Biking Solo Down the East Coast
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Lunch with a Homeless Woman Though New Haven had changed a good bit in the years since its birth, it had never given up its beloved Town Green, which still sat right where it had in 1638, smack in the center of town. Elm trees lined the perimeter of the grassy, 16-acre plot and a trio of beautiful, early 19th-century churches stretched their steeples heavenward along one edge of the Green.
"Going on a trip, eh?" she commented. "Yep. I'm heading to Pennsylvania from Maine." "Maine? That's where I'm from," she remarked. "Where'd you start?" "Bangor." "Bangor. Nice town. Not much crime. Not like here." There was something odd about her, I began to notice. She was a little too unkempt, even for a hippie. Her hair, tied loosely behind her head, was a bit too messy. The assortment of old plastic trash bags clenched tightly in her fists told me the rest of the story. She was homeless. My first reaction was one of caution. Was this a crazy person? Was she going to start babbling nonsense to me? Hit me up for money? Drool on me? But then I beat back those thoughts, ashamed to have succumbed to stereotypes. The woman started to move on, so I quickly asked her what part of Maine she was from. She said Detroit, a small town that I had actually passed through. She had worked, she said, as a caretaker on a farm there, helping a senile old man get through his final days. She sat down across from me at the table and introduced herself as Audrie Lou, a former schoolteacher. Only when I asked, though, did she reveal the woeful tale of how she came to be homeless in New Haven. She had been driving from Maine to New Jersey about three months ago to begin another job as a caretaker, she said. As she neared New Haven, she had developed car trouble and pulled off of I-95 to have it checked out. To her eternal regret, she chose a service station in the wrong part of town. The mechanics made her leave the car overnight, and while she slept, it was stripped and vandalized--enough to make it a total loss. She was devastated. Without enough insurance to cover the loss, she tried to force the garage to pay for it by threatening legal action. She got nothing. In desperation, she phoned a friend and begged her to wire money so she could get out of town. The funds came, but before she could escape her purse was stolen in a bar. The New Jersey job was long gone by then, and she was too humiliated to call for more cash. With no way to get back to Maine, she wandered the streets of this strange city in a daze of hopelessness, eating in soup kitchens and sleeping in parks. She had worked with the homeless in New York for a time, she said, so she was not entirely unfamiliar with their ways. She made some friends and eventually hooked up with a retarded man, who let her stay in his shabby apartment. All the while, she pestered the police to pursue leads on her stolen purse. They were not overly motivated to do so. She evidently got in their faces once too often, though, and one day a cop hit her with his blackjack, she said. She showed me the swelling on her leg where she said she'd been clubbed. Her retarded friend and his buddies began stealing her belongings and getting so abusive that she was scared to go near the place. She actually sought a court restraining order to keep them away from her and moved in with another guy in the meantime. His place was a reeking, sweltering hole in the wall, and she couldn't stand to be in it in the daytime. She knew where all the soup kitchens were in town and even gave me a rundown of the menus, in case I wanted to sample any of them. "On Tuesdays they give out cheese at Center Church," she informed me, pointing to the white-steepled structure across the Green. She talked half-heartedly about getting a part-time job and saving up money to get out of town, but the idea didn't enthuse her. Audrie knew many of the city's homeless by now, at least the ones who frequented the Green. Whenever a forlorn figure shuffled past, stopping to pick up a cigarette butt and put it to his lips, she told me a brief story about him. "You see him?" she motioned toward a Hispanic man. "He's only got one arm. He lost the other in a machine when he was young." I tried not to stare. Of another she remarked: "He sells crack sometimes. The cops are always watching him." It struck me then that all of the faceless homeless men I had passed on my way onto the Green actually did have faces. They all had histories and daily routines--they were all actors in a big play that went on here every day. And Audrie was the narrator. "I think maybe I'll write a book about all this some day," she confided, taking a bite out of the plum I offered her, but declining my offer of a sandwich. "You should," I encouraged. "There's so much going on here that people don't know about," she went on. "This is a dangerous place. New Haven has one of the highest crime rates in the country, but they don't tell you that. It's safer to live in an alley than in one of the shelters, or even a cheap apartment. Look! You see her?" She broke off, pointing to a young black woman crossing the Green, her head jerking around suspiciously in every direction as she walked. "She won't come over here. She stole a bag of clothes from me a few weeks ago." She paused. "I don't care, though. I always pick up clothes when I find them and give them to homeless people." She consistently refused to include herself in that category. "I haven't changed my own clothes since Saturday," she added. It was Tuesday. I hadn't changed mine in about that long either, but I held my tongue. Audrie seemed so self-assured that it was hard to believe she had let herself sink to this level without getting a friend or family member to bail her out. She even made reference to two children that she said were in college. Why weren't they on their way here to get her? I suspected that her intrigue with the homeless subculture had caused her to delay her departure indefinitely. Her dream of writing was pushing her to live as much of the homeless lifestyle as she could, while assembling an ever-growing cast of characters for her novel. I gave her more fruit and a few crackers, and then we parted ways. I watched her disappear into a crowd of dazed, disheveled men. Not once had she asked me for money.
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