Down and Out in Boston

With the Sunday paper for sheet and blanket and a tombstone as headboard, the two young men sleeping in Boston's historic Old Granary Burying Ground last week looked at first glance like a thousand others of the city's derelicts. Waking at dawn, they warmed up in the Park Street subway station, washed their dirty faces in the Trailways bus terminal, then looked for work at a day-labor hiring hall. In fact, there was only one thing that separated Frank Huszar and Peter Dahm from the mob of down-and-outers in the hall. The others were there out of necessity; Huszar and Dahm were students in a course in urban problems.

Huszar and Dahm, together with nine other students from Minnesota's Mankato State College, were dropped off on the steps of the Massachusetts Statehouse early Monday morning. They were equipped with $2 apiece and their Social Security cards. With that alone, they were supposed to live for a week to learn how derelicts and impoverished immigrants in the inner city manage to survive. "This is the harshest type of experience a person can go through in the city, and that's exactly why I assigned it to them," explains H. Roger Smith, associate professor of urban studies at Mankato, and the creator of the course. Its title: Project Plunge.

Inalienable Snobbery. One immediate problem that faced Smith's Plungers was genuine derelicts, who proved that snobbery is inalienable to human nature. "I'd run into a wino," recalls Peter Dahm, "and say, 'Man, I need a place to crash. I need some bread. Where can I cop some work?' The language would really turn him off. It's the language of street kids, and the real down-and-outer doesn't speak it. In general, they didn't appreciate me at all. But at least they stopped asking me for money." Frank Huszar discovered that some are more equal than others at the day-labor centers. "I was still waiting for work while guys that came after me, still drunk, were hired right away."

Peg Dusek, one of the two women in the group, found a bed in the state-sponsored Boston Temporary Home for Women. She shared a room with two other women, two children and an army of cockroaches. When a woman enters the home, the authorities take all her money--"to protect us from being irresponsible," as Dusek put it. But the result is a humiliating dependence. "You have to ask the matrons for 50-c- for transportation if you want to go out to look for a job," said Dusek. "You even have to ask for toilet paper." But she also found that a warming "kind of sisterhood" existed among the other boarders. "A woman with six kids gave me some clothes. Others told me how to get welfare if I were pregnant. They are not at all the stereotype of the welfare mother. They are good mothers."

Poverty's Tricks. On Tuesday, the students had run through much of their $2 largesse--and were well into depression. "It's easy to understand why the bums sleep all day on the Boston Common," said Huszar. "You just get so tired that it's hard to keep looking for work. I don't think I could cope with it myself. I think it would destroy me. Sometimes I forgot for a second that I was getting out Sunday, and it hit me like a punch in the stomach to think of being trapped like this."

By midweek, however, they had learned a few tricks. Bread, cheese and peanut butter are cheap. Hamburgers are expensive. Middle-class inhibitions vanished. Said Huszar: "One night I saw some garbage in burlap bags, and I was seriously considering pouring the garbage out and using the bags to sleep in. If I had found an empty car, I would have slept in it. You have to be like a fox, clever, to cope with the environment you encounter."

Huszar and Dahm both resorted to the Salvation Army, where they received breakfast, lunch and doses of advice. Both found the Army's workers "condescending." Said Dahm: "There was something in the attitude of the man who interviewed me that he may not really be conscious of. He was trying to make himself seem like a very important man, and make me seem very small."

The students never did find jobs, and there was no happy ending to their week. Robert Wournos, an athlete who normally jogs three miles a day just for fun, found his energy so low that he could not even follow a train of thought. "You find yourself in a desperate situation, but your mind doesn't function," he observed. "Your legs start to go, and you just have to sit down and rest." After going more than a day without food, Dahm found that the first spoonful of rice he ate at a free hostel actually hurt to swallow. "I was so goddamned hungry at one point," Huszar said, "that I was prowling around looking for the back alley of a restaurant where I might find some edible garbage."

None of them turned to wine or liquor, but they could finally appreciate the wino's need. "It's not hard to see how wine could provide some relief," explained Wournos. After seeing a group of them in the dining hall at the Salvation Army, he added: "I almost felt like crying."

After a week on the bum, all the students felt that they had acquired a totally new understanding of what it is like to be a down-and-outer--and the inadequacy of the agencies that society has provided for them. "These people are completely at the mercy of society," concluded Dahm. "They're castrated. How can a man be a man, how can he establish a relationship with a woman, for example, when the most money he'll ever have is $14 at the end of a day when he shovels crap for eight hours?" Or as Huszar put it toward the end of the week: "If yesterday was the first day of my life, I'd turn the rest down."

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