This is a continuation of Mark Patrick Gansert’s personal narrative of homelessness and street life.
Previous Installments:
A Life of Homelessness — Part 1
"You'll save more money, you'll save more money at Menards."
This was played over the PA system at the hardware store where I worked in the hardware department, an incredibly annoying sound that was a mental detriment to everyone—from the general manager to me.
Even though I had a college degree in Philosophy, I couldn't become a manager; they only hired business majors. It was a dead-end job, without a doubt.
My newly-pregnant wife and I found refuge in the most absolutely disgusting SRO occupancy in all of the Chicagoland area. The place was called the Northside Union Hotel. Well past its days of being a hotel, it was now owned by a heroin addict and his father, who was a bizarre sort of extremist religious person.
Most of the people in the hotel were of the good sort. Quite a few disabled individuals living on Social Security checks, others were working poor like myself.
The management of the hotel, Irene and Milton from Rhode Island, was hilarious and most welcoming. Both of them were in their late 70s and had that thick Northeastern accent. After two beers, they were nearly unintelligible unless you also consumed two beers while listening to them.
For six months, we lived in that one cockroach-infested nightmare of a hotel, along with our neighbors. The porch/fire escape outside Milton and Irene's room had collapsed; it had been a sort of community hangout. Directly over the fence on the property next door was a large pool hall/nightclub. We would watch the fights and drunks spill out of the place for entertainment.
Irene paid for me to repair the porch; I got the materials at a discount from the hardware store. Milton and I actually overbuilt it, as it was too important for everyone's safety.
That, and we made it just a tad larger to accommodate more lawn chairs.
One night a fire broke out on the third floor. It spread very fast. Everyone made it out safely, but after two firehouses of trucks and all the firemen, the building was a loss. The only thing left standing was the porch that Milton and I built.
My wife and I, now homeless and with no resources, found ourselves dealing with Section 8 as she was 7 months pregnant. A local church had a house they had rehabilitated, and they let us stay there. We slept on the floor. My wife was miserable. Near Halloween, she went into labor. For 72 hours, she suffered through abnormal labor before the OB finally decided to induce. I became the father of a baby girl.
Shortly after she'd given birth, we accepted a place in the housing projects. That's right—a white family living in the housing projects in Gary, Indiana.
I had enrolled in the local community college, seeking an AAS in Automotive Service Technology, which let me work on my battered and super rusty Toyota Celica hatchback.
One semester into classes, and the college decides to move the AST campus to an entirely new building—someone failing to tell the professor, a man who had taught auto mechanics for over 20 years at the same location.
To make matters even worse for Gene, all of his shop tools were loaded into a tractor-trailer and dropped off at the new campus.
Then the local high school district decided that a community college would be a great place to teach high schoolers shop class—something the 70-year-old, very well-to-do Gene had no intention of doing.
The first day of the new semester, we walked into a great modern shop. That is completely disassembled. Lifts, air compressors, all the lines and electrical not done. Racks of Iron Duke engines sat in testing cages and on engine stands, in utter disarray.
And no Gene to be found. Dr. Jeffs, the Dean of Instruction, showed up in the classroom with five guys who'd just been screwed by the community college. "We paid for this?" was the first thing out of my mouth the minute Dr. Jeffs identified himself.
He was stuck. Three of the other students left with his blessing to unenroll and get their funding/student loans back. That left me with Mike, a Vietnam veteran who'd made a career out of the Army after being drafted as a teenager. For 24 years, he had worked as a motorpool sergeant.
When Dr. Jeffs learned about my degree in Philosophy, he asked me if I wanted a job teaching the high school shop class. I couldn't pass that up and agreed. I was getting paid as much as I had been as a longshoreman. I asked him if he could hire Mike to help me put the shop together. He didn't understand until we showed him the shop—a pile of parts for 6 frame lifts stood 10 feet high. He was over a barrel. He hired my new friend Mike, too.
I then learned exactly what the high school intended to do. So it went like this: the troublemakers would go to school, like real high school subjects—the "4 R's," allegedly.
Then they were bussed to the community college, and for 4 hours the other half of the day, it was shop class.
Oh, what had I gotten myself into?
No wonder Gene bailed.
When I told Mike over a chess game and a left-handed cigarette in his attic with a model train setup, I remember he scrunched his eyes in pain. This man had stepped on a mine which took off his junk and left pieces of shrapnel still being found 20 years later. He knows pain.
We had taken classes together at the community college last semester. He told a story in the public speaking class. He didn't need to talk, nor did he say any of his story. It was about a friend he lost in Vietnam. It was brutal. Not the death of the man who was his friend, but brutal because it was the first time Mike had ever experienced death.
"Mark, you know damn well I can't take the job with my disability," he said while passing me a cigarette. "I've got to do this, Mike," I told him through coughs. "You know where I live. Even your old, ornery, well-armed self can't survive in my neighborhood."
He agreed I didn't have a choice.
On the weekends, I would sit outside our apartment in the projects and fix the "ghetto" bikes the children rode. Broken chains, handlebars without plugs, flat tires. There weren't too many bikes to begin with. So it didn't take very long, and soon everyone knew me as the mechanic—a guy who'd fix your car for cheap.
Teaching teenagers who weren't exactly interested in school to begin with, on top of a healthy smattering of Behavioral Disabled, was not worth what I was getting paid, and my wife was pregnant again. With no idea what I was doing, zero budget for textbooks or materials—which is significant in an automotive repair garage— I stood in front of the kids and wrote on the chalkboard in big bold letters:
Hotwiring Cars
Underneath this, I wrote, in very small print:
call it Ignition systems. Don't tell the principal.
— with a smiley face.
As the morning students rolled in at 8:20 and took their seats, I sat in my office with Gene's books from his old office. I found a gem of a book on Model T repair from some long-gone publisher.
The kids couldn't see into my office with the way I had the desks set up. I could hear them talking about hotwiring cars. "Did you read the board? All of it?" I called out. My most attentive student got up and read the small print. "What does it say?" The teenagers laughed as the student repeated it word for word.
I stepped out of my office with a smile on my face and introduced myself.
I was now the shop teacher.
To be continued.
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