “That sure is a good-looking sandwich. Does it taste good?”

Marc and I decided to go over to Marvin’s locker, for some reason. I’m not sure if I was supposed to have it or not, but I had the combination to his lock. At one point, I had filled his locker up with so many old Doctor Who novelizations that not only could he not use his own locker, but the books spilled over into the locker next to his too.

As you can see from my beautiful schematic, Marvin’s locker was right next to the doorway to the break room. In fact, when the two of us stood in front of his locker, one of us would actually be standing in the doorway. We were not ten feet away from the where we were sitting and we were gone not more than a minute.

When we went back to the table, the untouched half of the chicken sandwich Marc had left on his plate now had a single large bite taken out of it.

Eddie had a huge grin and sat licking his lips.

Marc looked at me.
I looked at Marc.
Without saying a word, we got up and left the break room.

The sandwich went into the garbage.

I am not sure it stayed there.

 

TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW: EDDIE PART TWO: THE CASE OF THE MISSING MOP

Be sure to read the comments for my blog notes.

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A New York Minute (14)

6 Feb

February 6, 2012

New York Minute!

I don’t know where you are reading this but it is cold in New York. We haven’t had any snow this winter and that’s a shame since the city looks great with a thin coating of snow. Of course now that I’ve jinxed I’m sure a major snow storm is hitting the city right now. Sorry New York, my bad.

New York has a long history with the winter and before you ask yourself what kind of a stupid statement that is, bear in mind that New York is where the last Ice Age ended. Yep, the last glacier died here. Various glaciers have covered the area of Central Park in the past, with the most recent being the Wisconsin glacier which receded about 12,000 years ago

I will now quote liberally from The New York Times. Hmm, “New York Times” and “liberal” in the same sentence. Never heard that before. Anyway, and I quote…

The New York region was once covered by a vast crystalline shield of frozen water, known as the Laurentide ice sheet. It carved the terrain of the metropolitan area, and as it melted, dumped so much transported rock, gravel, sand and sediment that it created parts of Long Island, Connecticut and New Jersey – including the barrier islands at the coast. It also deposited such notable landforms as Battle Hill, in the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

You might remember Battle Hill from my recent Gangsters, Goodfellas, and Parakeets New York Minute. Now back to The Times.

“The rocks of New York City are a climate archive,” Dr. Schaefer of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University said. Most New Yorkers are unaware “that they are living in the middle of a glacial event park,” he said, adding: “All they need do is open their eyes. By looking into the past, we can learn about the sensitivity of glaciers as climate indicators.”

In Central Park, for example, much of the visible bedrock was shaped by ice, and unmodified glacial features abound.

One of the most impressive glacial remnants in Central Park is Umpire Rock (so-called thanks to its proximity south of the Heckscher Ballfields), to the east of West 62nd Street, by the pétanque court.

 

The feature is a rarity in that its deep grooves reveal a carved channel and glacial fissures that suggest “possible evidence of subglacial streams,” Dr. Schaefer said.

“As you see the deep grooves, you can almost imagine these big boulders gouging out the bedrock,” said Neil Calvanese, vice president for operations of the Central Park Conservancy, which manages the park under a contract with the city.

Central Park really is an amazing place to spend some time. One of my favorite movie depictions of the park is from The Out-Of-Towners, the hysterical Jack Lemmon- Shelly Duvall movie from 1970. In one part the couple, having no where else to go, spend the night in the park where they are menaced by a man in a cape and Jack Lemmon nearly gets killed by some baseball players who misinterpreted it when he took a young boy behind a bush so he could look in his pants. Trust me, it’s not what you think.

This begs the question, does anyone live in Central Park?

Yes they do.

Again, from the New York Times:

New York City Census Tract No. 143, better known as Central Park, was officially home to 25 residents in 2010. Not only were there enough of them to stage a football game, but their ranks had also apparently increased: a stunning 39 percent, in fact, over the previous decade, dwarfing the 2.1 percent growth in the city’s overall population.

Turns out Central Park is not the city’s only open space with a purported population. According to the census data,, 56 people claimed Flushing Meadows-Corona Park as their home, and 5 — apparently alive enough to do so — said they lived in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. (For historical perspective, Central Park listed a whopping 63 people in the 1990 census, then dropped to 18 in 2000 before climbing to 25, defying all demographic trends.)

Of the Central Park phenomenon, Lester A. Farthing, an official in the Census Bureau’s New York regional office, wrote in an e-mail, “we are not certain, but this could be either one of two possibilities”: The self-described park residents were homeless, or they were parks department employees living in some sort of “caretaker facility.”

The latter was flatly rejected by Vickie Karp, a parks department spokeswoman. There were no workers, not a single one, living in the park, she insisted. And the former, as it happens, is trickier to sort out than it sounds.

A few homeless people, Mr. Farthing said, could have picked up census forms at “Be Counted” sites the bureau set up at businesses and community centers around the city, then mailed them in as an honest act of residential pride. It was also possible, he noted, that some of the 25 had been counted by census enumerators on their occasional forays to sites in the park where the homeless are known to stay.

And that’s your New York Minute.

An audio version of this legend recently appeared in the amazing FlashPulp website. Check them out for awesomeness and goodies!

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