Written to fulfill an assignment for an MSW “Casework” course at the Hunter College (Graduate) School of Social Work, this paper was honored, in 1994, with (one of the five) Jacob Goldfein Awards for academic achievement.
by David Mendelsohn
Yet neither economics alone nor psychologizing alone (dismissing subjects as “dysfunctional” alcoholics) provides a sufficient analysis. The stress of working-class life – both in its economic pain and in its social and cultural conflicts in the last two decades (described so well in books such as Lillian Rubin’s WORLD OF PAIN, 1976)—suggests a complex interaction of social, economic and cultural factors as leading to alcoholism, homelessness and downward mobility.
—CHECKERBOARD SQUARE, 1993
Indeed, the above outline of the environment into which Marvin J. was born and through which he has travelled his life’s journey forms a concise outline of the factors that (it seems to me, as best I can surmise from a mere thirty-minute interview) led eventually to homelessness and AIDS.
Marvin is now forty-six years old. He has been married and is the father of four. He has been to prison, twice. He has been addicted to heroin, methadone and cocaine. He is intelligent and sensitive and physically attractive. He is HIV positive and just suffered his first bout of AIDS (pneumonia). Marvin is African-American and was born and raised in the same part of the same borough as I was, in Manhattan. He was brought up on the same avenue I was , Lexington, just thirty blocks away, a mile and a half, in another world.
Marvin told me that his parents both moved from a rural area in South Carolina, where their families had lived for many generations, to a huge, impersonal and complex high-density city, New York. Soon, like other poor couples, they came to live in a high-rise development, cut off from the surrounding neighborhood, overcrowded with poverty-stricken people they did not know, in a racial ghetto called a “project.” Along with their race, they shared another, perhaps equally important trait, according to Marvin, hopelessness.
Marvin’s father worked, most of the time, in factories, sometimes as a free-lance apartment painter, often at both. His mother did “domestic” work, and she was alcoholic, “drinking all the time.” As little Marvin, and his brother and sister, came to know this life and what was normal there were arguments and fights, alcohol fueling the madness swirling around them. Sometimes his father would walk out and not return for days, or weeks. Marvin’s mother was an active alcoholic when he was born and she was when she died, as he so precisely and sadly remembered, on September 22, 1970.
Marvin was twenty-two then, and had already fallen prey to the hypnotic, generationally reproductive cycle of substance abuse. He was addicted to heroin and served a five year sentence for armed robbery at Attica, fearfully witnessing the riots and hostage taking and massacre (of mostly men of color) which erupted around him.
Marvin remembers that “growing up in the project was frustrating because of the “negativity and because there was nothing to do.” He recalls being in a band but felt that he “couldn’t get interested because I dwelled on my home life.” He was embarrassed by his home and felt he couldn’t bring friends over because “it was so messy and the furniture was so dilapidated.”
Looking back, Marvin feels that peer pressure put him into drugs, “because there was nothing else going on…we got into drugs, first smoking and drinking, then pot, then sniffing and shooting heroin.” Marvin’s cohorts would stay on the IRT all the way to Times Square, instead of getting off for Commerce High at the present cite of Lincoln Center, and spend the day doing drugs and soon selling them, going home when they were expected after school. Later, however, (at Attica), finding himself on his own with lots of time, in an environment where you are best off minding your own business and relying not on cohorts but on yourself for direction, Marvin started studying, first getting his GED and later taking college credits too. It seems that the environment can make all the difference.
Meanwhile, in that other world down Lexington Avenue, my father, educated for free through college in the (then) white City College, who’s great-grandfather had moved to New York, did very well financially, as did most all of mycohorts families from the city or our second home in Fire Island. Although my father suffered from depression, he had the money and connections to be treated andthe family history and training to expect success, not failure.
My world was overflowing with opportunities to experience art, ideas, discuss the most successful careers with those who had them, and filled with hope and expectation for my success, when my time came. When I failed the subjects in a competitive high school, (perhaps related to myfamily’s generational reproduction of family patterns), the norm was not to allow me to drop out, but to pull me out, of the public school and find the appropriate private school where the psychologist said I would benefit from being “a big fish in a small pond, instead of a small fish in a big pond.” In the end, I too got my B.A., for free, at City College and went on to work for Public Television as a fundraiser, not falling too far from the family tree. My father was also in marketing of television productions, in his case of commercials.
