The Shelter: Attrition

I've always worked more than forty hours a week for more than thirty long years, 17 of which I spent at a prestigious site working for a contract company. I won't mention names, because the idea is not to spite those who currently tag along my every step and obfuscate me everywhere I go. They, too, have changed and I cannot in all fairness say that things have not gotten slightly better. I was demoted, taken off the site I worked at for years, and subsequently fired from the next as the Coronavirus ravished nationwide without as much as a notice. Even before those things unfolded, I realized much later on, I've been targeted as were many others who had worked and lived here in the great U.S. of A. 

Following are a list of things that take place in a shelter in Jamaica, Queens, where I have been staying since late December, 2021. They have, as of yet, not helped with any of the complaints raised. At no point have I felt unsafe, not even when a roommate took a knife out and threatened me because I had complained about when I complained about the cigarette smoke air out the room to another roommate and asked if they could crack a window open. Of all the rooms I have been moved to, because there is always a plot to mask the reality that other roommates do not like people who don't smoke, and who are adamant about cigarettes. In the first room I was assigned my first winter here, I had my headphones on when the most active roommate, a young guy who smoked weed heavily and occasionally cigarettes as well, got in my face all of a sudden and asked if I wasn't paying attention to what he had been saying. I wasn't, since I was listening to a movie on my laptop. I could hear the commotion in his voice, but like I do in those situations, I keep to myself, so it wasn't coincidental that the volume in my headphones was all the way up. I try to keep far away from drama, mind my own business, and here all of a sudden this kid was in my face, threatening me with breaking my laptop. I complained about it lightly to the person in charge of my case, a behind-the-doors investigation followed (at least that's what I was told), but only when I complained about it 311, after some other issues ensued, not only was I scolded by having the audacity to call and report an unsolved situation outside the circle of people in charge here. From there on, I felt the mistreatment from behalf of the staff started, not personally, but because they felt I was out to make them look bad or something. If anything, I often kept a small profile, stayed away from making acquaintances, and kept to myself mostly. I'd open up and talk socially with a handful, but I noticed this sort of "secrecy" or aplomb, as I call it, unnerved a crowd of people who have nothing better to do than to spread their misery. Or maybe, just maybe, I too am a bit cocky, somewhat asocial, but nothing extraordinarily out of the norm, not "antisocial", just someone who doesn't like cliques, doesn't engage in small-talk, doesn't participate in popularity contests in the social spectrum. 

I try to be patient most of the time, but their untimely, tired act of rehashed routines gets to me sometimes, so it's common I storm out a room quietly and not so quietly at times. I stay in my own little world, the best place in the universe to be, and I understand that, at the core, we are all part of the lame sameness that composes a whole, so whatever they see in me I must see reflected in them, so it is oftentimes prudent to exercise patience and a kindness of sorts everywhere, not just out of of goodness but also out of self-preservation. 

Everywhere I go, I come across one of those unwholesome creatures. They're part of the masses that compose this once great city, and often awesome state, that is New York. They're in the lunch room, running drills I could've devised in a more effective way, and sometimes I understand people call these things unreal, mental unsteadiness or paranoia. This is how they fight back accusations of this kind. If you tackle the undesired element often enough and he or she complains about it, the term "paranoia" is thrown around to describe someone who has oftentimes made it that way. The interesting aspect of paranoid people is that they become so because of targeted conditions and imaginary ones at once. It is easy to make someone look or display paranoia, because we have a built-in mechanism to make sure that situations that look suspicious and malignant are never forgotten, so the situation may not at times merit the attention it deserves, but nonetheless attention is granted. Imagine you walk across a shady block to get to your destination and something awful happens, like you get mugged or harassed or attacked verbally or physically; next time around, you will not walk that street, even though it is unlikely that the matter takes place again. We better remember the things that hurt us in the past or else we run the likelihood of suffering it again. So, our minds create gateways to bypass the situations that caused us distress, and pointedly others have used this to target others and then blame them of being "paranoid" because it is fitting to the narrative. It's a win-win: suffer in silence or speak out often and be labeled paranoid. 

