JS

“There is no real sense in drinking… “Sometimes bad habits come back, but I am trying.”

When JS was around 16 years old, his father asked him to go out to the store one night and buy a particular brand of bread for dinner. He bought the wrong type of bread. In response, his father told the teenager to leave the house and never return home.

“So I was homeless,” JS remarks. He did not go back to his father’s house and wandered from one location to another in search of shelter. He stayed with his brother for a while. When a musician friend introduced him to the Hare Krishna movement, JS turned vegetarian and started residing in a Hindu temple in midtown Manhattan. His harshest experience, however, was the time he spent out on the streets of the West Village in the mid-1980s. “I was out in the rain, in the snow. I would go to train stations,” he says. “People were psychotic. There was mental illness out there. You never knew if you were going to get hurt.”

It took JS a year to overcome this situation. He started with a position at a Newmark & Lewis store and a space at a Bowery flophouse, which provided cubicle-rooms for $7 a night. He began attending sessions to battle the alcohol and drug addiction that had led him to the street. And he was eventually able to get his own apartment on the Upper West Side. JS recalls with visible enthusiasm: “My family said, ‘How did you get this?’ It was unbelievable. I had so many windows.” He thought he would never be homeless again.

In January this year, his belief was shaken. JS had to leave the apartment in the projects that he had occupied for the past five years. “I didn’t lose my apartment,” he clarifies. “I gave it up. I was smoking cocaine at that time. I was drinking and I was getting beaten up.” After one incident left him with a fractured jaw and partially paralyzed lip, he decided it was time to leave the projects altogether.

JS admits that substance abuse has been the cause of the instability surrounding his life. As he explains: “It is insanity. But it’s hard when you are out on the streets. I stayed sober for five years twice and then I had three years. I had some periods of time because I worked.”

The first time that his addiction forced him out on the streets, JS pulled himself out on his own strength. He remembers how he looked far better back then because not only was he younger but he was also able to find ample sites to eat and get clean clothes in. “I would go to places like this,” JS points out, referring to the soup kitchen at Broadway Presbyterian Church. “If you ever look at the homeless population, they don’t look thin. A lot of them have more weight than I do because there are plenty of these places around.”

But when he left his apartment this time, he was certain that he did not want to spend time on the streets again. So JS stayed with his family when he managed to remain sober. When he consumed alcohol, he would simply enroll in detox centers.

He was trying to get into one such detox program two months ago when he spotted a van waiting outside the crisis center. This van took him to the Staten Island University Hospital – and to his new home. “I went to the detox program for three days and then to rehab for 28 days. My counselor at the rehab gave me the option to go to a halfway house. If I had gone to any other hospital, nothing probably would have happened.”

JS is slowly adjusting to life at the halfway house in his first week there. At the same time, he is also learning to negotiate his way through the maze of social services available to homeless individuals. JS had been unable to obtain adequate substance abuse treatment for years because he was on a Medicaid Managed Care Plan. It was only after he approached Shelly Moore, Health Education Coordinator at Care for the Homeless, that he learnt he could disenroll from this program and access better healthcare under full Medicaid coverage.

JS now has to complete the 45-day interval before he gets his first allotment of public assistance and food stamps. He has to also begin exploring long-term housing options. The only aspect of this process that JS is sure about is that he does not want to return to the projects for fear of more violence. The most important issue for him, however, is his fight against alcoholism, an addiction he developed as a teenager to feel more confident around women and about himself. JS thinks he has been able to abstain from drinking for the past 38 days. He hopes that he will be able to maintain the distance. “There is no real sense in drinking,” he acknowledges. “Sometimes bad habits come back, but I am trying.” And besides, JS says,"I am getting too old for all this.”

See other stories at "Homeless Voices."