While Marvin’s family of origin and later his own lived in a “project” which wasbuilt at the government’s expense, the projects also served the purpose of isolating the poor (and non-white) out of view of the rest of us, creating economically unviable ghettos, due to the low demographics and tending to reproduce poverty for the inhabitants. While this was bad for them and their children it did follow the “doctrine of less eligibility” because whoever was working full-time still had someone to look down on and feel above, no matter how difficult their(working class) lives were.
Meanwhile, my family was buying three vacation homes, one for us and two for rent and allwith substantial help from the government through the policy of mortgage tax deductions. These homes all increased in value over the years by 500-1000%. Later my parents and I would buy cooperative apartments the same way and reap substantial profits again.
When Marvin got out of Attica an old girlfriend looked him up. They soon married, and the family grew over the years until he had four children. Marvin worked for a pharmaceutical company, rising to the level of manager. He remembers these ten to twelve years as the “best time of my life.” But his addictive personality got the better of him, and already on methadone for his heroin abuse, Marvin started snorting and later shooting cocaine, moving up the scale of addition until only illegal activities could support his habit. In 1983 he was again imprisoned, this time by the federal authorities for stealing checks out of the mail and he did not get out until 1988.
It was due to a mandatory blood test while he was away serving time that Marvin learned he was HIV-positive. When he returned to his wife, due to his medical condition and their arguments over her infidelities while he was in prison, things were not the same. In six months, she threw him out, and with rents gone so high in the eighties and no public housing available without a wait of years due to cut-backs in federal support for low-income housing, he couldn’t find a place that he could afford. Marvin as homeless.
He had to think first and foremost of his immune system, so drugs were out and so was living in a shelter, because there were so many diseases spreading there, including untreatable TB, “and they will rob you blind in the shelter.” After living on the street, with acquaintances or in rooming houses when he got enough money, Marvin was placed in the St.George Hotel, in Brooklyn, which he said “sucked”.
“It was the pits, homeless people, people with AIDS, a hell-hole, a refuge. You know how you look forward to coming home, well I looked forward to staying away. It was depressing. “I was in the street for six months straight because, you know how the system is. If you don’t have an address, or won’t stay in a shelter, it’s real hard to get help. Finally, they put me in another hell-hole, a hotel on 144thand Amsterdam. I can’t remember the name now. After a month there they pulled a gun on me. I got robbed and I won’t go back. That was five months ago. I’ve been on the street since then, and it’s been a hard winter. “I’ve been trying to keep from robbing or stealing because I’m deathly afraid of going back to prison, but I’ve stayed with some people who are selling drugs, or if I get enough from panhandling I’ll stay in a hotel or rooming house, or I’ll sleep under the stairs…
“I just got out of the hospital a month ago. I was sick for the first time with AIDS, had pneumonia. I take it a day at a time. I’m off drugs cause that tears you down, but I do smoke. I have to keep my immune system up if I can. I’m supposed to get help from the Division of AIDS Services, a residence, medical, finances. I’m looking forward to that…and I’ve heard that although it takes a little time you doget help, so I’m looking forward to that.”
I asked Marvin whether he thought there was any social problems or family problems that might have caused him, rather than me, to become homeless. He said, “Speaking hypothetically, because I’m not a psychiatrist…my upbringing, growing up in a ghetto, with drugs all around, my family structure…” But what about it, Marvin? “It was not a prosperous environment, all the negativity, the bickering, the hopelessnesscontributed to my present status…no motivation…”
I tried to make a living producing documentaries over the last few years and when the money I had was nearly gone and my hope was nearly gone I turned to my family for support, and I looked around at my successful friends and did what was expected of me, what was the norm. I made a change, went back to school, knowing that things wouldn’t get too bad, that things were sure to be OK. They always were.
Contact: David Mendelsohn 212-254-6802