It's funny that the term paranoia has a counterpart, a state that denotes the same condition but in a more positive light, coined by a hippie in the early nineties: pronoia. It is the concept that, just like a paranoid episode, pronoia occurs not out to get us, but out to foster and make us better, as good fortune would, in a serendipitious way. A silly childhood joke I once heard explains it splendidly: a mosquito is told by his mosquito mom not to go out of the house when she's not home. When mosquito mom comes back home and doesn't find her mosquito son, she panics, only to see him come shortly after in a frenzied state. His mom asked him if he was okay, if he hadn't found humans out to kill him. "No, mom" he said. "On the contrary, they would applaud me." This lame attempt at humor illustrates perfectly the conundrum of paranoia and pronoia at once: it is how we see reality, in the end, that determines the phenomena. It is not a phenomena in and of its own, but rather more like a choice or a tendency, like the quantum realness that has no place in time until the observer is curious enough to pitch it in with his imagination. The word "real" comes from Latin and it merely means "thing". A thing can take so many forms, and the quantum superposition represented such a metaphysical conundrum that even a sophisticated mind as that of Einstein had a "hard" time admitting it. Einstein wanted to believe that "God did not play dice" and that if you were suddenly be no more, that the moon you see would still exist. As it turns out, especially since the Nobel Prize in Physics this year reaffirms, once you check out and even before you do, or even before you know of a moon, said moon does not exist outside your experience. Not that there is no physicality to the things we observe, but that the fact that we observe them makes them possible, and that if it weren't for us hallucinating ourselves into the realm of possibilities, such a deduction would not exist. Therefore, no Einstein moon exists.  

Minor, tangible improvements since I first arrived, I have observed. There are now two microwaves in the lunchroom, because I hoard one of them with my endless plant-based/vegan dishes. No one's perfect, and if you assume some sort of proclivity toward exceptionalism, you're suspect around here. The situation has, no doubt, improved. There are now veggie options every day, aside from the regular starches from the beginning, like bread, peanut butter, bananas and apples. I ate only those options as I complained lightly on a consistent basis and bargained for more options. They did listen. And, among those wishes, potable water. I cannot complain. Things have been addressed, today for instance I walked to find a minty lunchroom with the chairs and tables spotless clean, there are crews working like bees nonstop to keep the place up to date and the city of New York has taken notice, I have called 311, as I explained, not to complain but to add my observations on the manner. I thought of asking about the fire safety plan in place, since I have not seen a fire drill or any type of fire safety measure to inform the tenants of the course or plan to implement in case of an emergency. I have mapped the means of egress, the fire hydrants, the number of units, and overall is not a bad place. Except for the roommates, and no, I am not asking for perfection and mostly, my time here, has been otherwise relatively manageable. Here are some of the complaints and happenings I've observed thus far my current roommate and others staying here as well have fomented. The bad and the good. And since negativity is always prevalent in our minds, as we evolved to notice conditions that could pose a threat to our survival, I take notice that the good in humanity always outdoes the bad. But we have a larger, fuller, more vibrant memory for things that go awry. We could, for example, complain about how bad players the police is, but I have seen them in action looking for my autistic son the two times he happened to venture out on his own and appear unharmed a few hours later. That happened twice, once in Queens and another time in the Bronx, and I lived the most horrific experience of my life on each of those two instances. And the great service that the police department rendered always made me feel that no amount of bad coverage could erase from memory all the invisible good they do and goes unnoticed on a daily basis. That's not to say that there's no room for improvement, but if we were to count our blessings, we would need a 24 hour, nonstop news station just to channel the goods. That said, here's the bad. And some has already been remedied or in the process of being so, or no longer an issue. So it is to be taken with a grain of salt. Some seem like nitpicking, but they irritate me because these happened on more than one occasion and just to spite me. Not that they irked me anymore than they would anyone else, but knowing that they were done on purpose, and that there had to be an underlying invisible hand that passed on the information from one roommate to the next, kind of made it more significant than if it had happened only once or a few times by an unknowing actor, as part of his careless act. 

• Leave the bathroom door open. 

