5th: 12/13/11 St. Patrick's Shelter

December 14, 2011

Recorder says:  12/13/11 @ 4:55 p.m.

When I got to St. Patrick’s Shelter last night, the first thing that one of the staffpeople said when she saw me was “Oh no.  I have a headache.”

When I heard the staff calling me into the kitchen, I turned the tape recorder on and put it in my pocket.  The same one who said she had a headache as soon as she saw me; you can hear her ask me if I’m going to behave, and me ask her back if SHE’S going to behave.  That turned out ok; she laughed.

Then I went out into the dining room/common area.

You can hear some coughing, and also the toilet flush and the hand dryer go, which lets you know that it’s not a big place.  As I wrote before, the door to the restroom is always left open; there are stalls and a sink and a shower.

There’s also some verbal harassment, in the comments people make to other people there.

The second time that the staff called me into the kitchen, they were looking through the log book to try to find out if they could kick me out.  I heard them saying “She walked out at 9:00 p.m. at night” about something that happened weeks ago.  The only reason I would have walked out at 9:00 p.m. at night would be if I had been getting harassed and couldn’t get any relief from it, or had gotten yelled at by the staff, or had gotten yelled at by the staff for trying to get help to stop the harassment.  I explain it at the end, that I was getting harassed in the common area by other guests just before the staff called me into the kitchen again while the staff was looking for a reason to kick me out. 

Here’s something that I know happened there too, but I’m so exhausted and get harassed at shelters so much that I don’t remember if it was last night or over the weekend, when I was also there.

The staff wouldn’t let me eat by myself in the stairway, on a chair that was already there, either; I HAD to go out and sit in the dining room with the other guests, which I’d be happy to do if I didn’t get harassed.  The dining room often doesn’t have enough room for everyone to sit at a table; I had gone to the stairway because the place was so full that someone was sitting on the piano bench, holding her plate in one hand and eating with the other.

Copyright L. Kochman, December 14, 2011 @ 4:54 p.m.