Sue, the receptionist, faces me. She looks scared. John can be intimidating, even when he hasn’t been in jail. I hold up my finger: one second. I slide my chair back to my cubicle.
The woman on the phone is very sweet, despite her desperation. She needs at least one thousand dollars, two months’ rent, plus she’s behind on her utilities. I have the blue intake form in front of me. It still looks new sometimes, confusing, even though I’ve been using the form for months. When I’m busy, especially when two or three or four people all need help at the same time, the blue intake form looks like a page in the Bible, tiny rules I can never keep straight.
Last week, I forgot to get a man’s zip code. There’s a line on the blue intake form, an inch long, maybe shorter, and I missed it. I wrote nothing. The man talked. I listened. I wrote other things, things not zip codes, as he offered them or after I asked a question. I knew his income. I knew his religion. I knew his phone number. I knew he had kids and a church, but not where he lived, not exactly, not the zip code, just the house, just the flooded basement, just the landlord taping notes on his front door saying he was going to slap on a padlock. I told this man I would talk to my boss. I told him I would call him back, that I thought we could help.
I took the blue intake form and went to my boss.
“What’s his zip?” my boss said.
My boss knows the form, taught me the form.
I said, “Shit.”
I called the man back. The man said his landlord was at the door, banging. He was taping a note. He was threatening the padlock. I asked where he lived. I could hear the landlord’s fist on the front door, knuckles on wood. It sounded like a hammer.
The man said, “McKees Rocks.”
I said, “What’s the zip down there?”
He said, “One-five-one-three-six.”
I said, “I’ll call you right back.”
Back in another cubicle, my boss’s cubicle, I repeated the numbers off the blue intake form and my boss said, “Out of our service area.”
I said, “We can’t do anything?”
My boss said, “Tell him to call the United Way.”
“The United Way?” I said.
This is part of the process—if you can’t help someone, you refer them to another organization, another nonprofit, another charity, a church, even, which may or may not be able to help them or which may refer them to another organization that may help or may keep the referrals going until the person who needs help circles back to the original organization but days later and with even direr circumstances and less money and more people looking to collect. Or this person may just fall. It goes: shelter, homeless, dead.
My boss—kindhearted, easy to work for—is used to this.
I’m not.
More people come for help than we can help. Who gets help is a confusing process for everyone: the people who need help and the people who help. The money is not enough—the grants, the donations, none of it. One set of numbers means assistance. Another set does not. I can seldom remember the numbers because the numbers are illogical or bogus or impractical or unnecessary or simply a figure to show government officials and voters who confuse poor with being lazy. The poor have become shadows—they’re here always but only visible in the darkness under bright light and sometimes look like nightmares.
If I go to the roof, right here in Bellevue, on top of the old Allegheny General Hospital, where our office is located, where they generously rent us three rooms for a dollar, where we sweat all day because we share space with the boiler room and it’s always ninety degrees, even in winter—if I leave the heat and take an elevator and stand on the roof above the fifth floor, I can see McKees Rocks, right there beneath the bridge, right before the tunnels. I can see the houses and the old rusted-out mills and the machine shops where no one works anymore. I could drive there in minutes. I could run there. I could fall right over the bridge and land in the dirty water.
Out of our service area, my boss said.
We are here, and they are there.
I want everywhere to be in our service area, even though I know that is impossible, even though I know it would be worse, that we wouldn’t do anyone any good.
McKees Rocks is an old mill town, the kind of place that lost jobs when all the steel mills moved away. I knew a guy, years ago, who used to score blow in an old house near a tattoo parlor, down by the river. I think the tattoo parlor is still there. I don’t know what happened to the guy who used to do blow—maybe dead, maybe quit, maybe a lawyer, maybe still at home on his mom’s couch. All those people I used to do drugs with when I was a kid and young man seem like characters I know from books, from movies, all of them stuck in time. It’s hard to imagine someone who snorted coke in a bathroom stall with a Budweiser bottle balanced perfectly on his head ever growing up, let alone old, but I was there, too, waiting for my line.
The world forgives worse.
But then, other times, the world doesn’t forgive anything at all.
* * *
I tell the woman on the phone I will call her back. The blue intake form is complete. I have her zip code, the wrong numbers, but still. I tell her that the most we ever give for rental assistance is five hundred dollars. I give her some phone numbers to try and drum up the rest