• Look my way from their bed.

• Use loud smartphones. 

• Use of strong scents. Body odor like feet. Vomit stench in the bathroom every single night, snoring loudly, 

• Talk loudly on the phone, but not an issue with my current roommate who only has time for drinking. The one before was interested in partying, had a strong social life and did not smoke cigarettes. He did smoke weed, but no one -especially me- finds that reproachable. 

• Never use headphones. Both roommates, and roommates in the previous rooms I’ve shared, did not use headphones. What’s more, in the public spaces, where lunch is served, people often incur in the habit of playing their music out loud which can be taxing if you aren’t into whatever groovy tune the listener is into. We often feel like what we like or obsess over is also liked obsessively by others. Listening to music out loud is rude, especially in shelter conditions. I do notice, however, that either I am getting used to their shenanigans or they’ve softened the blow, or perhaps a mixture of both. 

• Slam the door on the way in and out. 

• Snore loudly. 

• Get drunk and aggressive. One of them, not the current one who doesn’t show much aggression unless passively, like making exaggerated noises snoring, farting, or clearing his throat. 

• Mess with my things when I’m asleep or not in the room. 

• Leave the window without the metallic (which facilitates insects getting in). 

• Cross me at the bottom of the stairs. 

• Ask me about Wifi out of nowhere (not one or two of them, but five) since I got mine.

• Interrupt me while eating, while sleeping, while walking out of the room, everywhere that I go. 

• Put pennies and dimes near my space in the room or on the floor. 

• Give me money so I buy vice but I end up buying goodies or saving it. 

• Leaving tiny objects underneath my bed cover, anything to interrupt my sleep. 

• Also, leaving garbage under my mattress and the floor under my bed. 

• Dirtying the floor by walking whenever I mopped which is every other day. 

• Send specific people to intercept and often interact near me, in the lunchroom. Ask things out of the blue, “business ideas”, politics, matters that only a society bent on surveillance and its own vomit-inducing rhetoric could muster. 

• Invade my personal space, like sitting next to me when there’s space and room in the cafeteria. 

• Talk out loud about subjects that they think might interest me and even look my way, but since I often use earplugs, and noise-canceling devices, it often falls on “deaf” ears. 

• Often the same people follow me wherever I go in the neighborhood. They interact with me as if we were old friends, ask my opinion about stuff crap, be particularly annoying as everyone is in everyone else’s business when they have none of their own. 

• Get physically close to me in every other instance, like blocking the only door entrance to the cafeteria. 

• Mimic my behavior, literally. If I don’t talk, no one does; if I talk, they do. It’s more simple than it looks. It is called “mirroring” and whatever it is I embody, they emulate. Even the roommates, if I cover the side of my bed with a sheet to keep a little privacy, they’d think it’s personal and do the same; if I do something slightly out of the ordinary, or listen to music in my headphones, the same song I was listening to, they’d play out loud. No one believes in headphones around here. And they take pride in rudeness. 

• Start conversations about triggered subjects such as politics, policies, complaints, themes that may be of interest to elicit an opinion. 

• Have threatening conversations about situations that have taken place so as to elicit a frightening response. 

• Offer me cigarettes when I’m not smoking, and smoke excessively. 

• Be noisy when I’m around, yawn loudly, have conversations on speaker on the phone. 

• Burp. Sneeze. Cough. Do so loudly. 

• Smell awfully, whether bodily, or feet stench. 

• Be exceedingly messy and annoying. 

• Laugh out loud for no reason. 

• Wake up from snoring when I make the slightest movement in my space. 

• Go to the bathroom shortly after I use it. 

• Not flush the toilet. 

• Leave their personal stuff, like lighters, toothbrush, in the bathroom. 

• Leave petty coins (five cents, ten cents, sometimes even quarters, but specially pennies all over the floor). 

• Get confrontational if confronted: a guy once took out a knife because another told him I had complained about smoking in the room. Another got mad when I ask if I could put the light off at 2 a.m., since he was not using it and had been just sitting in bed for a while talking loudly on the phone. Another smashed the fan provided for the room in anger and in more than instance threaten physical violence verbally, as in “You don’t wanna fuck me me” or “I’m the wrong mother fucker to mess with.” In said situations, I did not instigate or retaliate in any way, just ignored them, just as I was ignored whenever I reported situations. 

