161 beds are allocated to the men’s dorm at a local homeless shelter. This includes 160 twin sized bed, and 1 double. What to do with the bigger bed?
Keep in mind, the shelter already has separate dorms for families that stay together, and all of those dorms already have family sized beds.
The obvious thought would be that occasionally you get someone who is morbidly obese or otherwise just massive enough to render the twin sized bed a rather limited platform on which to sleep.
So I was expecting, as I sat on my own bed (two beds away from the big bed) and read my books that eventually they were going to come in with some new guy who was big enough to get the big bed. They came in with quite a few big guys, but one by one they were led past the big bed and to their normal sized twin bed.
One of those big guys was given the bed right next to mine. He had just gotten out of prison. He’s not really obese but portly, tall and big and tough looking. He said they had told him he would get that big bed, but so-and-so who is in charge doesn’t like him and doesn’t want him there, so they gave him a regular bed instead.
He looked to me as if expecting a response. I shrugged and suggested that he not dwell on it, that this sort of thing would happen often, and he’d be better off just to rise above the drama. This advice bounced off him like a force-field had surrounded his brain, deflecting any subversive efforts to undermine his campaign of righteous indignation.
“Can you believe that though? What would make them-“ He continued, unperturbed. I returned to my book
The righteous indignation of the homeless is perhaps their most surprising trait. I have been staying at this shelter for a month or so, and have taken this opportunity to observe the homeless up close. I have been homeless before, for brief periods of time, but it was always a solitary ordeal. This is the first shelter I have been at, and it provided me a unique opportunity to observe homeless society from the ground up, and more specifically to observe the social dynamic which exists at this shelter.
The social dynamic reminds me of two places I have been: high school and jail. That is, you have two distinct castes of people: Teachers/guards and students/inmates. One is subservient to the other, though usually resentfully so, and will advertise his rebellious ambitions to his cohorts at every given opportunity. Thus the path for assimilation into the social club is simple: embrace the solidarity that comes with fighting against a common enemy.
The ‘guards’ in this case are the handful of workers who run the shelter. The ironic thing about these guards is that they are former residents of the shelter themselves. So the some of the homeless eventually graduate to running other homeless. Their compensation is minimal. From what I’ve heard, they get 25 bucks every 2 weeks.
Nonetheless they take their jobs seriously, and take every opportunity to make their authority known. From this, you get the resentment of the masses over being told what to do, and the simultaneous resentment of the authority that is being questioned, for the fact that its being questioned.
This brings us back to the previous question of bed allocation. Before long, a skinny, short black guy was led to the double sized bed. This drew the immediate attention of every big guy in the dorm.
“Seeing that scrawny nigga in that big ass bed just kills me..” I later heard one of them lamenting.
I puzzled for a while over the logic which went into this decision. I’m still unsure as to exactly what the answer is. A few possible explanations immediately spring to mind.
1.) Maybe the decision was entirely arbitrary, and the staff actually pays no attention to who gets what bed?
2.) Maybe they intentionally gave the bed to the little guy, to sadistically taunt everyone else and provoke more of the bitter feelings that the staff and residents regularly display for one another?
3.) Or maybe, somehow, it was the right move. Maybe they had observed from experience that when you make the size of the resident a determining factor in who gets the big bed, this leads to bickering over which big guy gets the bed (since there are numerous big guys but only one big bed).
The more I think about it, the more the option # 2 seems the most likely. In a homeless shelter, where every body is constantly sizing up what everyone else gets, it seems exceedingly unlikely that the staff would be incognizant of the implications of giving one guy a bigger bed than everyone else.
Similarly, the longer I stay here the more it seems that everyone involved (both staff and residents) thrive on the daily drama more than they dislike it. It gives the staff the opportunity to flaunt their authority, and it gives the residents something to bitch about, which inevitably becomes a seemingly endless topic of conversation.
So given the above, I can only assume that a seemingly provocative action is in fact designed to be provocative.
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