Intrepid Women: My Life on the Street, Part I

by Paige Churchman (New York City)

Labor Day weekend approached, and all week I’d answered what-are-you-doing-this-weekend with “oh, sticking around.” True, but… For the next four days and three nights, I would be living like, and with, the homeless. I had signed up for a Street Retreat run by the Zen Peacemakers. The street that I would be living on was as much a state of mind as the street that peppered financial conversations, but the two were worlds apart.

The Countdown
It was Thursday morning, and I was in a suit, headed to my office at Citigroup Center, rushing to make my 9:00 A.M. meeting. I was carrying two bags. One was my usual bag for the office. The other was an old plaid daypack that held my material possessions for the weekend: a lightweight nylon rain jacket so filthy you could barely tell it had once been yellow, a beat-up baseball cap, a nearly treadless pair of Merrell mocs, two pairs of underpants, an XL blue T shirt that said Copernicus in big faded gold letters, a skimpy vest with more pill balls than fleece, my social security card (needed for a city shelter), and a plastic bag for soup kitchen carryout.

When I dressed that morning, I did not put on my watch (no watches allowed) and I removed the small sapphire that always hung on a chain near my heart. There was one guideline I had not followed. We were asked not to shower for five days before the retreat. Not an option at The Citigroup Private Bank. I’m not that brave.

My plan involved some duplicity. The Street Retreat began at 5:00 P.M. on the Thursday before Labor Day, which meant I would have leave work by 4:00. I told my team I had a doctor’s appointment. What about Friday? I would find a pay phone and call in sick.

I Crack Early
At 4:00 P.M., I left my office and went 10 blocks west where a good friend let me use her company’s ladies room to change into my new identity. I left my wallet and clothes in her custody. “You don’t have to do this,” she pleaded. She accompanied me to the subway and swiped me in, then reached through the bars and dropped some change in my hand. “Do you have a toothbrush?” “Nope,” I said, “Bye.”

It was a 10-minute subway ride to Washington Square Park. I hadn’t spent one minute on the street as a homeless person, I was in a rush hour train same as I am every day, but inside I was shaking. I didn’t scout for the next likely seat. I stood there in my dirty clothes and clung to the chilled metal of the pole. I kept my eyes down. The big difference between this ride and my usual commute was how I now saw myself. I couldn’t pop off the train and buy something. I wouldn’t even be able to get back into Citigroup Center if I wanted to right now. “Keep your center,” I told myself. “You are not your ID cards. You are not your well-cut suit.”

When I stepped into Washington Square Park, the quiver in my stomach bumped up a notch. It was just after 5:00 P.M. on the cusp of Labor Day weekend 2003. In the world I’d stepped out of an hour ago, people were tying up loose ends at meetings and probably thinking about cocktails, dinner, seeing their kids. Here people spilled from benches and walls, they seemed to sprout from the concrete. I had no idea what the people I was seeking looked like. Part of me hoped never to find the group but then I spotted the smaller-than-expected group – just five people, including our two cheery Zen teachers named Genro and Paco. We found a spot on the grass near the edge of the park and sat in a circle for our first council.

“A street retreat isn’t about pretending to be homeless,” Genro told us, “we’d only be practicing homelessness as a plunge into a side of life we usually try not to see.” Genro (Grover Gauntt) and Paco (Francisco Lugoviña) had been doing street retreats for years. I was to discover later that Genro had an MBA in Finance from Wharton and had started his own real estate consulting firm. Paco, who’d tell anyone who’d listen that he’d never had a “J.O.B.” and then laugh with delight, had started several successful businesses, worked with troubled youths in the Bronx and had been a bank regulator for New York State for eight years. By “J.O.B.” I guess he meant something like what I did.

Two things going on in my life had brought me to the street retreat. It was two years after 9/11. What I had seen since that day had me thinking a lot about what peace is and how an individual like me can take responsibility for it. Second, I was fairly new to the corporate world. I’d been a VP at Citigroup for three years, but I still had the mindset of a freelancer who does anything to please her client. I shrank from self-promotion and competition. I sat in meetings but rarely made my voice heard. I wrote and wrote and wrote─in my journal that I never showed anyone. I was also a regular meditator, and I wanted to find out more about this Socially Engaged Buddhism of the Zen Peacemakers. “When you realize the wholeness and interdependence of life, you have to take care of everyone,” said founder Bernie Glassman, “And to do that, you have to work with every ingredient of life.” Made sense to me.

Paco and Genro gave us scant info about what lay ahead. There was no hour-by-hour schedule, but they could tell us this: we’d stay together the whole time, we’d be eating at soup kitchens and sleeping wherever we could find a spot (they’d try to keep us out of the shelters), and we’d sit in a circle like this three times a day to meditate and process. Just before we got up, Paco said we’d find that “it’s a feast out there.” Everything about Paco and Genro─their stories, the joy in their voices, the ease in their bodies─were like they thought we were embarking on a delightful pleasure cruise. The quiver in my belly subsided a tiny bit.

Before we left the park, Genro asked us to scatter any money we had on us in the grass. And so the coins my friend had pressed into my hand through the subway bars plopped into the dusty public grass for some truly homeless person to find. I felt like the Easter Bunny.

Our First Night

Our first meal was a feast. We’d been invited to dinner at a Sufi mosque on lower Broadway. I remember it as a nondescript windowless building next to an upscale bar that spilled out into the street. The door opened and before I knew what was happening, I was nestled in the soft robes of a smiling woman. “Welcome,” she said, and someone put a freshly baked cookie in my hand.

She was Sheikha Fariha. “Please feel free to lie down and sleep at any time, no matter what we’re doing,” she told us many times. She told us that what we were about to do was very courageous because really, when it comes down to it, everyone in the world is lonely and longs for love, but most do not face the emptiness as we would on the street retreat. She took us upstairs where we settled on big cushions on the floor and were fed course after course of vegan food. In the large and gleaming bathroom, I took off my shirt and gave my torso one last soaping while reading a prayer on the wall about ablutions.

It must have been after midnight when we left. Who knows? Believe me, the Outlook calendar section of my brain had melted down hours ago when my bedtime came and went. The sheikha had sent us off with big bottles of water, cookies and plastic quarts of nuts. She told Paco and Genro to bring us back to sleep later. “Oh yes!” I thought, but Genro told her no, we needed to be on the streets. So out we went into the night. Gone were the sleek young bar patrons. Gone was everyone but us. We headed south.

Then Genro stopped short at a small parking lot that was closed for the night. “How about under those racks,” he asked Paco who nixed the idea. A few blocks later we found a playground where the chain link gate lay open. We slipped in quietly, and Genro pulled the gate closed behind us. This was a city playground like I’d never seen. The apparatus was brand new, and under our feet was pristine spongy black stuff. We couldn’t have ordered anything better.

Paco said he’d be the sentinel, and Genro told the rest of us to find places to sleep. I went for the darkest spot─there to the left, beneath the jungle gym. Make this look like an empty playground to anyone passing, that’s what was going on in my mind. Not in the minds of the other two female participants. They gravitated to the playground’s only light, like moths, and settled on two benches. Genro and a male participant named Paul slept in the dark spots, a respectful distance from each other and me.

Tired as I was, I didn’t sleep much. I remember hearing a pack of teen boys pass and how their shouts made the hairs on my arms stand up. I remember the headlights that swept over us every few minutes. I remember being cold, even with my rain jacket zipped up tight with the hood up. It wasn’t long before I was debating how long I could tolerate a full bladder and then wondering how could I dirty a space for kids?

(to be continued)