A Wordplay Travel Column: Know Before You Go

Salvation Army Shelter
Caters to: Single Women, Families
Number of Stars: 1
Dining Facility: Yes
Amenities: Laundry on Premises; Free Parking; No Swimming Pool; No Wi-Fi

The Salvation Army isn’t quite what I expected. It starts with the other residents, who in many cases don’t match my idea of folks you’d expect to meet in a shelter. It’s a bit like the experience I had last spring when I jumped through the social services hoops to get a Medicaid card: many of the people in the agency office looked like they’d been sent over from central casting. I’m serious. I’m not making fun of the plight of homeless people in any way when I say this but am merely observing that doing double-takes is a nearly daily occurrence for me. There could be several reasons for this, but I’ll allow you to make what you will of it. After all, if I’m in a homeless shelter, nearly anybody could be, and it seems likely that they are, based on what I’ve seen.

The SA differs from your typical lodging experience in the number of rules and regulations imposed on residents. It has almost a quasi-military flavor, as if you were lodging in a barracks rather than a shelter. I won’t say there aren’t reasons for some of these rules, but they seem to be applied somewhat haphazardly, so that you might get dinged for something someone else does on a regular basis. The main complaint I hear from other residents regards this inconsistency.

My main complaint in the first few days was about how seriously people seemed to sweat what I considered to be small stuff, and how disrespectfully some of the staff and other residents acted toward me regarding things that didn’t really seem to matter. I have one roommate who was apparently unnerved by the presence of an opened (dry) umbrella I had placed on my bunk to keep it out of the way, an episode that escalated into a threat of expulsion for yours truly. I don’t know if my experience is typical, but I can imagine someone coming in here with fewer inner resources than I have ending up bullied and depressed very quickly. This seems like the opposite of what a social services agency ought to be doing, because don’t you want to build people up rather than tear them down? Again, I’m not sure how typical my experience is, but I have been leery of getting too involved with the culture or resources on offer here.

Some people say they don’t like the food, but although it’s a bit too heavy on the starch, there are days when it’s rather tasty. I haven’t been poisoned yet, though I do avoid the Kool-Aid flavored drinks. We’re not talking about Dinner at Antoine’s, after all. It’s communal dining typical of a school cafeteria. I eat a fair amount of doughnuts for dessert and must assume the SA has a generous donor from that industry. I don’t make a big deal out of what’s on the menu, I just eat it; from past experience, I know food service isn’t the easiest job in the world.

The lack of privacy is one of the worst aspects of being there. There just isn’t any place to go to be really alone, but as I told someone, in some ways it’s not much worse than my last apartment. I never really felt I was alone there, either, with the intrusiveness of my neighbors breaking in on me even when I had closed my own door behind me. There is something in the SA experience that reminds me of the almost cult-like place my apartment building had become in the last few years I was there (due in part, I felt, to the presence of several members of a Christian youth organization who lived and/or worked on the property). I seem to get a whiff of the same quasi-religious, quasi-military atmosphere at SA, and if I were an investigative reporter, I would probably dig into it a little further. Could be a story there.

The worst aspect for me has undoubtedly been the people I have in my room. It’s as if someone took all the worst neighbors I had on Nicholasville Road and handed them to me for roommates. Now, you know Wordplay doesn’t like to exaggerate, and furthermore I am not a mental health expert, but it doesn’t take one to know when someone has boundary issues that are serious enough to indicate possible psychosis. I’m not saying, though, that I would necessarily do better by trading some of them out. I’ve encountered other guests who seem to be a couple of pencils short of a pack as well. I’m not talking about the type of personality clashes you always see when people live together but something more troubling, something that goes beyond the simplistic notion of just getting along with others. Do you, after all, really want to get along well with someone with criminal tendencies? Well, do you?

I actually like some of the people, although I have a suspicion that many of them are other than what they appear to be, and I tend to think this is not a good thing when I myself am exactly what I appear to be. It gives me the feeling that I’m a part of something that I never signed up for, and that is disheartening. I wish you could see some of these folks; they run the gamut from a girl who looks like a sorority sister fresh out of the Chi Omega house to a woman who resembles just the sort of person you’d meet at a Pacifica cocktail party or soirée at the Getty Villa to someone reminiscent of your grandmother or great-aunt. There are also a number of mothers with young children, people with tattoos, and some who really do resemble what you probably think a homeless person looks like, though some of them are surprisingly sharp dressers.

Customer service runs the gamut from harsh to indifferent to friendly, but again, things are not always what they appear to be, so take it as you will. Obviously, it’s not a five-star experience, and it’s surprisingly difficult to get paper towels in the bathroom, something that is of more import to me than, say, free tickets to the Met, but I try to make the best of it. Based on my experience so far, I am likely to leave the place with fewer items than I went in with (who steals underwear, for God’s sake?), but it is what it is (whatever that is), and perhaps my next hotel experience will be more to my liking.