Body in Motion

I still remember the first man to give me a rose.

I was 14 and standing in a back entrance to the subway at Penn Station on 34th Street. A homeless man who had been selling roses stopped and gave one each to myself and my two friends. God bless you.

It was my first trip out with the Midnight Run, an organization dedicated to bringing the gap between the homeless and those with homes in New York. Several times a week since 1984, community groups of all sorts have gathered food, clothing and blankets to distribute to New York’s homeless population. The Midnight Run is headed by a man who himself spent several years living on the street and once told me the story of how his shoes were stolen off his feet while he was sleeping in the park.

On a given Saturday night, we loaded up the vans and head out around 9pm, passing by a caterer in the Bronx where we picked up leftover hot food: roasted pig, pans of paella, fresh bread, and rolled into Manhattan somewhere around 11pm. Our regular route took us down the West Side, stopping at the Boat Basin as we headed toward midtown. I still occasionally walk past the Citibank ATM where a group of us sat eating birthday cake one cold winter night. In the early days before the city moved the homeless out of Central Park, it was our best stop with bonfires in the winter and roller-blading parties.

This is what the Midnight Run is about: connecting with people whose lives are totally different from yours even though you live mere feet from one another. Each stop was anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour as we caught up with friends and chatted about our lives with whoever showed up that evening in search of a sandwich, a spare pair of socks, a razor. A conversation. The Midnight Run is not about a solution, it’s about being human.

Over the course of my high school career, I got to know a few people very well: Tracy, the transexual addicted to her walkman and dancing; Murray, a tall thin HIV+ man who lived under a staircase in Harlem; a round-ish couple who had met and married on the street; the gay couple that lived in a dumpster adjacent to Central Park. People would disappear for months and reappear (I went to Florida for the winter!). You never knew when to worry, when to give up, when to give in.

Everyone has a story: a divorce gone bad, an addiction. Mostly mental illness. Jupiter’s Wife a documentary that details a schizophrenic young actress’s decline to life as a street person with a pack of dogs in Central Park touches best on how life on the street happens, the struggle to get into housing and the fall back out of it.

Here in Africa where people believe Americans are born with a silver spoon in the mouth, grow into car keys at the age of 16 and have welfare to fall back on, I can honestly say it isn’t all roses.

I think his name was Ernie. I’ve mixed his story with other people’s in the years that has passed since. But this is what I remember: he gave us each a rose and said God bless you and that was the beginning.