• Get asked by staff members if I had signs repeatedly when I had, in fact, signed for my bed. 

• Make holes in my underwear, disappear all my socks except the gray and black ones, hide pieces of clothings of mine for a time and then return them days or even weeks after I had looked for them everywhere. 

• Dirty clothes I washed and dried by hand. 

• Complained because I use baking soda to wash my clothes, deodorize the floors, brush my teeth and even as deodorant. 

• Put my stuff in different places from where I left them. 

• Bang on the walls when I’m asleep. 

• Awake me by any means necessary just as soon as I fell asleep. I have not slept a night without there being loud conversations in the next room or a loud roommate doing all the things that I have described previously. 

• Return items of mine as I complained about not finding them. I let it slide as soon as I found the item in question. Then, it’d be another: a wallet on the floor, my phone uncharged when I left it plugged, my combination lock opened in my absence, my passport even. I complained about a trimming shaver and as soon as I returned to my room, I found it in my locker. 

• Had others take my food off the microwave and ask if it were my food, innocently enough. The fact that it happened more than once and in the same manner, and the fact that it was such a rare thing to have done made it stick and bring to mind, so as to not relax around anything or anyone. Which I do, I am not bound by anyone or attached to anything in particular, but we all like our things to be left in place and for others to leave us alone. 

• Have undesirable people (because of the way they smell) sit close to me in the lunch or reception areas. Everyone has a right to their own sanctity, and it is not to slight those who find themselves in this transitional purgatory, but the fact that a man with a frailed look demand sitting right next to you and not just that, to move over so that he can sit where on the very spot you’re sitting, when in fact he could, as I suggested by gesture, go halfway around the very table I sit at and sit on the other side, next to me if he must, without having to interrupt my dinner. I go lengths not to inconvenience others, wear headsets to minimize the inner joy of watching a movie on my laptop or TikTok on my beat-up disconnected phone (in order for anyone to get in touch with me, I’d need to be on WiFi and in the app that they want to connect to me with since I got “Do Not Disturb” on along with muted ringtones and silenced alarms. Apps do not have permission to interrupt me unless I happen to be on forementioned app.  

• A particular gentleman I once confronted because I had seen him in the morning, afternoon, and evening lunch schedules even though there are two hours in each scheduled meal, and then finding him in Target store, at the deli, in a church nearby as I went for a walk. All in the same day, until it dawned on me that this gentleman was following me without the slightest regard to go unnoticed. What’s more, it seemed from the looks of it, that it had been happening for a while, and that I’d been unwittingly oblivious to it. Denouncing it as soon as I saw it was never my approach. I wanted to make damn sure it was happening and so I confronted him right on the spot. The guy played stupid and only dimished the frequency with which he’d make his appearances only to be discreetly replaced by another and then another. It’s hard to say if they’re coordinated but when it comes to stupidity, it seems to come naturally fitting them. Of course, we all have that proclivity, including men of genius, and I am torn between two worlds. Had I been meditating, I could’ve easily brushed away all of these nuances with a serene smirk. Heck, you could’ve sat on my lap that I’d not not just not lose my temper, I’d probably laugh it off. Meditation is that dangerously good. Has anyone seen Tibet who’d set themselves on fire to protest brutality against Hinduism by China, a picture that speaks volumes immortalized in Rage Against the Machine’s iconic album cover. It’s meditated suicidal madness. 

• I like my solitude and my space, and I know that sometimes it is impossible to ask for either one. But keeping to myself is nearly impossible when I step out of the room. It is not something that happens just here. It extends everywhere I go. People, openly, interact with me. I even had a guy ask about my country's soccer jersey on the subway and it turned out he was from the same city I was born in. What are the odds? I confirmed it by asking him about slang pertinent to our city. He answered correctly. Then the guy asked if we could be in touch on Instagram. He was following me on Insta a few days later.